II

How are we to explain the resistance to the doctrine of the resurrection and the afterlife described in the Quran? The usual answer is that it reflects Arabian paganism, which does not seem to have included belief in any meaningful form of life after death.Footnote ¹ The pagan roots of the resistance are universally held to stand revealed in 45:24, where the radical deniers single out time (al-dahr) as their killer.Footnote ² This cannot be entirely true. It does indeed seem likely that Arabian paganism played a role in the resistance, but its contribution is not as simple or direct as normally assumed.

Arabian dahr

The radical deniers of 45:24 are assumed to voice the traditional view of Arabian pagans because pre-Islamic poetry speaks a great deal about time (al-dahr, al-zamān), often equating it with fate, as the source of human misfortune, including death. As Goodman observes, the emotive thrust of this material is not usually metaphysical, but rather elegiac or grieving.Footnote ³ Time is described as a killer, a thief and a destroyer; it bites, strikes and gnaws at its victims, and it consumes them without ever getting fat, despite its rich pasture.Footnote ⁴ There is no sense that time, as opposed to God, does all this, however. On the contrary, in so far as God is mentioned at all, He and time appear on the same side. Zuhayr, for example, has a line on how he sees nothing enduring or eternal “except the rooted mountains, and the sky, and the countries, and our Lord, and the days that are counted, and the nights”.Footnote ⁵ Zuhayr is here identifying himself as an eternalist, but his mountains, sky, countries (the world) and his days and nights (time) appear together with “our Lord” as the three enduring aspects of the cosmos; they constitute the eternal stage on which humans play out their ephemeral lives, flitting across it for their brief performance. There is also poetry which seems to identify God and time, or which casts God as its source, or claims that fate only bites if God permits it or does not protect the victims.Footnote ⁶ Whether this is truly pre-Islamic or not, there is no sense here of time as an alternative to God.

Conversely, 45:24 has none of the vivid imagery in which time is described as a killer, nor are the speakers in that verse expressing a complaint about time or lamenting its power, and there is nothing to suggest that they are equating it with fate. Time to them is simply the passing of time, the onset of old age (murūr al-ayyām wa'l-layālī, ṭūl ikhtilāf al-layl wa'l-nahār, ṭūl al-ʿumr, as the exegetes explain).Footnote ⁷ The exegetes nonetheless often use the opportunity to cite a ḥadīth telling people not to malign al-dahr on the grounds that God is al-dahr, as indeed He sometimes is in the poetry; but though al-Ṭabarī reports that an unbeliever had complained about time, occasioning the revelation of this verse, there is nothing in the verse itself to suggest it.Footnote ⁸ Both the poets and the Quranic deniers use the distinctive word al-dahr, but it is not the poets' position that the Quran is condemning.Footnote ⁹

Al-Dahr is an alternative to God in 45:24 because the Messenger's God is a transcendental deity credited with the creation, operation and judgement of the cosmos that Zuhayr saw as simply co-existing with Him. The wedge between the two can be attributed to monotheism, which radically subordinates the one to the other; it was once the likes of Zuhayr were inside the monotheist universe that they had to choose between acceptance of the supremacy of God at the expense of the self-regulating cosmos, and retention of this cosmos at the expense of God. Most of the mushrikūn in the Quran would appear to have accepted God's supremacy, but those of 45:24 have opted to retain their self-regulating cosmos. They are straining against a monotheist framework in which the Quran once again suggests that they had grown up: for if the Messenger had appeared as the first monotheist preacher in a pagan environment, the obvious response to him would have been that he had misunderstood the nature of God (as Greek pagans often told the Christians). But there is no debate about the nature of God in the Quran, only about the lesser beings. The Messenger and most of his opponents think of God as the creator of the world and the governor of all things, and it is as such that He is rejected by a few. This fits the fact that the Messenger's opponents reject the resurrection as an ancient fable familiar to their fathers, formulating themselves in reductionist terms suggestive of contempt for the believers' position. But above all, as we have seen, their truculent claim that “we die and we live, nothing but time destroys us” is a denial of Deuteronomy 39:32, in which God claims to be the bringer of death and life. Like the rest of the mushrikūn, the radical deniers may well have been pagans in the sense that they were not formally Jews or Christians; even if they were or included formal converts, it is reasonable to link their dislike of the doctrine of the resurrection with their pagan heritage. But they were pagans rebelling against a Biblical doctrine from within a community dominated by the Biblical tradition, not as outsiders resisting entry into such a community.

They were by no means the only pagans or ex-pagans in the Near East at the time who were trying to hang on to their ancestral understanding of the cosmos. We find them among Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians too. Denial of the resurrection and the afterlife is one of their best attested features, but like their peers in the Quran they sometimes deny God as well, and they too were often contemptuous of religious claims. In short, what we see in the Quranic is not the monotheist conquest of an archaic Arabian outpost of paganism, but rather a struggle within a monotheist community over the relationship between God and the natural world. This is not to deny that Arabia at large was an outpost of paganism: it may very well have been, for all that parts of it had been converted to Judaism or Christianity. But the Quran does not give us a window on to Arabia at large, only to one particular locality in it, or two if we accept the traditional association of the Meccan and Medinese suras with different places; and what we see in that locality (or two) is a conflict attested all over the pre-Islamic Near East. What follows is an attempt to document this claim.

Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrian sources frequently take issue with deniers of the existence of heaven and hell and the resurrection. The earliest evidence is probably the Avestan Sūdgar Nask, which only survives in a Pahlavi summary: it deals, among other things, with “the idea of the wicked that there is no heaven, that the renovation does not occur, that the dead are not raised, and that the transformation cannot occur”.Footnote ¹⁰ It was presumably against such wicked people that the third-century Zoroastrian priest Kerdīr set up monumental inscriptions in which he tells passers-by not to be incredulous of the things beyond, “for they should know for certain that there is a heaven and there is a hell, and he who is virtuous goes forth to heaven and he who is sinful is cast into hell”.Footnote ¹¹ This Kerdīr could say with certainty because he had been on a heavenly voyage and seen these things for himself. The wicked people were probably eternalists who believed in reincarnation, a doctrine which appears to have been widely accepted in Iran.Footnote ¹² By the sixth century, however, all kinds of life after death are doubted or denied, and sometimes the gods or God (Ohrmazd) as well. The physician Burzoē, active under Khusraw I (531–70), tells us in his preface to Kalīla wa-Dimna that he lost his faith in his ancestral religion, but tried not to “deny the awakening and resurrection, reward and punishment”.Footnote ¹³ The courtier Vuzurjmihr is credited with a Pahlavi treatise dedicated to the same Khusraw I in which he proclaims himself free of doubts concerning the existence of the gods, paradise, hell and the resurrection, lamenting the fact that the evil spirit had caused the rewards for good deeds and the punishment for sins at the end of times to be hidden from people's thoughts.Footnote ¹⁴ A Pahlavi advice book says that a man becomes wicked on account of five things, one of which is lack of belief in the (imperishability) of the soul, and assures us in its closing statement that all will be well if we are without doubt about Ohrmazd's creation of the spiritual and terrestrial worlds, the resurrection and the future body.Footnote ¹⁵ According to a famous account with a long redaction history, the priest Ardā Virāf went on a tour of heaven and hell much like Kerdīr, and saw people in hell who were there because they had repudiated the gods and the religion; they “did not believe in the unseen and did not recognize the religion or the creator Ohrmazd; they doubted the happiness of heaven, the misery of hell and the coming of the resurrection and the final body”.Footnote ¹⁶ The high priest Veh-Shāpuhr, also active under Khusraw I, spoke of anast-gōwišnīh, “saying non-existence”, which could perhaps be translated as atheism.Footnote ¹⁷ We do not know what had caused this loss of faith, but the co-existence of rival belief systems and the popularity of disputations are likely to have played a role in it.

However this may be, the doubts and denials continued after the Arab conquest. The Adab al-ṣaghīr attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ declares the person who believes in something, even a sorcerer, to be better than the one who believes in nothing and does not hope for an afterlife (wa-lā yarjū maʿādan); he also refers to people who had doubts about God and denied Him.Footnote ¹⁸ A Zoroastrian creed in Pahlavi or Persian reproduced by al-Maqdisī declares that “I am free of doubt concerning the existence of Ohrmazd and of the Amahraspands; I am free from doubt concerning the Resurrection”.Footnote ¹⁹ The Dēnkard mentions the sin of performing worship while thinking that the gods do not existFootnote ²⁰ and repeatedly refers to the evil of not believing in, or positively inducing doubt about, the existence of God (Ohrmazd);Footnote ²¹ it also speaks of leading people to the faith by first persuading them that the creator does exist.Footnote ²² Zoroastrian atheists appear under the name of nēst-yazat gōwān, “there is no god sayers”, in the ninth-century Škand Gumānīk Vičār. Footnote ²³ In view of how little evidence we have for Zoroastrianism in the relevant period, this is an extraordinary number of attestations.

Judaism

On the Jewish side, lack of belief in life after death is the norm if one goes sufficiently far back in time, but by the second century ad it was belief in the resurrection which had come to be dominant. Even so, there is much Rabbinic material countering disbelief in it. A well-known story has it that a matrona confronted the second-century Palestinian rabbi Jose with the Biblical verse on how Jacob refused to be comforted when he believed Joseph to be dead (Gen. 37:35): she was using the Hebrew Bible to prove that there was no resurrection.Footnote ²⁴ Several third-century Palestinian rabbis are reported to have cast Esau as a denier of the resurrection and indeed of God himself;Footnote ²⁵ according to one of these rabbis, Esau was the person mentioned in Psalm 14:1, “the fool says in his heart, there is no God”. The Mishna (c. 200) denies a portion of the world to come to a list of sinners, including those who deny the heavenly origin of the Torah, Epicureans and those who say that “there is no resurrection of the dead [to be derived from the Torah]”. Here the words in parentheses, which were probably interpolated in the course of transmission, make it clear that the deniers were, or had come to be understood as, Jews.Footnote ²⁶ Similar lists are found in the Tosefta (late third/early fourth century) and elsewhere,Footnote ²⁷ and they are discussed in both Talmuds, usually held to have been redacted by c. 400 and c. 500 respectively.

