For believers in a resurrection of the body, there arises the question of what happens after death but before the Last Day: the intermediate state. For most Muslims, the intermediate state is the barzakh. It is a fantastical and frightening time in the grave. The present study will examine where the belief in the barzakh comes from through a study of the Qur'an.

This study challenges the conventional image of the tenth-century Sufi mystic Al-Husayn Ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ (d. 929) as an anti-philosophical mystic. Unlike the predominantly theological or text-historical studies which constitute much of the scholarly literature on Ḥallāğ, this study is completely philosophical in nature, placing Ḥallāğ within the tradition of Graeco-Arabic philosophy and emphasizing, in a positive light, his continuity with the pagan Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus.

This work presents a putative reconstruction, testing the hypothesis that Islam is historically linked to Jewish Christianity. The argument takes the Qur’anic text to be a valid start-point for historical inquiry and reconstructs from biased views of Jewish Christianity the notion of an enduring Nasorean movement. The effective link between the Nasorean movement and the Meccan religious awakening is the preaching of the Qur’anic Prophet Shu’ayb in Midian, on the border of Arabia.

In the present work, Baby Varghese presents the Syriac text, accompanied by an English translation, of Dionysius’s commentaries on the rites of myron (anointing of oil) and baptism.