Azrael: Encounters with the Angel of Death in Islamicate Thought and Culture

The archangel Azrael enforces the divine command that all living things must return to God in death. The very word islām implies submission to God’s will, and yet Muslim saints, prophets, and sorcerers used charisma, magic squares, and their bare hands to defy Azrael and extend their lives on Earth. Their efforts reveal tension between the necessity of submitting to God’s will and the human yearning to transcend death.

With particular attention to the writings of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), Dunja Rašić explores the time-honored rites and practices of defying death in Muslim cultures and societies. Ibn ʿArabī, one of the most influential Sufi scholars, poets, and philosophers, claimed among his many spiritual accomplishments the subjugation of Azrael himself. His pursuit of mastery over death was rooted in his extensive knowledge of angelology, prophetic traditions, and thanatology, and his works preserve striking accounts of his encounters with the angel of death. Drawing on these texts, Rašić delivers an in-depth study of Islamic angelology that challenges our understanding of the status and functions of angels, human (dis)obedience to God, and (im)mortality in Islam and Akbarian Sufism.

An original and pioneering work, Azrael contributes new insights into how Muslims have imagined angels, death, and immortality. It will appeal to scholars of Sufism, Islamic studies, comparative religion, and medieval philosophy, as well as general readers interested in spirituality, esotericism, or the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī.

Dunja Rašić is a specialist in philosophical Sufism and the school of Ibn ʿArabī at Tampere University and the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society PRISM Project. She is the author of The Written World of God: The Cosmic Script and the Art of Ibn ʿArabi, Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam and Akbarian Sufism, and The Nightfolk: Ibn ʿ Arabi Behind the Veil of Night.