Barzakh

Imagine you passed away.

The time in Berzah has passed.

A day comes where all souls are resurrected.

and given physical bodies, billions and billions and billions of you human beings, we are just amongst one of them on that field, Mahshar, it looks like a very scary scene, obviously we'll be shaking there with tremors, because we don't know what's going to happen.

Very beautiful.

Another thing that attracted my attention is the theme of writing the Barzakh.

And the Barzakh is an Arabic word, an Islamic word, actually.

So tell me about it.

Why did you write about the Barzakh? And what does Barzakh mean to you? In Islam, but also, we know it's an Islamic word, but how does it relate to the current situation in Palestine? And how does it relate to the novel?

Yes, so my characters appeared to me once I'd got this first, second idea, as this girl arriving at this sterile house and actually feeling ironically unsettled because she'd been uprooted from her house in London.

And she's uncomfortable and she's alone because her family have gone out.

Arabic is a very, very...

And it turns out that it's on everybody's mind.

So this podcast, Barzakh or this Henri Corbin's imaginal realm is that almost people have a drinking game for every time it's mentioned in this podcast.

And it's just that the renewed interest into the magical of the magical part is still sadly somehow feels that it's contributing to the first, to the defined part, to the technique part.

Because people want to try and use the same vocabulary and want to try to use the same toolset of description.

Can you please tell us what did your husband do that has granted him this? Amazing honor that we can all witness.

What is happening in the grave? What is happening in Barzakh? What will happen on the Day of Judgment? Allah knows best.

This is something we're all a witness to.

So she said, my husband accepted Islam quite late.

Third, uh, fourth, the grave will be made spacious as far as the eye can see.

From above the ground, we think it's small, but Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala, keep in mind, the life of the Barzakh, the life of the grave is completely different than this life.

Allah will make the grave very spacious.

And fifth, he will be liv- given the glad tidings of Jannah, of Allah's pleasure and Jannah.

And, um, I, I might mi- I might be mistaken, but I don't think that I am, there's a, a part of the Quran where he's explicitly called a jinn, specifically.

But, I think this is the more important thing, he belongs to this Barzakh.

He belongs to this intermediate category.

And just like his title, whether it's Azazel, Iblis, he has other epithets, Al-Harith, Abu Murah, et cetera, et cetera, the more important thing is wh- what is he doing? How is he acting? Sort of what, what role is he filling in this respect? That, to me, that is more important, and we can garner more information from that.

Like, you know, those, like, fire dancers, the people who are sticking fiery swords down their...

That's, [laughs] it's to deal with the tension.

Iblis, being representative of, of that tension, of that Barzakh, of that liminal space, that liminal personality, yeah, I, I, I don't think it's helpful for us to get too, you know, conclusive with these different things.

But by and large, the Quranic interpretation, uh, falls towards him being a jinn because in the Quran, angels are obedient to God fully.

It creates a threshold between appearance and interpretation, between hearing and answering, between seeing and naming, between a form and the meaning we assign to it.

In an earlier episode, we encountered the idea of Barzakh, the threshold between two worlds.

Silence can also be understood as a kind of epistemic threshold.

It belongs neither entirely to what has appeared nor entirely to what we will say about it.