19.  Can a Muslim believe in reincarnation?

Summary:

•	Some Muslims today believe in reincarnation but hesitate to say so publicly.

•	Islamic arguments against reincarnation are similar to Christian arguments, but those arguments contain moral contradictions.  

•	The Islamic idea of Barzakh is similar to the Christian idea of Purgatory.  Both ideas prompt questions about why souls, after death, would wait thousands of years for Divine judgment.  

•	Belief in predestination creates a theological contradiction if God knowingly creates people destined for Divine Hell.

•	The Holy Quran does not use the Arabic word for reincarnation—tanāsukh or التناسخ —but several verses can be read as implying reincarnation.

•	Verses in the Holy Quran forbid people from re living the same lifetime to do better before the Day of Judgment.  However, such verses do not forbid living a new lifetime in the future.

•	Traditional opposition to reincarnation may have arisen in part to increase the differences between Islam and Hinduism.

•	Verses in the Holy Quran about God giving life, causing death, and then giving life again— and one verse about God taking souls during sleep and deciding which ones to return—can be interpreted as supporting reincarnation.

•	Some Sufi groups, and likewise the Alevis, the Alawites, and the Druze, accept reincarnation without treating it as against Islam.

•	Reincarnation does not contradict belief in a final Day of Judgment.  Reincarnation offers fairness by giving souls multiple lifetimes containing different challenges and opportunities.  The idea of reincarnation can help a Muslim grow spiritually by increasing humility, empathy, and devotion to God.

Islam and Christianity share many beliefs that are rooted in the beliefs of Judaism.  For example, resurrection of the dead and judgment by God are beliefs found in the Jewish Bible and likewise in the Christian New Testament and the Holy Quran.  Since Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are related, theologians from each of these religions have sometimes pondered the same questions.

Today, a number of Muslims believe in reincarnation but are reluctant to acknowledge their belief in public.  Many other Muslims might be receptive to the idea of reincarnation if they can be persuaded that it does not violate the Holy Quran.  For several centuries, most Islamic theologians who wrote anything about reincarnation offered arguments against it.  Their arguments are essentially the same arguments offered by Christian theologians against reincarnation. 

Those arguments against reincarnation contain moral contradictions.  And that means they contain theological contradictions. 

Judaism does not emphasize an afterlife, but a number of Jewish theologians believe that reincarnation is implied in the Jewish Bible.  They believe this in spite of the fact that the Hebrew word for reincarnation, gilgul— גילגול —does not appear in the Jewish Bible.  The Arabic word for reincarnation is tanāsukh— التناسخ —which means “to replace a thing with another thing.”  This word does not appear in the Holy Quran, but the idea of tanāsukh (reincarnation) is implied in the Holy Quran.

If reincarnation does exist, then why does the Holy Quran only imply its existence rather than declare it?  The reason involves the purpose of Islam.  The word Islam means “submission to God.”  Only God is to be worshipped.  Islam offers a complete way of life that emphasizes this principle and its opposition to idolatry.  Many Islamic theologians have argued that a person should not need more than one lifetime to prove the person’s devotion to God and, furthermore, the threat of eternal punishment in Hell ought to convince the person of how very important this lifetime is.  To them, the idea of reincarnation suggests a form of idolatry: the worship of selfish pleasures, living sinfully across multiple lifetimes by avoiding Divine judgment and accountability.

That would be a strong argument against reincarnation if that were how reincarnation works.  That is not how reincarnation works, according to many near-death experiences.  Reincarnation is not a form of idolatry because it does include Divine accountability.  In a life review, according to many NDEs, the soul feels all of the harm and suffering that person inflicted upon other people and animals during that lifetime.  (The soul also feels all of the goodness and happiness that person brought to others during that lifetime.)  The punishment (and happiness) is exactly proportional to the person’s actions.  For many centuries, though, many millions of Muslims did not know this.  Not until relatively recent times were records kept of many near-death experiences, and only some of those experiences describe anything about reincarnation.  This information about reincarnation would have been very, very difficult to explain centuries ago.  Furthermore, the faith of many millions of Muslims was satisfying without any belief in tanāsukh.  Those Muslims did not suffer for not believing in reincarnation. 

That does not mean that reincarnation does not exist.

