The discovery of paradise in Islam : the here and the hereafter in Islamic traditions

Abstract

On 16 April Prof. Christian Lange (professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies) will be giving his inaugural lecture on paradise in the Islamic tradition, based on a close reading and analysis of how paradise is imagined in the Qur’an. He will pursue a dominant theme of the Qur’an in detail, namely, the spatio-temporal and existential nearness of paradise to this world. Christian Lange argues that the Qur’an is the fountainhead of a cultural-discursive tradition that conceives of paradise both as a space and a state of being that remains accessible to humankind, even after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There is thus no strong sense of an irreversible “loss of paradise” in Islam. Instead, the possibility is stressed that humans may switch, seamlessly as it were, from their ordinary lives to the simultaneous reality of an existence in which all material and spiritual potentialities are realised and lived to the full. Besides arguing for this conception of an Islamic religious anthropology, Lange in his inaugural lecture also aims to showcase the peculiar literary quality of the Qur’an: how the slippage between this world and the otherworld is built into the Qur’an’s very structure, and how the Qur’an therefore pushes us to rethink common assumptions about the category “scripture” itself.