Roads to Paradise ─ Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam

From a May 2009 international conference in Göttingen, Germany, 54 studies explore notions about the afterlife in Islam. The first of two volumes covers foundations and the formation of a tradition: reflections on the hereafter in the Qur'an and Islamic religious thought. Sections there look at preparing for the journey; paradise, hell, and afterlife in the Qur'an and Qur'anic exegesis; the pleasures of paradise; the afterlife in Sunni tradition and theology; a wise man's paradise--eschatology and philosophy; the path beyond the world--vision and spiritual experience of the hereafter; and unity in variety--Shi'ism and other Muslim identities. The second volume considers continuity and change: the plurality of eschatological representations in the Islamic world. It discusses paradise and eschatology in comparative perspective; eschatology and literature; bringing paradise down to Earth--aesthetic representations of the hereafter; heavens and the hereafter in scholarship and natural sciences; and paradise meets modernity: the dynamics of paradise discourse in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Sebastian Gunther, Ph.D. (1989) is Professor and Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Gottingen. Germany. He has published extensively on the intellectual history of Islam, including Representations and Visions of Homeland in Modern Arabic Literature (co-ed., Hildesheim 2016) and Ideas, Images, and Methods of Portrayal: Insights into Classical Arabic Literature and Islam (ed., Leiden 2005).Todd Lawson, Ph.D. (1989) is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Thought at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on Quranic exegesis, mysticism, Shi‘ism, and Quranic literary problems. Recent publications include articles such as Friendship, Illumination and the Water of Life (2016), Joycean Modernism in a 19th century Qur’an commentary (2015), The Qur’an and Epic (2014) and the monograph Gnostic Apocalypse in Islam (London 2012).Christian Mauder is a PhD student at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies of the University of Gottingen, Germany. He has published several studies on the intellectual, cultural and religious history of Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt, including the monograph Gelehrte Krieger: Die Mamluken als Trager arabischsprachiger Bildung (Hildesheim 2012).