Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• The topic I will be discussing in this paper concerns the efforts of medieval Muslim theologians to establish claims of identity for human beings resurrected after a period of non-existence.
• Medieval Islam had room for a fairly diverse range of views about the nature of human beings, of resurrection and the afterlife¹ in general, but what sets the stage for a problem familiar both in medieval Christianity and in contemporary philosophy is a particular combination of views found among some, though by no means all, medieval Muslim theologians.
• One was the view of human beings as basically physical entities for whom death meant the cessation of existence with no part of them to survive, and the other the belief that resurrection was preceded by a temporal gap – a yawning temporal gap indeed, in which created being was annihilated by God in order to be created anew afterwards.