Abstract

Muslim philosophers and theologians have long taken into consideration the question of resurrection, especially bodily resurrection, and have faced some problems in providing rational explanations for it, because man’s afterlife is an unseen matter. As a result, some theologians conceived death as nonexistence and resurrection as the instance of bringing back an annihilated thing exactly, and considered it possible because they believed in afterlife. Others conceived death as dispersion of material parts of body and, referring to Quranic verses which show the annihilation of universe, believed that accepting bodily resurrection is contingent upon the possibility of bringing back the similar of an annihilated thing. Reminding theologians’ view about the idea of bringing back of an annihilated thing and its relationship with man’s afterlife, the present paper explains that death is not nonexistence, according to revelation; rather, it is a kind of transition from one mode of being to another mode of being, and that the annihilation and destruction of men and phenomena in the world means dispersion and instability of their bodily parts in worldly life and their final return to God. Therefore, accepting bodily resurrection is not related to accepting or rejecting the bringing back of an annihilated thing.