Most of this material clearly originated in a period too early to be of interest here. The matrona, for example, stands for a highborn Roman lady of the type who would attend synagogue service, perhaps becoming a Godfearer or even a proselyte; there are many stories in which she asks tricky questions of Rabbi Jose, who responds in a friendly manner.Footnote ²⁸ But the material was included in much later compilations, raising the question of how far the problems it confronted had continued to be relevant. The matrona's question regarding the resurrection reappears in a different version in a compilation made perhaps as late as the eighth century (probably in Italy); here it is a heretic (min) who confronts “our rabbi” with the verse on Jacob's refusal to be comforted, and both the heretical claim and the rabbi's response are spelled out in clearer terms than in the first version.Footnote ²⁹ When Babylonian rabbis such as Hisda (d. 309) or Raba (d. 352) try to prove that the doctrine of the resurrection was in the Torah, it is hard to believe that their interest was purely academic.Footnote ³⁰ Commenting on a list in which deniers of the resurrection are included – along with scoffers, deniers of the Torah and others – among those who will go to Gehinnom for ever, Raba even remarks, in one version, that “among them are the most handsome of the inhabitants of Mahuza” (Ctesiphon/Madā’in).Footnote ³¹ That the Jews (and/or Samaritans) held Esau to have denied God was known to Epiphanius (d. 402 or 403).Footnote ³²

The targums offer several slightly different accounts of the dispute between Cain and Abel that culminated in the latter's death. Cain appears as the bearer of a heretical position in all of them, but his heresy is not the same in the early and the later recensions, and only the later recensions are of interest here.Footnote ³³ In these recensions he says that, “I know that the world was not created with mercy, and that it is not governed according to the fruit of good deeds, and that there is favour (i.e. partiality) in judgement. There is no judgement and no judge, and there is no other world; there is no granting of recompense for the just; and there is no reckoning for the wicked”.Footnote ³⁴ In short, Cain denies that there is any form of reward for virtue in either this world or the next. His heresy has been identified as Sadducee or Epicurean.Footnote ³⁵ But on the one hand we find the same outlook in the much earlier Ecclesiastes (Qohelet), in which God is neither just nor merciful from a human perspective, and in which deep pessimism about the ways of this world is also coupled with disbelief in life after death; and on the other hand we encounter it again later, in the fourth and fifth centuries, now among pagans and Christians of the type addressed in the Pseudo-Clementines, and by Nemesius of Emesa and Theodoret of Cyrrhus (discussed below). These pagans and Christians also found it impossible to believe in a God who took a providential interest in this world, or in any God at all, since the world evidently was not governed by either law or reason: the good were not rewarded, but rather treated badly, whereas the wicked and violent grew in power and wealth. These pessimists also found it impossible to believe in life after death. It stands to reason that there should have been fourth and fifth-century Jews who shared this outlook and that this is what the two targums reflect. It is Cain's position that the sinful King Manasseh renounces when he is subjected to punishment and repents in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (5th c?): “Where there is judgement, there is a Judge”, he exclaims, now realizing that “the Lord was God” (2 Chron. 33:13).Footnote ³⁶

For hard and fast evidence, however, we have to await Justinian. In 553 he issued a famous novella in which he took it upon himself to legislate about the language to be used in the synagogue service, and in which he added the following warning on a completely different subject:

Here there are two heresies, both formulated as denials: there was no resurrection or last judgement and the angels did not exist as God's creation. Whether the first heresy amounted to a complete rejection of the afterlife one cannot tell. The second heresy has been understood as a denial that the angels existed,Footnote ³⁸ but what is being denied seemsrather to be “that the angels are the work and creation of God”, as other translations and paraphrases have it.Footnote ³⁹ In positive terms, then, the claim was that the angels were uncreated and shared in God's divinity. As the main topic of the novella makes clear, the Jews addressed were in the Greek-speaking part of the empire, and the only evidence for its reception to have been proposed is a mosaic inscription in the Ein Gedi synagogue by the Dead Sea. But this rests on a reading of the inscription that has been rejected by some, and in any case it relates to the language issue rather than the resurrection.Footnote ⁴⁰

In this novella, as in the Quran, belief in the uncreated nature of the angels is concatenated with denial of the resurrection, and here as there one wonders what, if any, the connection between the two positions could be: were they simply current within the same community, as probably in the Quran, or were they linked in some way? The Judaists have surprisingly little to say about it. They have written a great deal about this novella, but their interest is almost always in its regulation of the language of the synagogue; that the novella also prohibits two startling heresies is rarely even mentioned.Footnote ⁴¹ The fullest discussion is by Juster, who wrote a century ago and interpreted the entire novella as a decision by Justinian in favour of Pharisee doctrines at the expense of their Sadducee counterparts, without claiming that the Sadducees had actually survived as a sect.Footnote ⁴² That the Sadducees denied the resurrection is well attested; that their heresy extended to the angels is known only from Acts 23:8, according to which “the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel or spirit”, a much disputed passage.Footnote ⁴³ The heretics in Justinian's novella are not denying the existence of angels (or spirits), and Juster would have made a better case for himself if he had argued that the Sadducees did not do so either (as now seems to be the general view).Footnote ⁴⁴ But he did not, and though he has the merit of having identified a real or alleged set of heresies relating to the disparate topics of the resurrection and angels, his suggestion has not found favour with later authors. Avi-Yonah, in the 1940s, proposed that the heretics in Justinian's novella were “the Samaritans and those Jews who shared their views”.Footnote ⁴⁵ That the Samaritans denied the resurrection is well known from Origen,Footnote ⁴⁶ Epiphanius,Footnote ⁴⁷ a rabbinic tractate,Footnote ⁴⁸ the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions,Footnote ⁴⁹ and later authors.Footnote ⁵⁰ But why should Justinian have condemned a Samaritan belief in a novella on Jews? He knew the Samaritans very well, inter alia because they had rebelled against him, and he is not likely to have confused their doctrines with those of the Jews.Footnote ⁵¹ This is why Avi-Yonah adds “those Jews who shared their beliefs”. But if there were Jews who denied the resurrection, why should they owe their conviction to the Samaritans? And why should their denial be associated with denial of the created nature of the angels?

