Nakir

Nakir is the second of the two angels who examine the dead man in his grave, and his name has a feature his companion's lacks: it is a word from the Qur'an. Nakir occurs there as the close of a warning, in the formula 'and how terrible was My reproof', with which God recalls what He did to the peoples who called their prophets liars. In that place it designates no one: it designates a divine act, the severe disavowal of what men had done. Hughes's dictionary renders the angel's name exactly so, as 'the Repudiating'.

So the word is Qur'anic and the angel is not. The Qur'an has no need to name either of the two: the one who names them is al-Tirmidhi, in a single hadith. And Shia tradition supplies the fact that explains why these are two names and not two biographies: Munkar and Nakir are not personal names but names of what happens. When the same two angels come before someone who answered well, that tradition calls them Bashir and Mubashshir, the announcer and the bringer of good news, because they appear with a kindly face.

That detail is worth more than any division of duties: the names describe the encounter, not the individuals. The dead man who sees Nakir and the one who sees Mubashshir are not seeing different angels, but the same visit according to what he answered.

Barzakh is the Qur'anic name of the interval. The word means isthmus or partition, and it occurs in sura 23, verse 100: behind the dead there is a barzakh until the day they are raised, and that is why nobody comes back. This is the stretch of time in which what was settled in the grave holds good.

What follows the answer is told in the hadith of al-Bara ibn Azib. For the man who answers well the grave is widened and a door is opened for him onto the Garden, and its air and its scent reach him through it. For the man who does not answer the grave narrows until his ribs interlock, and a door is opened onto the Fire, and its heat and its foul wind reach him through it. Neither of the two is the sentence: they are a foretaste, and they last as long as the interval lasts.

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya devoted a whole book to that interval in the fourteenth century, the Kitab al-Ruh, still the most detailed classical treatise on what happens to the soul between burial and resurrection. And against all of it the tradition sets something very small and very material: the Prophet passed by two graves whose occupants were being punished, split a fresh palm branch in two and planted one half on each, saying that perhaps it would be lightened for them as long as the branches did not dry.

The torment of the grave is not hell. Jahannam is another place, it has its own keeper, Maalik, and no one enters it until after the judgment; what Nakir administers comes before all that and settles nothing definitively. Confusing the two turns an interval into a condemnation and empties the rest of Islamic eschatology of sense, since it places the judgment much later.

The proof that it is not final is precisely the palm branch. If the punishment of the grave can be lightened because two branches are still green, it is not a sentence but a situation. For the same reason, tradition allows the prayers of the living to reach the dead in that state, which nobody claims of hell.

And Nakir is not a demon. He does not belong to the rebels or the fallen, he tempts nobody and has no will of his own in the matter: he asks what he is told to ask and does what the answer determines. That his name sounds like a punishment is because it is, literally, the word the Qur'an uses for punishment; the angel who carries it is a functionary of the interval, not its owner.