Thank you very much for your kind introduction and for the invitation.

Good evening.

In Christianity and Islam, you can find a number of ideas and motives about death and life after death.

Both traditions involves the idea that each individual human being will die,

descend to the realm of death, and will be raised from the dead at the day of his last judgment.

As it is implied in the term, Judgment Day, the idea of resurrection is connected in hisflowering

The idea of Resurrection is connected in both monotheistic religions to the opinion

that each person will be confronted with his deeds and judged for by God.

of the choice in heaven as a form of hell

are very present in the Quran, but also in the New Testament.

In the Book of Revelation, you find a detailed schedule

of the things which must shortly come to pass.

The epistles of Paul, which form the eldest text corpus of the New Testament,

are in great extent concerned about the death on the cross

and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and about question on salvation.

Like the Qur'an, the New Testament entails a lot of warnings to be prepared,

because nobody knows when the Day of Judgment will come.

The significant force of early Christianity is to expect that this day will come very soon.

So at first, the question what will happen to a person between his individual death

and the Day of Universal Resurrection was not urgent for Christians in this time.

But it becomes more and more relevant as it becomes obvious

that the return of the Messiah will maybe be a long time in coming.

And also in Islam, the question what will happen to the deceased until they will be awakened

becomes a topic of extended discussions, and for the Qur'an doesn't say much about this period

of exuberant speculations.

In my presentation, I will concentrate on the question which concepts were developed

by Christian and Muslim theologians and philosophers, as well as which narratives

were present in the Christian and Islamic tradition to describe the margin between the individual death

of a person and his resurrection on Doomsday.

But the investigation not targets to list grand answers to a question

to which obviously no human being really can have an answer.

My aim is to show that we can find in the Christian and the Islamic tradition

a huge rary of ideas and extended debates about concepts of the time span

between individual death and Judgement Day.

And this is due to the fact that neither the Qur'an nor the New Testament

entail any reliable information about that point.

My second aim is to show that there are remarkable commonalities

between these ideas in the Christian and the Islamic tradition

due to the fact that Christian and Muslim theologians, philosophers, and ordinary believers

lack information with sources which already exist in a shared cultural area.

Against the chronological order, I will begin with Islamic tradition.

Although the Day of Judgment and Vision of Hell and Paradise are very present in the Qur'an,

there are only a few passages who are concerned about the process of dying

and the transition to the realm of the dead.

In Surah 693, we are told that angels welcome the wrongdoers who are in agonies of death

by telling them to discharge their souls.

They also foretell the wrongdoers that they will be recompensed with punishment.

I will quote the verse that can be understood at least in two different ways.

If you could but see how the wicked do fa in the flute of confusion at death,

the angels stretch forth their hand, saying,