Returned to the Earth

So at the point of death the soul hovers over, and according to the Muslims the soul says: ʿajjilūnī, ʿajjilūnī — hasten this process; because this disengagement is very difficult, for the soul to be separated from the body.

And then the person is washed and wrapped in a funeral shroud of white cloth. Males wash males, women wash women — unless it is husband and wife; but generally males wash males and women wash women. And then the body is put into the grave. The grave is dirt: Muslims are not buried in coffins. You are buried in dirt, and it is going back to the earth.

Now there is a story — told by one of the commentators in his tafsīr, with doubts expressed about its validity, but it is told, and it is an interesting story — that God sent Isrāfīl, who is Seraphiel in the Bible, to go down and get earth from which Adam would be made. And the earth refused, which is in a way the nature of the earth, wanting to maintain its integrity. It refused. And then another angel went down; the earth refused. And then the third angel, who is ʿAzrāʾīl, the angel of death, went down and said: if you give this to me, I promise I will return it to you. And so the earth was given.

And the Prophet (peace be upon him) said that the first soul, which contained all of creation, was created from all the earths of the world: from the white, the black, the red; the difficult, the easy; the fertile, the infertile — all of the earths, the topsoil. And "Adam" in Hebrew has among its meanings "from blood"; and one of the words in Arabic is tawny, from the topsoil of the earth. So the idea is that the human being is from this topsoil. And so ʿAzrāʾīl separates the soul from the body and returns the earth back.

And one can look at it in terms of clay, man being created from clay, scientifically and secondarily — because everything that makes up our body, our body being about seventy per cent water and the rest of it coming from the earth through the animals and the vegetables that we eat: so we are literally made of earth, and we go back to earth.

Is cremation unacceptable? It is unacceptable in Islam, yes. Although there is an interesting hadith, a very sound hadith, in which, according to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a man cremated himself; and God still brought all of his parts together, and then asked the man why he did it. And the man said that he was so afraid of the Day of Judgement, and he was hoping that he would not be resurrected. And so, according to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), God forgave him for that. The body goes right back into the earth, and preferably on the first day.