In arguing against reincarnation, Islamic theologians have often cited these verses from the Holy Quran:

These verses explain that if a person has lived a lifetime of sins, the person cannot relive the same lifetime to add some good behavior.  The lifetime is over, the moral damage has been done.  However, these verses do not declare that reincarnation is impossible.  They do not declare that a soul cannot live another lifetime, a new and different lifetime, and then another, and another, and so on, striving to become a better Muslim during each lifetime and then judged after each lifetime.  You cannot redo a lifetime, but the Divine barrier does not prohibit having an additional lifetime.  The barrier is behind you, not in front of you.  Perhaps in those future lifetimes there might be some similar situations and circumstances, but each lifetime is also different and therefore each lifetime is unique. 

An additional explanation for the traditional Muslim opposition to reincarnation could be that many Muslims wanted a sharper contrast between Islam and Hinduism.  Hinduism worships multiple Gods.  Islam worships one God.  Hinduism creates artistic, human-like images of the Gods.  Islam opposes creating any images of God, preferring to display religious sayings in artistic ways.  In Hinduism, the idea of reincarnation is central to the religion and to traditional Indian culture, which developed a hierarchy of castes (social classes) based on ancient beliefs about reincarnation.  The lowest castes were called the “untouchables” because they were considered unworthy of being touched by others.  Islam teaches that all Muslims are equal.  Unless Surah 23, verses 99-100, are interpreted very carefully, those verses can imply that reincarnation does not exist.

One of Islam’s Six Articles of Faith is that Muslims believe in the Day of Judgment, when God will judge every person to be either rewarded with eternity in Paradise or punished with eternity in Hell.  Many Christians believe in this as well, referring to Paradise as Heaven.  Many readers of the Holy Quran have assumed that the Day of Judgment is the same day for everyone, and perhaps it is.  But is that day the only day when souls are judged by God? 

Some Muslims believe in a concept called Barzakh— برزخ —pronounced bar-ZAKH, which is the Arabic word for “barrier” but can also refer to a spiritual place where the souls of dead people must wait until the Day of Judgment.  The Holy Quran provides few details about it.  Some Islamic theologians believe that it is a form of non-material existence rather than an actual place.  Whatever the answer, if the souls of the dead must wait until the Day of Judgment, then some souls have been waiting for thousands of years.  The Holy Quran was recorded approximately fifteen centuries ago.  The Prophets Adam, Abraham, and Moses lived several thousands of years before that.  In Christianity, the Roman Catholic faith has a similar concept, called Purgatory, where some souls must be cleansed of their sins before they are allowed into Heaven (Paradise).  Not all Christians believe in Purgatory.  It is also different from Barzakh because Purgatory contains only souls destined for Heaven, being actively cleansed and purified until then.  Barzakh includes the souls destined for Hell, and all of the souls in Barzakh are not being cleansed or purified.  They are only waiting. 

For these reasons, most Muslims today, like most Christians today, no longer believe that dead souls must wait in their graves for a very long time.  Instead, most Muslims and most Christians believe that a soul, after the death of its body, is judged immediately and begins an eternal afterlife.  They cannot imagine a moral reason why God would delay that.  But this belief does prompt some questions.  If souls are judged immediately after death, is that day of death also their Day of Judgment?  Is the Day of Judgment a different day for each person?  Or, if it is the same day for everyone, might the Day of Judgment described in the Holy Quran be a final Day of Judgment.  Until that day, there could be multiple judgments of a soul, perhaps a judgment after each lifetime experienced by a soul after each reincarnation.  Perhaps those multiple judgments will end on the final Day of Judgment, the last judgment, after the soul has been morally perfected by multiple lifetimes through reincarnation.  The Holy Quran does not directly say this, but the Holy Quran does not deny this possibility either. 

Another of the Six Articles of Faith is the belief in the Divine decree, the belief that God knows all and controls all, including the future.  Devout Christians have this belief as well.  Among other implications, the Divine decree means that God knows before a person is born that the person will become so sinful that, eventually, God will judge and sentence that person to Hell.  Christians call this idea predestination, meaning that God knows the ultimate destination of your life even before you were born.  

If that ultimate destination is Hell, then God’s knowledge of that future creates a moral contradiction.  Why would a loving God create a person destined for Hell?  After a human lifetime of probably less than 100 years, the person will suffer for eternity in Hell, an outcome that God could have prevented by never creating the person.  And that person is not the only one who will suffer.  If the person becomes a criminal, then every victim of that criminal will suffer.  If the person becomes a murderer, then people will be murdered, and their families will also suffer.  God knows that these terrible events will happen.  There is no possibility that they will not happen—unless God does not create that person.  But God does create that person, someone who is predestined by Divine decree to end up in Hell and eternal punishment.  That is a moral contradiction and therefore a theological contradiction.

