Azrael

Born three hours before Adam, Azrael—the angel of death—enforces the divine command that all living things must return to God. Though no place is beyond his reach, Muslim prophets, saints, and even sorcerers tried to resist him—through prayer, charisma, and esoteric rites designed to defy mortality. These paradoxical efforts reveal a long-standing tension between submission 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 traces the emergence of Islamic death-defying practices from the seventh century onward. Ibn ʿArabī, one of the most influential Sufi mystics of the medieval period, claimed among his many spiritual accomplishments the subjugation of Azrael himself. His pursuit of mastery over death was deeply rooted in angelology, prophetic traditions, and thanatology, and his works preserve striking accounts of his encounters with the angel of death. Drawing on these texts, Rašić explores the paradoxes of defying God’s angels while affirming faith in God and reevaluates the functions of angels, the nature of divine (dis)obedience, and the limits of human 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.