Since then the Judaists seem to have lost interest in the question. A recent scholar, for example, dismisses all the information in the novella as a mere reflection of Christian topoi, merely noting that it also mentions “certain doctrines” that the Jews should not believe in.Footnote ⁵² But Justinian's description of these two heresies is not based on topoi. Early Christian sources do indeed accuse the Jews of angel worship, but they never describe it as a denial of the angels as the work of God;Footnote ⁵³ and though they also accuse the Sadducees of not believing in the resurrection, angels or spirits, as noted already, it is not the existence of the angels that Justinian's heretics are denying, nor is the term Sadducee used. One would infer that real heresies had in fact come to Justinian's attention, presumably because outraged Jews had denounced their erring coreligionists to the authorities, or alternatively because they had attracted the attention of the authorities by taking violent action against them on their own.

The identity of the heretics is still unknown, but we need not invoke the Sadducees to explain them. A Jew such as the physician Domnus, who taught in Alexandria at the time of Zeno (474–91),Footnote ⁵⁴ for example, is likely to have been a Neoplatonist; if so, he will have denied the resurrection of the body and cast the angels as emanations, a position which cannot be documented for the Quran, but which could be what Justinian's novella condemns. Unfortunately Domnus' views on the question are not recorded. Among his pupils was the iatrosophist Gessius, a pagan hailing from Petra who taught in Alexandria in the 520s and who exemplified the arrogant pagan to the Christian Zacharias Scholasticus. His views on the angels and the hereafter are not recorded either. He is reported to have been forcibly baptized, without changing his beliefs, and to have ridiculed the healing miracles allegedly worked by the saints.Footnote ⁵⁵ Gessius, a scoffing pagan from Petra trained by a Jew in an environment dominated by Christians, may not give us precisely the radical denier we meet among the mushrikūn, but he is taking us close in terms of place of birth, religious environment and contemptuous attitude alike.

Christianity

If we go sufficiently far back in time on the Greco-Roman side, disbelief in life after death becomes commonplace there too. Some pagans, notably the Platonists, did believe in the immortality of the soul (or more precisely its most noble part, the rational soul or mind), but the physician Galen (d. 199), a great admirer of Plato who came to be the most widely read medical authority in the Near East, had trouble agreeing with him: “Plato seems persuaded that the rational part of the soul is immortal, but as for me I think it could also be otherwise”, as he said. He left the question open since it had no bearing on medical practice.Footnote ⁵⁶ The triumphant progress of Christianity notwithstanding, many continued to share his doubts. In the Pseudo-Clementines, mentioned several times already, one of the heroes is a well-born Roman pagan who believes in astrology and denies the existence of both God and providence on the grounds that everything is governed by chance and fate, meaning the conjunctions under which one happens to have been born; he resists conversion because he cannot accept that souls are immortal and subject to punishment for sins. It is not suggested that he is attached to his ancestral deities, or for that matter to any philosophical school; he simply cannot bring himself to believe in the Christian god because everything he knows about the world runs counter to what this deity stands for: a world supposedly created with human welfare in mind, a moral purpose to human life, and a happy ending when all will receive their just rewards. In the Pseudo-Clementines he nonetheless converts in the end under the influence of his son, a Christian who teaches him the difference between faith based on prophecy (i.e. revelation) and philosophy, which is conjectural.Footnote ⁵⁷ In later works we meet the like of this man as nominal and doubting Christians.

Aphrahat (d. c. 345), taking us back to the Sasanian side of the border, was also confronted with people who denied the resurrection, and perhaps the afterlife altogether. They would ask: “which is the place in which the righteous receive a good reward? And which is the place in which there are torments?”, clearly meaning to deny their existence. They were people of inferior understanding who disputed the afterlife about which Aphrahat had written in his Demonstration on death and the hereafter.Footnote ⁵⁸

