Visiting the Living Dead: The Role of Barzakh in some Islamic Cosmologies

In this paper I will present the theory of two figures, Ibn ʿArabī and Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥya al-Suhrawardī, concerning the nature of *barzakh*, specifically on its location between this world and the next, and what happens in this liminal space. By focusing on the activities in *barzakh* I will ask how we should understand barzakh: whether as a place in between two places; a place considered in its own right; a creative principle, or the principle by which the soul grasps the world. Indeed, I will argue that these figures, and the Qurʾān itself, barzakh is both a barrier and a passageway. As such, a key element in their cosmologies is the role the dead play as living icons, or passageways, for divine grace (baraka), that we see reflected in Mameluke Egypt and in the tombs of figures like Barqūq and Ibn ʿAttallah as-Sakandarī. I argue that in the systems of al-Suhrawardī and Ibn ʿArabī, the dead continue to have a role in the structure of the cosmos and its sustenance, and that both, therefore, extrapolate the notion of barzakh in a way that can be seen as a faithful (although controversial) reading of its Qurʾānic source material in *al-Raḥman* (Q55) *al-Furqān* (Q25), *al-Muʾiminūn* (Q23). In doing so, they make *barzakh* the central turning point of the soul’s ascent to paradise.

First I argue that although these thinkers understand *barzakh* as a broader notion than just the place of the dead, they expand its meaning based on that crucial Quʾrānic point. Both take the initial eschatology of the Qurʾānic notion of barzakh and stretch it to generate a hierarchal, ordered world which we can only imperfectly grasp via the boundaries that are set up in it by God. These boundaries in different ways generate the world as sites of a dynamic relationship between the created and created. For al-Suhrawardī and Ibn ʿArabī, barzakh is a generative rather than limiting principle of the activity of the divine. I explore some passages in the

*Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq* of al-Suhrawardī to show how *barzakh* is that which generates distance from the world of lights and is that ladder by which the intellect can grasp forms and images. Barzakh becomes a site of ascent. I point out how this echoes elements of Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of imagination (*al-khayyāl*). For both thinkers, this transition is rooted in either the intellect or imagination and has eschatological implications; The link between knowledge and apocalypsis is due to the idea that one’s knowledge and consequently ascetic practice determines one’s state in the afterlife; whether one understands the higher forms or is enslaved to passion will result in bliss or perdition. The meeting point of these authors, in sum, is a result of their shared Quʾānic context and inheritance.

Second, I note that their biggest difference lies in the fact that Ibn ʿArabī stresses the idea that *barzakh* bridges the gap between God and creatures, since it is the seat of the imagination and the way towards deeper insight into reality. In this, he departs from al-Suhrawardī, who stresses the notion of *barzakh* as a series of barriers that keeps us and the dead separated from the Light of Lights. I clarify here that Ibn ʿArabī understood barzakh in primarily psychological terms as a power belonging to the soul, and so reflects certain *tafsir* on Q23. By contrast, al-Suhrawardī makes *barzakh* a broader principle to explain the degrees of emanation from the One, thus hardening the more porous sense that Ibn ʿArabī gives it. al-Suhrawardī thus understands *barzakh* in a stricter, more physical way and takes it as a principle of nature applicable to both the living and non-living. He thus takes as his starting point the notion of *barzakh* as found in *al-Raḥman* (Q55) and *al-Furqān* (Q25).

Lastly, I explore some ways these conceptualizations of *barzakh* echo in the terminology of Ibn ʿArabī and al-Suhrawardī, and how they draw on vocabularies to emphasize the mediative role barzakh plays. I point out that terms like *aṣnām* (idols) and *arbāb al-anwaʿ* (lords of species), and others is meant to remind the readers that the imaginary, representational element in their cosmology is also the site through which power, life, and guidance is channeled from the realm of spirits (*al-arwaḥ*) to the physical realm (*al-ashbāḥ*). It follows that that which lies in the *barzakh* is alive and well; the living dead like the angels can play a mediative role for the intellect in achieving knowledge and salvation. Accepting *barzakh* as a talismanic, iconographic spiritual site and seeing the dead as living in the grave filled with grace (*baraka*) implies centering *barzakh* as a central element in certain Islamic practices. I stress this to point out that such terminology is used by some of the most vocal critics of grave visitation, like Ibn Taymiyya. As such we ought to understand later reformers like him and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya as attempting to reject this new understanding of *barzakh* and the living dead. They thus insist to the everyday believer to leave the dead as they are, asleep in every sense till the Resurrection. Their rejection and criticism of grave visitation does not reflect a general suspicion and rejection of Sufism, then, but rather a rejection of a specific practice that they see coming from some Sufi’s drawing on Ibn ʿArabī and, conceptually at least, from the broader imagination and cosmology of *Ishrāqi* Illumination.