Death desire and loss in western culture pdf

Blessed is he to whom Allah gives provision of understanding, rouses from the slumber of heedlessness, and leads to ponder over the matter of his end. Let us, therefore, ask Allah to appoint us a good ending, to grant us an ending that is accompanied by a message of good tidings, for there is a message of good tidings from Allah—exalted be He—for the true believer when death comes to him, and it is the words of the Most High.

Grieve not! But rejoice in good tidings of the Garden which ye have been promised. By keeping the straight course he means believing in Allah and in His Apostle, and standing firm in the faith, though others say that it means performing the required duties and avoiding things forbidden.

Blessed is he whose ending is accompanied by a message of good tidings, for there will be such a message of good tidings only for such as have been true believers and whose works have been good.

To such the angels will descend at death , and they will say to the angels:. Man was created for death. There is no running away from it. Allah here makes it clear that the one who speaks truth desires death, but the false speaker flees from death because of the evil of his works.

The truth-speaking believer has made preparation for death, so he wishes for it, yearning for his Lord. It is related that there is no soul, innocent or wicked, to which death is not a good thing. We went out with the Apostle of Allah [to join] the funeral procession on a man from the Ansar. In his hand was a rod with which he kept digging in the ground. Anon they come with it to the gate of the lowest heaven and ask that it be opened for it. It is opened to them and the chief personages in each heaven receive it and accompany it to that which lies beyond it, till finally they arrive with it at the seventh heaven.

Spread for him a bed firash from the Garden. Clothe him in a celestial garment, open for him a door giving on the Garden through which may come to him its breezes and its aroma, and expand his grave for him as far as eye can reach. This is your day that you were promised. Thus he takes it, but it is not in his hand more than the twinkling of an eye ere [those angels] take it, put it in the hair-cloth where the odor from it is like the stench of a decomposing carcass.

Anon they come with it to the gate of the lowest heaven and ask that it be opened for it, but it is not opened. I know not. Spread for him a bed from the fire, clothe him in fire, open for him a door giving on the fire, through which its heat and smoke may enter to him and contract his grave so that his ribs pile on one another. O Lord, let not the hour arrive.

His spirit comes forth as easily as a hair from a batch of dough, and hears the words:. His spirit is painfully dragged out, and hears the words,. When a true believer is placed in his grave, the grave is expanded for him seventy cubits, strewn with sweet basil, and hung with silk. At this point I feel safe in concluding that Islam in the Middle East gives more attention to death than Christianity. The aforementioned details show clearly that in Islam afterlife for good men is something to look forward to.

It depicts both spiritual and material life. Conversely, Christianity generally emphasizes afterlife more than being in the world. We have now covered Islamic concepts of death and dying; let us briefly present other rites of minority groups in the Middle East.

What about Pre-Islamic Egyptian beliefs and practices concerning death? Let us go back to the days of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. According to the oldest Egyptian beliefs, the gods also were subject to age and could die. The body was preserved so that the soul would not also die as a result of the dismemberment of the body. Legend has it that the gods Herus and Anubis cared for the dead body of Osiris, an Egyptian deity; and likewise a dead person would live on only if friends and relatives did for him just what Herus and Anubis did for the body of Osiris.

Osiris reigned in the world of the dead over the ka or soul of the dead. Each Egyptian burial was made out to be an exact duplicate of the god-burial. Further at Sais, the suffering of Osiris was enacted yearly and images of Osiris were filled with grain and placed with the dead person as symbols of fertility and eternal life.

Much of the Egyptian religious beliefs would show up in either culture in modified form but with a common theme as their basis. Even as late as in Egyptian Christianity, some forms are still easily identified. In ancient Egyptian religion when a pharaoh came to the throne, the first thing he planned was his tomb. Like King Tut, whose funerary remains are moving around the United States these days, the body was mummified because the Egyptians wanted the body to still be alive in the tomb.

In Egypt, one finds three big jars in every tomb of any pharaoh: one for his heart, one for his intestines, and one for other things. His whole body was mummified and wrapped so that he looked exactly as if he were alive. The rituals differed but the king was taken through corridors, surrounded by high priests and a variety of elaborate things, and given the best burial a man could see. As the pharaohs disappeared in Egyptian history, they were replaced by descendants of other ancient Egyptians called the Copts.

The Copts, or Christians of Egypt, have developed different burial customs. I have had personal experience with many of these. If a Christian dies in the Middle East, he is kept only until the undertaker arrives and takes care of the body. As in Jewish customs of burial, the deceased must be buried immediately. There must be no waiting. The body cannot even stay overnight.

Symbolically, a person is buried wearing his suit and tie if he worked in one of the professions , with a new haircut, everything prepared as if he is alive.