A generation or two thereafter, Gregory of Nyssa (d. after 394) in Anatolia composed a dialogue in which he takes the role of the Christian doubter who suspects that the soul dies with the body and assigns the part of firm believer to his sister, Macrina. In his role as sceptic he explains that the divine words command belief in the immortality of the soul, so one accepts it “by a kind of interior slavery”, not by voluntary assent. The role he is assuming is that of a Christian who really wants to believe in life after death, but who simply cannot, though he submits to authority. The difficulty lay in the fact that when the body died, it was dissolved into the elements of which it was composed. If the soul was composite, it would be dissolved as well and so cease to exist; if it was in the elements, it was identical with them. On the other hand, if its nature was different from the elements, it could not be in them, but there was nowhere else it could be. That everything was composed of four elements (earth, air, fire, water), or four elementary qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), was the axiom on which all Late Antique science was based. Macrina fully accepts it, but she dismisses Gregory's objections as the kind that Stoics and Epicureans might make: for small-souled people, perceptible things were a kind of wall that shut off their vision of things which could only be perceived by the mind, so that they had to remove from their teaching even the very divinity which maintains the universe. But whoever said that “there is no God” was a fool, she observes, quoting Psalm 14:1, for the very creation openly proclaims its Maker. Gregory agrees, and thereafter the concept of man as a microcosm together with the idea of the soul as the image of God helps to take care of the rest.Footnote ⁵⁹ The problems pertaining to bodily resurrection are also covered, and there are hostile references to clever dialecticians who use syllogistic and analytical methods to overturn the truth in connection with both sets of problems.Footnote ⁶⁰

Nemesius of Emesa, who wrote in Syria around 390, has a chapter in which he mentions people who deny that God's providence extends to particulars on the grounds that God cannot be the supervisor of a realm in which murders, injustices and wrongdoing of all kinds are endemic and in which neither law nor reason rule: the good are mostly treated unjustly, while the wicked and violent grow in power, wealth, positions of command and other worldly goods. Nemesius responds that these people seem to him to be ignorant of many things, especially the immortality of the soul: “For they suppose it to be mortal and circumscribe man's lot by this life”, believing that “the soul suffered dissolution together with the body”.Footnote ⁶¹ Nemesius is here presenting a popular view, perhaps inspired (at least in his presentation) by Alexander of Aphrodisias,Footnote ⁶² and its bearers could be pagans of the type encountered in the Pseudo-Clementines, for Nemesius explicitly says that he is writing for pagans, Christians and Jews alike, adding that he would try to persuade the pagans on the basis of things that they themselves believed.Footnote ⁶³ His audience should keep in mind that “the wisest of the (pagan) Greeks” believed in transmigration, even though this tenet was “defective in some other ways”.

Thereafter Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. c. 460) wrote an entire book against deniers of providence, delivered as lectures, perhaps in Antioch. The errors he lists include: inability to believe in anything beyond the senses; deification of the elements; outright denial of divinity; and belief in a God who did not concern Himself with this world (the Epicurean position) or who did not concern Himself with anything below the moon (a view commonly attributed to Aristotle). The list moves on to those “who have the formal title of Christians”, suggesting that the bearers of the previous beliefs were pagans. But the errors listed for the formal Christians do not have anything to do with providence, and at one point he addresses the deniers of providence directly, telling them that “you who have been delivered from the error of polytheism and agree that all visible things are created, you who adore their creator, (you) banish Him from His creatures, set Him completely outside His creation, assert that such an ordered universe is without a pilot and is borne about aimlessly like a ship without ballast”.Footnote ⁶⁴ Apparently, then, the upholders of the errors he has listed were Christians, too, at least in formal terms. They believed in God, or most of them did, just not in providence. But as Nemesius had noted in his treatise, if God is not provident, He does not protect, punish or reward, nor is there any prophecy, so “who would then worship a god who helped us in no way about anything?”Footnote ⁶⁵ Without providence, the world was ruled by fate or chance combinations of natural processes, and the existence of God was irrelevant, or alternatively God was simply another word for those processes. We are close to the position of the radical mushrikūn here.

As one would expect, Theodoret's opponents also included people who denied the afterlife. He comes to this question in connection with the problem that virtue so often goes unrewarded whereas the wicked flourish, the problem that was also bothering the targumic Cain and Nemesius' audience. This would indeed be unjust, he says, if there were no life after death, but “there does exist another life in which those who here escape punishment will pay the due penalty, and those who enjoyed no return for their efforts at virtue in the present life will obtain the reward of their striving”. He cautiously adds that, “perhaps you find yourself in agreement with me?” But he knows that some do not, for he proceeds to try to persuade them: the (pagan) Greeks did not receive any prophet, apostle or evangelist, but even so, he claims, they were convinced of these things, directed by nature alone; their poets and philosophers alike believed and taught that the wicked would be punished and the just rewarded in a future life, leaving a record of their teaching in writing. “Perhaps you, too, persuaded by nature (tē physei), instructed by these truths, and convinced by what has just been said, will join your voice to theirs and agree that these things are so”.Footnote ⁶⁶ Like the pagan Greeks, those who denied both providence and the afterlife had to be persuaded by arguments based on nature, i.e. reasoning based on what you can see, hear and otherwise perceive with the senses of the world around you.

