A Comparative Examination of Al-Mizan and Ruh al-Ma ani with Regards to the Corporeal Afterlife

The corporeal afterlife and belief in it is one of the important requirements of Islam; so much so that the disbelief in it is equal to profanity. Various views have been held by Islamic scholars on the quality of the afterlife. The subject has been looked into theologically by theologians, philosophically by philosophers, and with focus on hadith by hadith scholars. This paper seeks to examine viewpoints of two of the great Islamic exegetists of the Qur’an in Shia and Sunni traditions, AllamehTabatab’i and Alousi respectively, by analyzing in their respective books, al-Mizan and Ruh al-Ma‘ani, their exegeses of the verses which imply the corporeal afterlife. Alousi adopts a theological approach arguing that, in the afterlife, the human being will be the same as what he was in the world after his scattered pieces converge together. Allameh Tabataba’i, however, adopts a philosophical approach and argues that what happens in the afterlife is conversion not convergence, and that the sameness is in the soul not the body – which will not be the same as that of the world, but similar to it.