A Place Between Two Places: The Quranic Barzakh

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What happens after death but before the final resurrection? This is the intermediate state. For most Muslims, it is called the barzakh, and it is a fantastical and frightening time in the grave. Throughout history and today this belief has been discussed and expressed in many forms: from Sufi dreamscapes to theological tests of orthodoxy. But where does the barzakh come from first? In A Place Between Two Places: The Qur'anic Barzakh, George Archer reconstructs the barzakh’s early history. Analyzing sixteen of the Qur'an’s suras in search of oral formulae, subtextual hints, and concentric parallelisms, the early barzakh is exposed as a response to the saint cults of late antiquity, and most especially, the cult of the divine Christ. From here, the Qur'anic vision of the barzakh is traced forward through later prophetic biographies, Islamic architecture, and the hadith literature in order to show how the barzakh developed into the distinctive eschatological claims of the Islamic Middle Ages.