But before the burial the body must be washed. In certain cultures the family takes care of the washing but in the Middle East, the family cannot even touch the body. So a volunteer or the undertaker washes the body before dressing him in a beautiful way. The Coptic or Christian cemetery is really amazing. People are never buried underground.

Homes, sometimes very strange, and no doubt inspired by the tombs of the pharaohs are built. After six thousand years of history with some adjustments, Egyptian Christian cemeteries have now developed into communities of homes.

My family has a home in a town where it lives, with a key and a door and locks. The house even has a kitchen, living rooms, and bedrooms. On certain feast occasions, the family of the deceased get the key from the oldest or the most respected man in the family, go to that house, open the door, and rest there for several days or a week.

Underneath the house is the basement where the caskets are lined up. Everybody knows this is the casket of so-and-so and so-and-so. When the family is endowed with a brilliant or famous man, there are sometimes special inscriptions. These family reunions in the cemetery house are often festive occasions, not gloomy funeral reminders.

Family members console each other and the minister or priest offers a prayer and the family gives the priest a little money. When the family visits the house, they prepare rahmah. Rahmah is a form of charity. They make a big loaf of bread, and give it to poor people—who know that this is the day the Christians go to their tombs, and ask for it as charity. You will find many baskets full of bread. This also has symbolic meaning—for comfort of the soul of the deceased, wherever he may be.

This custom is deeply embedded among the Christians, whether educated or rural people. The Christians of the Middle East are a minority group. The predominant religion is Islam. In accordance with Muslim concepts of death and dying, loud screams and lamentations are performed only by women. Christians do the same. Another distinctive aspect of Muslim funeral practice involves a group of women called naddabat or in the singular, naddabah , who come to the funeral house.

Immediately after death a family member contacts one of these women. The woman brings a group with their drums, and they begin to eulogize the beautiful characteristics of the deceased. These women are very fiery and emotional.

If they slow down, they are urged by relatives of the dead to pick up the tempo. Then they do all they can to raise their emotions. They cry out without interruption with no food, no drink all day until the body is prepared and washed and taken from the house to the burial place. For Christians, we know where the dead are going.

The dead have a home, or a semi-home at least. For Muslims, burial is very simple, the same from Nasser to Sadat to the man in the street. After the body is washed, it is wrapped in a white sheet. Instead of a casket, a flat board platform is used, held up by four assigned pallbearers and four volunteers. They rotate their positions from the home to the burial place.

There are no automobiles with headlights on and no police officers to accompany the march as is done in the United States. Jonathan Dollimore. Home Groups Talk Explore Zeitgeist. I Agree This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and if not signed in for advertising.

Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.

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Gilmour rated it it was amazing. Dollimore is fascinated by the relationship between death and desire in Western culture. He traces it through literature and philosophy from Ancient Greece to modern times. While the book at times becomes a list of how various authors approached the relationship the ideas that Dollimore introduces are important for further research. That is one argument of this book. Happiness is always in a past where it never quite existed at the time.

The seductiveness of the idea of this death of the self has always been a part of Western individualism. Here is the basis of Western metaphysics, and a crucial influence on Christianity; it is the most influential attempt to escape from the mortal world of flux and change and decay.

When desire is extinguished the person is dissolved. Since life and suffering are synonymous, the extinction of desire is the goal of human endeavour. Sexual ecstasy might be itself be a kind of death-an obliteration of identity.

It is this urban confinement of homosexual transgression that is most striking in postwar gay culture. Where once the romantic homosexual exile wandered abroad, sometimes literally across seas and continents, in search of liberation of the foreign and the exotic, now he tends to haunt the claustrophobic spaces of the bathhouse. For Foucault desire is a notion already imbued with oppression; to desire is already to be subjectively policed..

He says that, for Cavafy, the casual homosexual encounter involves the power to snatch sensation, to triumph over the moment even if remorse ensues. Perhaps that physical snatching is courage; it is certainly the seed of exquisite memories and it is possibly the foundations of art.

Jul 21, Jesus rated it really liked it. Heavy shit. Good dissection of the modern westerner. I absolutely love this book! Thrilling in a way few academic works manage to be. Mar 24, Alwin rated it really liked it Shelves: pretensions-to-intellectualism.

Can't say I agree with his conclusions but an interesting read nonetheless. Jim Parker rated it liked it Aug 19, Ronan Johnson rated it really liked it Jan 22, Christian rated it really liked it Jan 11, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey rated it it was amazing Aug 12, Kyrsten Carlson rated it it was amazing Nov 16, Rico Abrahamsen rated it liked it Jan 31, Leen rated it really liked it Mar 09, Ryan Murdock rated it really liked it Jan 10, Jonathan Holmes rated it it was amazing Feb 06, Sabrina rated it really liked it May 03, Seraphim rated it it was amazing Sep 06, Penny rated it really liked it Apr 17, Kristyn Hammond rated it it was amazing Oct 30, Mike rated it liked it Jun 23,