Thereafter Theodoret moves on to consider the claim that the afterlife was purely spiritual, eventually reaching the problem of bodily resurrection, which his opponents evidently also denied: they judged things by the standards of their own weakness, he says, for they thought that what was impossible for them was impossible for God as well; but God could reassemble the body even after it had decomposed, turned into dust and scattered in all directions, in rivers, in seas, among birds of prey, or wild beasts, in fire or in water: “I am bringing forward all your grounds of disbelief”, he remarks.Footnote ⁶⁷ They are the grounds we meet again in the Quran. God had made the heavens at His merest wish, Theodoret responds, and created the earth adorned with meadows, groves and all kinds of crop land; He simply spoke the word, whereupon countless living creatures appeared on land, in the water and in the air: surely He could resurrect the body too. It was easier to renovate something that already existed than to create it out of nothing. Why were the opponents unwilling to accept the resurrection when they were constantly seeing it being reproduced in their own lives? God sent rain from the heavens, causing the seeds to sprout and plants to shoot up; the deniers should look at the twigs of the vines and other trees, or at their own bodies; the nature of embryos and the initial formation of human beings were sufficient proof of the resurrection.Footnote ⁶⁸ Theodoret's arguments in favour of the resurrection are largely identical with those of the Quran. He uses them in proof of providence, too, and they show his opponents to be ungrateful;Footnote ⁶⁹ they refused to see the wonderful ways in which everything in the world, be it the heavens, the earth, animals or human society, was arranged for their own good. Here as in the Quran, the appeal is to God as seen in nature.

In the time of Theodosius II (r. 408–50), we are told, a heresy arose which confused the church. It was led by two bishops, presumably men thoroughly educated in Greek philosophy. “Some of the heretics said there was no resurrection of the dead, and others said that the disintegrated, decayed and decomposed body could not be resurrected and that only the soul received the promise of life”.Footnote ⁷⁰ There seem to be two different doctrines here, one that there was no resurrection of the dead in the sense of no afterlife at all, and another to the effect that only the soul would live for ever. Theodoret wrote against the same two positions about this very time, but this could be a coincidence. However this may be, it was against the “Sadducee” doctrines of the two bishops that the story of the Seven Sleepers was composed, to become a bestseller: Syrian merchants took it all the way to Gaul, Mesopotamian Christians took it all the way to Sogdia.Footnote ⁷¹ The story was also known in the Messenger's locality. He tells it as a story in proof of God's threat/promise, with the stress on the threat, and he knew “them”, presumably the Christians, to have disputed the question of whether a monument should be erected over the Sleepers: the winners wanted a masjid to be built over them (18:21). Some people, apparently including the locals, disagreed about how many Sleepers there had been, with the numbers ranging from three to seven, or four to eight including the dog, but one should neither commit oneself on this question nor consult anyone about it (18:22). There had also been disagreement over the number of years that the Sleepers had slept, for in the Messenger's view God had resurrected them (baʿathnāhum) for the very purpose of knowing which of the two parties was better at calculating the term (18:12). One takes it that the story had been the object of much debate in the locality well before the Messenger told it.

Theodoret's efforts notwithstanding, Saint Simeon the younger (d. 592), a contemporary of Muhammad, still found Antioch to be infected by impious mockers whose errors included denial of the resurrection, astrological beliefs such as that the cause of earthquakes, plagues, adultery and homicide was the position of the stars, “automatism” (presumably meaning the view that the world had arisen on its own), and the belief, here characterized as Manichaean, that the creation was due to fate or chance. When Amantios, who had suppressed the Samaritan revolt in 555, came to Antioch, he rounded up, jailed and killed large numbers of such people, burnt all their books and suspended their “idols” in the streets. As Simeon saw it, Amantios was acting as God's instrument.Footnote ⁷²

Again the attestations continue after the Arab conquests. Towards the end of the seventh century there were Syrians who wished to know how it was apparent that the soul did not die with the body, for some believed this to be the case. Some “foolish people” thought “that the human being does not differ from animals in anything. The death of a human being is just like that of an animal, since (humans) don't have an immortal soul. For, it is said, humans and animals have the same death once their blood has been spilt”.Footnote ⁷³ Some fifty years later the Iconoclast Council of 754 anathemized anyone who “does not confess the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, and the reward to each according to his deserts by the righteous scales of God”.Footnote ⁷⁴ But we hear more of such people in the former Sasanian empire. John of Phenek, writing in the 690s, tells us that the demons are responsible for a number of errors. Some of them have persuaded men “that there is no God at all, and others that there is a God but that he is not providential…They have persuaded others to call the mute elements God”.Footnote ⁷⁵ Shortly thereafter the Muslims begin to tell us about such people under the label of Dahrīs.

“Dahrī” is a blanket term for anyone who denied creation out of nothing and who thus postulated something pre-eternal along with God, in so far as he credited the world to God at all. In that broad sense Dahrīs included Manichaeans and other dualists. More commonly, they were aṣḥāb al-hayūlā or aṣḥāb al-ṭabā’iʿ. The former believed God to have created the world out of pre-eternal prime matter (Greek hylē), or held the world to have arisen on its own out of this matter. The latter usually believed the ultimate constituents of the world to be the four elementary qualities (ṭabā’iʿ, “natures”), hot, cold, dry and wet, which had always existed in combination and which were constantly recombined and dissolved, accounting for everything we see around us. The world, not just its ultimate constituents, had always existed and always would. Some held there to be a fifth “nature” which regulated the action of the other four, usually in the form of spirit (rūḥ) or the heavenly spheres, and some believed God to have created the world out of the pre-eternal natures; but the “pure Dahrī” insisted that there was no creator or providential ruler (mudabbir), and no angels, spirits, messengers, prophets, revealed books, holy laws, requital after death or afterlife of any kind at all.Footnote ⁷⁶