If God is all-loving, all-powerful, all-merciful, and all-forgiving, then why does God have only one Divine option?  That one option would compel God—because there is no other option—to create a future sinner, including allowing that sinner to sin, and then compels God to punish the sinner for eternity.  The person may believe that he has free will, but due to this one option compelling God, the person has no free will.  God knows the person’s future, knows the person is destined for Hell, and this option denies God any choice, preventing God from being merciful and forgiving.  (The average human mother would be more forgiving.)  

In response to this theological contradiction, many Muslims have done what many Christians have done: they ignore it.  They try not to think about it.  They say that God knows best and that we cannot know everything that God knows.  However, even that response becomes a theological contradiction when those same people insist that reincarnation cannot exist, as if they know with certainty about every Divine option available to God.  If we assume that no other Divine options are possible other than what is stated in the Holy Quran and Holy Bible, then we are imposing limitations upon God.  If God’s knowledge and wisdom are infinite, then the Divine options available to God could be infinite.  This means that reincarnation is not only possible, this means that we are insulting the power of God whenever we claim that reincarnation is impossible.  Nothing is impossible for God.

Furthermore, reincarnation offers benefits that a single lifetime cannot.  One of those benefits is equality.  People are born into unequal circumstances: some people are born with more wealth, more beauty, better health, or better opportunities than other people.  Many people throughout history were born into slavery.  Many others died as infants.  Life is not fair, and that suggests that God is not fair.  Reincarnation removes the unfairness of a soul living only one lifetime on Earth.  Through reincarnation, a soul can have a variety of lifetimes, some more painful than others, others more joyful, and the soul learns from all of them.

Another benefit is that reincarnation offers the soul more opportunities to improve.  Why would God—all-loving, all-merciful, and all-forgiving—not give you more opportunities to improve?  Not everyone has the same opportunities in a single lifetime, and not every lifetime has the same duration.  If you have lived a relatively easy lifetime, then perhaps in your next lifetime you should face more difficult challenges.  Would you refuse to face those challenges if God desires that you at least try?  Does your devotion to God depend on an easy lifetime?  Or, if you have lived a very difficult lifetime and have consistently proven your devotion to God, nevertheless you have not experienced every opportunity that humans have to serve God.  Have you experienced much joy?  There are lessons to be learned from feeling joy, including rejoicing in your love for God.  Are you certain that you have already learned every possible lesson that several lifetimes could teach you?

What about people who are not people of the Book?  If you were born a Muslim and they were not, then you had an advantage from birth.  They did not.  Are you destined for Paradise but they are destined for Hell only because they did not have your advantage from birth?  If you believe that Islam is the path to Paradise, then reincarnation offers them that opportunity sometime in the future, when they are ready for it.  If all of them were ready for it immediately, then Islam would be the world’s only religion because no other religions would be necessary.  However, those religions are necessary because each of them emphasizes different spiritual lessons that Islam also teaches but does not emphasize as much.  There are other spiritual lessons to be learned besides opposition to idolatry.  That is why Judaism continues to exist, and likewise Christianity, and likewise all other religions.

If God already knows who will enter Paradise, then what is the spiritual purpose of Earth?  Why on Earth are there moral tests and temptations if God already knows the outcome?  Why does God send souls to Earth?  The reason is because Earth is a place where souls can grow spiritually because they can behave authentically.  Paradise is a perfectly sinless environment and therefore Earth offers opportunities for learning that may not be possible in Paradise.  On Earth, there is no physical certainty that God exists and therefore souls can be driven by faith alone.  Earth is not a trap.  God has no need for traps because God knows all.  Souls come from Paradise to Earth to learn and, after death, they return to Paradise.  Not every spiritual lesson can be learned during a single lifetime, and that is why souls reincarnate again and again.  They learn and they improve.

By understanding this background and its spiritual reasons, a different way of understanding the Holy Quran becomes possible.  These verses in the Holy Quran imply that tanāsukh (reincarnation) does exist:

The third example declares that God (using the plural pronoun We) has already decided when you will die, a decision in accordance with the Divine decree (and with the Christian concept of predestination).  The third example also declares that, after you die, God “cannot be prevented” from transforming you and recreating you into forms which, currently, you do not know.  The concept of tanāsukh (reincarnation) can easily fit into this description, indeed it fits more easily than the concept of resurrection.  If your body is going to be resurrected, then you already know what it will look like: it will look like your current body, or perhaps what your body looked like years ago.  Reincarnation, however, can mean that you will get an entirely different body and, at present, you do not know what that body will look like.

