The Prophet's Ascension and its Impact on Resalat al-Ghufran and Resalat al-Tawabeʿ wa al-Zawabe

The thought of leaving this world for the heavens, paradise and hell inspired by the Holy Prophet’s ascension appeared in the form of fictional stories in the Arabic literature in the fifth century (solar calendar), i.e. in the late Abbasid period, although the history of such journeys goes back to the time before Islam. As it goes in Pahlavi texts, the first one to have gone on oneiric journeys was Zarathustra. However, most imaginative journeys in the Arabic and Persian literatures appeared after the rise of Islam and the event of the prophet’s ascension.
Following this great event, men of letters and poets were inspired to create myths and stories that fed o their imagination, though, beliefs and moral characteristics, stories that occurred in the world of fiction and outside the realm of the real. Two of the most important of such stories in the Arabic literature include, first, Resalat al-Ghufran by Abul ʿAla Al-Maʿarri, which was written as a response to a letter by Ali ibn Mansour al-Halabi, a.k.a., Ibn al-Qarih, a great contemporary literary man of his and, second, Resalat al-Tawabeʿ wa al-Zawabeʿ by Ibn Shaheed al-Andalusi. In this paper, we aim to analyze the impact of the prophet’s ascension on these two works using a descriptive-analytical perspective. The results of this study show that these two works, as famous instances of ancient Arabic literature, are inspired by the prophet’s ascension from semantic, stylistic and structural aspects.