In short, wherever we look, adherents of the once self-evident view that we die when we die are holding out against a new consensus that actually we will live on and even have our bodies back, a view officially backed by both the Roman and the Sasanian establishments, often by force, and also by the rabbis. Those holding out against the consensus are sometimes recent and/or reluctant converts to Christian, Zoroastrian or Rabbinic orthodoxy, or even undisguised pagans, but they also include people who have moved from ancestral orthodoxy to the doubts and denials that were now held to be a characteristic of paganism:Footnote ⁷⁷ thus Burzoē and, one assumes, the Jews behind the targumic Cain, and the targets of Justinian's novella. The doubts are often connected with Greek philosophy and other science, as the accounts of Nemesius and Theodoret make clear and as also suggested by the fact that, like Burzoē, many Dahrīs were doctors, astrologers and others taking an interest in the workings of the natural world. It would seem to be the Arabian form of this general Near Eastern phenomenon that the Messenger is battling with in the Quran.

The Dahrīs and the exegetes

The Muslims probably coined the term “Dahrī” with reference to Q. 45:24, recognizing that the book was talking about radical unbelievers of the same kind as those they were now confronting for themselves in the conquered lands.Footnote ⁷⁸ The earliest exegetes, all traditionalists, never hint at this, however. Their eyes were as firmly fixed on Arabia as were those of the Babylonian Rabbis on Palestine, and all they tell us about the Quranic deniers of the hereafter is that the mushrikūn of Mecca, or the Arabs in the Jāhiliyya, did not believe in the resurrection or afterlife. One would have liked to know what the early mutakallims among the exegetes said on the subject, but the first mutakallim whose views have been preserved seems to be Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq (fl. later 3rd/9th century). Abū ʿĪsā wrote on religious doctrines, not on the Quran, but he included the pre-Islamic Arabs in his work, and he reconstructed their beliefs on the basis of the Quran; in other words, he engaged in the same enterprise as that attempted in this article, except that he tacitly equated the Messenger's audience with the pre-Islamic Arabs in general. According to him, some Arabs believed in God, the creation and the resurrection, but worshipped “idols” (i.e. the lesser beings) in order to draw near to Him (cf. 39:3) and engaged in various ritual practices to this end; others believed in God and the creation, but not in the resurrection; and still others denied the creator and inclined to taʿṭīl (stripping God of his attributes or eliminating him altogether) and Dahrism (al-qawl bi'l-dahr); they were the ones who said, “there is nothing but our life down here; we die and we live, and nothing but time (al-dahr) destroys us” (45:24).Footnote ⁷⁹ In short, Abū ʿĪsā arrived at the same three groups of unbelievers as those proposed in this article: traditional mushrikūn, traditional deniers and radical deniers.

How did Abū ʿĪsā infer that there were mushrikūn who believed in the resurrection? Unfortunately he does not tell us, and ʿAbd al-Jabbār, who cites him, only adduces information from the tradition.Footnote ⁸⁰ We get no explanation from al-Māturīdī either. He too informs us that some mushrikūn believed in the resurrection while others denied it with the Dahriyya.Footnote ⁸¹ He also says that the Meccans fell into different groups: some were monotheists who denied the resurrection; others were polytheists [divided over the resurrection?], and some adhered to madhhab al-dahr. Footnote ⁸² This would seem to be the same three groups, except that the first are now monotheists even by al-Māturīdī's standards. In another passage he says that one group believed that the world had originated in time and would be destroyed, but not that it would become a new creation, while another adhered to the Dahrī doctrine that the world would never perish.Footnote ⁸³ This gives us to different doctrines upheld by the deniers, presumably in his own time, though one would have liked to know how he read it into the Quran. All the groups are adduced as givens which may elucidate unclear passages and often left unmentioned in his comments on verses most obviously suggestive of them. Thus al-Māturīdī considers the possibility that the deniers of the afterlife in the vanished nation of 23:37 were dualists or DahrīsFootnote ⁸⁴ and notes that there were Dahrīs in Mecca in his comments on 75:36 (“Does man think he will be left on his own?”),Footnote ⁸⁵ but makes no mention of Dahrīs in his comments on the unbelievers who held al-dahr to destroy them.Footnote ⁸⁶ He further tells us that the hypocrites of Medina were partly Dahriyya and partly People of the Book, but he tells us this in elucidation of 59:13, on people “who have no insight” (lā yafqahūna) and who could be anything,Footnote ⁸⁷ not in connection with the verses actually suggestive of Dahrīs. In his comments on 4:150, on “those who do not believe in God and His messengers” (alladhīna yukaffirūna bi'llāh wa-rusulihi), he does identify the non-believers in God as Dahrīs and understands the continuation “and his messengers” as a reference to others who believed in God, yet denied all the messengers; but this is a forced interpretation given that the culprits proceed to declare their belief in some (messengers) rather than others; al-Māturīdī takes this to be said by a third set of people.Footnote ⁸⁸ One gets the sense that he is squeezing in the Dahrīs in his interpretation of passages which had not been authoritatively settled by the early exegetes, and it is possible that he had the three basic groups of mushrikūn from Abū ʿĪsā, padded out with knowledge based on his own experience. However this may be, it is striking that both Abū ʿĪsā and al-Māturīdī accept as a matter of course that there were mushrikūn who believed in the resurrection, a position which probably sounds like extreme revisionism to most Islamicists.

