of the spirits and their survival after death only in conjunction with the body’s survival alone, as many of the later Muslim theologians maintain.

Thus the children of Adam have advanced four opinions concerning the resurrection:

1. The first holds that both body and soul are resurrected. The soul that departs from the body—what they term the “rational soul”—undergoes bliss or torment after the separation, and thereafter, at the Great Resurrection, Allah restores it to the body. This is the doctrine of the Companions, the Followers who excelled them in righteousness, and all the leading scholars of the Muslims. The Qur’an and the Sunnah bear witness to it. While these authorities do not attribute to the soul the qualities assigned to it by the philosophers, they do affirm—on the strength of prophetic texts and early reports—that it moves, endures after death, and possesses other characteristics.

2. The second view affirms only the resurrection of the body. Many scholastic theologians—among the Jahmites, the Qadarites, and those Ashʿarites and others who sided with them—hold this position. They proceed from the assumption that within us there is no soul that remains once it departs from the body. Instead, they imagine the spirit to be an accident inhering in the body, like life itself, or one of the body’s parts, comparable to the incoming and outgoing breath. For that reason they deny that the souls which leave the bodies can be blessed or punished. Those among them who do acknowledge the torment of the grave—such as the Ashʿarites and some of the Muʿtazilites—contend that Allah creates a new life in a portion of the body, which is then rewarded or punished; yet they still reject the soul’s persistence after death.