Egypt's Dar Al Iftaa: Dead can hear greetings from their loved ones and return them

Fatwa from Islamic advisory board says life does not end with death but goes on in a different form

A tomb in the Cairo Necropolis, known as the City of the Dead. Egyptian officials have said the dead can sense the living world. Reuters

The dead can perceive the world around them even after they are gone, a fatwa from Egypt’s official Islamic advisory board said.

Dar Al Iftaa, in a Facebook post on Saturday night, urged Muslims to visit their dead loved ones and offer them kind words because they can sense and reciprocate the greetings in their own way.

“It is well-established that when a person dies, this death is not pure annihilation or a lifeless existence, rather, it is a transition from one form of life into another,” the fatwa read.

The advisory cited a hadith, one of many sayings of the Prophet Mohammed to have been passed down orally from his disciples to their descendants, in which he tells his companions that they should view his death as a blessing as it would enable him to watch their actions in the afterlife.

“Your actions would be presented to me. For every virtue I would witness, I would thank God. And I would ask him forgiveness for every vice,” reads the hadith quoted by the advisory.

The advisory said the dead’s ability to perceive the world of the living was the very reason that in Sharia, one of the sunnahs — the habitual practices of the Prophet whose emulation is an important cornerstone of Sunni Islam — advises mourners to visit the graves of loved ones and recite a prayer.

The prayer, called talqeen al mawta (“indoctrination of the dead” in English), begins with the shahada, the Islamic oath that acknowledges God as the world’s sole deity and Mohammed as his Prophet, and has sections reminding the deceased of their faith and of how the afterlife will be, whether it is spent in heaven or hell.