Abū ʿĪsā's account, cited above from ʿAbd al-Jabbār, was also used by al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), and he cites more verses in illustration of the three groups, perhaps still reproducing Abū ʿĪsā or perhaps adding them himself. Once again, however, we are left without illustrative material for the first group, the mushrikūn who believed in the resurrection, for the verses he adduces concern other positions of theirs. As regards the second group, al-Shahrastānī's choice of verses is surprising. He does not adduce any of those presented in this article, but rather singles out passages in which God argues from the creation to the resurrection, such as for example 36:78, on the one who “forgets his own creation when he says, ‘who can give life to bones that have turned into dust?’”, or 50:15, in which God denies being exhausted by the first creation, declaring the opponents to be confused about the new creation (50:15). According to al-Shahrastānī, God is arguing on the unbelievers' own premises here: the opponents believed in the first creation, so they ought to believe in the resurrection too. As far as I can see, there is nothing in these verses to show that the unbelievers shared the Messenger's premise, but there are of course other verses showing that they believed in the first creation, so al-Shahrastānī may be right. In connection with the third group he merely cites the familiar 45:24 already adduced by Abū ʿĪsā himself, but he adds that these unbelievers held nature (al-ṭabʿ) to be the giver of life, and time (al-dahr) to be its destroyer; when they said that there is nothing but our life down here, they were alluding to the elementary qualities (al-ṭabā’iʿ) which are perceptible in this lower world, and reducing life and death to the composition and dissolution of these qualities.Footnote ⁸⁹ In short, he describes these unbelievers as Dahrīs and aṣḥāb al-ṭabā’iʿ.

This had in fact become a common view already by the fourth/tenth century. The Imāmī al-Qummī takes both 23:82 and 45:24 to have been revealed about the Dahriyya, familiar to him as insincere Muslims who had converted out of fear for their lives or property.Footnote ⁹⁰ The philosopher al-ʿĀmirī (d. 381/992) rails against the Dahriyya, also holding 45:24 to have been revealed about them.Footnote ⁹¹ Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209) explains that those who held al-dahr to destroy them subscribed to the view that people were born thanks to the movements of the heavenly sphere, which affected the mixtures of the elementary qualities and sometimes resulted in life, sometimes in death, so that there was no need to presume the involvement of decisions by a creator.Footnote ⁹² Ibn Kathīr explains that the verse reports “the doctrine of the Dahriyya and those pagan Arabs who agreed with their denial of the resurrection”,Footnote ⁹³ and so on: even traditionalist exegetes were happy with the identification now.

All of these commentators are probably guilty of anachronism, for it is not clear that they had independent evidence for Dahrīs or aṣḥāb al-ṭabā'iʿ in either Arabia or anywhere else before the rise of Islam. The litterateur al-Maʿarrī (d. 449/1058) does say that the Persian emperors would persecute Zindīqs of the type called Dahrīs, which could conceivably reflect a historical tradition, but he may simply be updating the well-known fact that the Sasanians persecuted Manichaeans.Footnote ⁹⁴ The chances are that the exegetes are simply inferring from the wording of 45:24 that the verse must be speaking of deniers of the afterlife of the kind that they knew from their own place and time.Footnote ⁹⁵ Many centuries later we still do not have any independent evidence for Dahrīs in Arabia, but we do at least know that they were well represented in the Near East in general at the time of the rise of Islam. On that basis one would be inclined to infer that the anachronistic commentators were right. The hardline deniers of the afterlife in the Quran do indeed seem to represent an Arabian version of the wider trend that the Muslims were to call Dahrism after their conquest of the Near East.

Recapitulation

This article has argued that the Quranic mushrikūn were monotheists in the Biblical tradition who drew their beliefs from either Judaism or a form of Christianity closer to its Jewish roots than was normally the case. Most probably it was a local type of Jewish Christianity for which our only source is the Quran,Footnote ⁹⁶ but this is more than can be inferred from the evidence presented here. Formally, they seem still to have been pagans rather than converts, but monotheism of the type rooted in the Bible was nonetheless the dominant form of religion in their settlement. The key evidence for this is that they think in terms of “the first death” and “the second death”, and that they deny the second death in the inverted order rooted in Deuteronomy 32:39. An obvious possibility is that they were God-fearers forming a gentile penumbra around a Jewish–Christian community.Footnote ⁹⁷ All or most seem to have grown up as believers in the resurrection. Some believed in the resurrection too, without paying much attention to it in their daily lives, or even feeling sure that they would be saved, perhaps because they had imbibed this view from their Jewish mentors. Even those who believed in God and the lesser beings were prone to disbelief in the resurrection, however, and some rejected it altogether, ruling out any form of afterlife in an eternalist vein that left no room for God, or at least not for a God who had created the world, ruled over it, and would sit in judgement on it. All the doubters and deniers seem to have disseminated their views in disputations of the type popular all over the Near East at the time; the entire environment was highly disputatious; and their doubts and denials were well known outside the peninsula too, being attested among Zoroastrians, Jews, pagans and Christians over several centuries before the rise of Islam. In short, the Quranic polemics form part of a wider Near Eastern struggle between affirmers and deniers of the resurrection and the afterlife.