He Gave Up the Ghost

Now there is a fourth aspect of Islam to add here, which is death; because the word in Arabic to die is aslama: aslama nafsahu — he gave up the ghost. This is what people used to say; the expression could still be heard a generation ago: he gave up the ghost — the spirit; he died. It is interesting: an excellent professor who gave a course on death and dying in religions had a sheet of euphemisms about death, and one would be amazed how many ways there are, in this culture alone, to say that somebody died. Kicked the bucket. That's all she wrote. Bit the dust. There are a lot of ways to say it. One of the Arab poets said: if you do not die by the sword, you are going to die some other way. There are lots of ways to die, but death is one.

So this idea really goes back to the fact that there is a verse in the Qurʾān, in the chapter called The Event, in which the Qurʾān says: when the ghost reaches the throat, and you are looking on — you are watching this thing happen — then, says the Qurʾān: make it go back. Make it go back, if you are in control; make it go back. And then it says: and We are closer to him than you are, but you do not see.

The idea there is that when the ghost gets to that point — the self, the soul — there is nothing we can do. That is absolute submission. We can try, and we are pretty good now at trying. Someone who has worked in critical care for about four years, and been in a lot of what they call codes, will have seen it, and it is pretty amazing: somebody is dead; one comes in — no pulse, no heart, no breathing; defibrillate; do some CPR; defibrillate — and people have been seen to come back and start breathing. It is pretty amazing. But how long can we do that for? Ultimately it stops. And even the success of that is quite small — unlike television. It works about ninety per cent of the time on television; it works about eight per cent of the time in the hospital. There were all these physicians complaining about that, because if they coded their relatives, the relatives would say: why did it not work? It always works on television. Welcome to reality: things are not like television — unfortunately, or fortunately.