Sometimes sacred texts use symbols or metaphors to convey a message that is not intended for its original readers but, instead, is meant for future generations after they have carefully pondered the text.  If reincarnation exists, then the original readers of the sacred text are not the same people as future generations—but they are the same souls.  Future generations grow up in societies very different from societies of the past.  Symbols and metaphors allow sacred texts to be re-interpreted and better understood as generations of readers become better educated, more knowledgeable, and more spiritually more enlightened.

A verse in Surah 39 of the Holy Quran says that God takes souls when they die, but that God also takes souls when they are asleep, and then God decides which souls to keep; the others continue on for a specified term.

A literal interpretation of this verse might imagine that souls go to Paradise when they are asleep, but then God sends most of them back to continue living on Earth.  But this verse may have a very different meaning.  Souls are not human bodies; instead, souls inhabit human bodies.  Other verses in the Holy Quran refer to human bodies, other verses refer to people, and other verses refer to the souls of people.  This verse refers to souls.  How a soul experiences death or sleep differs from how a human body does.  When a human body dies, it ceases to live and gradually decays and disintegrates unless God resurrects it.  When a soul dies, it does not cease to live—it transitions.  It leaves a body that no longer functions normally, but the soul is still alive.  Many people who have had near-death experiences report that, during their NDE, they felt better than they had ever felt before.  Those who had out-of-body experiences or went to a spiritual realm later reported that their eyesight, hearing, and other senses all improved dramatically to super-human levels.  Many said their NDE felt “more real than real.”  By comparison, life as a human on Earth felt limited, not as clear.  Described more symbolically, life as a human on Earth felt like a hazy dream, because life in Paradise felt fully awake.

Perhaps, therefore, this verse in the Holy Quran is describing reincarnation.  In this interpretation, death does not mean the death of a human body, it means the end of a long period of learning all of the spiritual lessons which only multiple lifetimes on Earth can fully teach.  In this interpretation, sleep does not mean unconsciousness; there is no talk of dreams.  Instead, sleep means living in less awareness because the soul is inside a human body on Earth.  When the body dies, God takes the soul to Paradise where God helps the soul to decide if the soul should learn more on Earth or maybe the soul is told that it has another mission to perform on Earth.  If the soul returns to Earth, that is reincarnation.  Reincarnation is not a punishment, it is an opportunity.  It does not last forever, even after multiple lifetimes, and it is not without Divine accountability.  The verse even encourages you to think about the message that the verse is conveying because it tells you that it contains “signs” for people who think about it.

Reincarnation does not mean that Islam’s Six Articles of Faith are not essential for a Muslim.  They are essential.  Reincarnation can be interpreted as another opportunity to become an even better Muslim before the Day of Judgment, the final judgement.

Theological opponents of reincarnation will argue that these interpretations of the Holy Quran are flawed.  Whether they are flawed or not, there is no requirement for a Muslim to believe in tanāsukh (reincarnation).  Nevertheless, there are some Muslims who treat the Holy Quran as sacred but who also believe in reincarnation.  Within the Sufi tradition, the mystical tradition of Islam, a number of Sufis believe in reincarnation.  Most of them are quiet about this belief, but in some religious orders this belief is relatively common.  Such beliefs can be found among the Alevis in Turkey and the Alawites in Syria.  They see no contradiction between Islam and reincarnation.  The Druze, an Arab people, most of whom live in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, do not identify as Muslims but their faith arose from Shia Islam.  Their belief in reincarnation is prominent in their religious faith and culture.

The religion of Islam offers a soul the opportunity to live a human lifetime focused on devotion to God, a devotion without the distraction of idolatry.  The idolatry of arrogance, even when that arrogance is disguised as faith in God but without respect for all people regardless of their religious beliefs, that arrogance, that idolatry, must be avoided and replaced with unconditional love.  That is the point of the Holy Quran and its teachings—not to harm others in the arrogant assumption that doing God’s work means harming others, but to help you win the inner struggle against the ego, a struggle pursued in devotion to God.

If a belief in tanāsukh (reincarnation) assists you in winning that struggle, that belief will lead you to God, not away from God.  If that belief encourages in you more empathy and humility because your know that you may have lived lifetimes very different from the life you are living now, then why should God feel angry because you feel increased empathy and humility?  If the possibility of tanāsukh adds to your feelings of wonder and awe about the power of God to help souls learn and grow spiritually, then why should God feel angry because you feel wonder and awe?

If tanāsukh makes logical sense to you but you worry about being mistaken, then pray for understanding.  And remember that God forgives a peaceful, loving soul who is devoted to seeking the truth.