Some Muslims believe that when a person dies, two angels, called Munkar and Nakir, come to interrogate the deceased’s soul. When I was little, I remembered being told that some people wanted to test this out by placing a recorder in a grave. When the people returned to hear what happened, they found out the recorder malfunctioned. This was offered as proof that this happens: the angels made it malfunction since these people were tampering with God’s processes.
The above anecdote notwithstanding, is there any way to perform an experiment to verify whether this (this: interrogation by Munkar and Nakir) happens or not?
I wouldn’t imagine there would be any way to test it; as far as I know we don’t have any technology capable of reliably recording the ‘voices’* of immaterial beings (*in quotes because I’m certain we’re not talking about sound waves here).
Seems like an unfalsifiable claim; too easy to weasel out of the experimental results, whatever they are or are not.
Well, “angels make recording equipment malfunction far more regularly than dictated by chance” is a testable claim, requiring a number of coffins containing reliable recording equipment, some of which contained cadavers and some of which didn’t: did the cadaver-proximate recorders malfunction more regularly than those in the empty coffins?
Remember, if you’re sure they will, any costs you incur in buying the recorders will be reimbursed when you win $1M.
I think it depends on how smart Munkar and Nakir are. If they exist, they clearly don’t want anyone listening in, but on the other hand they don’t seem to mind being quite overt in their tactics to avoid it.
Let’s say I set up a variety of recorders, all operating under different principles - a sound-activated magnetic tape recorder, a radio mike, a clockwork wax cylinder recorder and a flexible mirror with laser light bouncing off it via optic fibre. I keep the experiment a secret to avoid pranksters, and fit the things with anti-tamper devices and tell-tales for good measure.
If all of these devices experience bona fide, inexplicable malfunctions - burnt out components, a spring that has lost its temper, optic fibre that has mysteriously clouded - I will certainly be open to the idea that supernatural forces have been at work. So the Angelic sabotage of equipment is theoretically verifiable.
However, if Munkar and Nakir are smart and would prefer not to leave any evidence of their existence, they could circumvent all this by a number of means, the simplest being to wait me out and do their job when I’ve given up.
I would like to know how the original recorder malfunctioned. A flat battery isn’t very mysterious, nor is being full of dirt or water. On the other hand, if all the semiconductors had transmuted to sand within their epoxy packages, well that’s worth looking into!
On preview, I see Mangetout has pointed out an implicit assumption, that this “interrogation” involves sound at all. I’m going along with this assumption since it is obviously a tenet of the original experiment.
And of course, matt, Munkar and Nakir being the powerful entities they are, they’d have no problem having their conversation and then realigning all of the trillion trillions of magnetic domains on the tape itself so that it seems like it recorded nothing.
Of cours, in that case one might as well believe in a tooth fairy which implants a false memory of replacing a tooth with a coin in your parent’s brain.
Hmmm. I cannot find any webpage that discusses the ancedote I remember. (Then again, it was told to me orally by my Moulvi sahib. He can’t lie, right?)
Even if I believed in this stuff, I wouldn’t believe this happened in a way audible to the living world. Just like you can’t see the soul arise into heaven, you wouldn’t hear the soul (or angels) conversing.
Ah, but in the alleged original experiment, the angels did have a proper interaction with part of the living world - they caused recording equipment to fail to record. And not in a subtle way so that it would simply have appeared that there was nothing to record. No, they went ahead and induced a malfunction!
Now, while your point is perfectly sensible, the angels may have induced the malfunction out of angelic pique that someone would have such temerity, even if the “interrogation” was non-material and hence would not have been recorded. Which means that provided you can provoke them into taking this kind of overt action, you can devise a test for their presence!
Of course, a test for the presence of angels that depends on pissing them off has its drawbacks, rather like a test for the presence of lions that involves kicking them up the arse…
That would appear to be an unsupported assumption on the part of those making the claim; certainly your earlier suggestion (about the possible statistical increase in the malfunction of recording devices) would be a good starting point, but with a sample size of one, it seems unwise to draw any conclusion that isn’t directly supported by positive evidence (such as the miraculous appearance of a post-it note on the broken tape machine, saying “nice try! - better luck next time, best wishes Munkar & Nakir”).
Correlation does not equal causation; it can be evidence of a causal link - particularly when the evidence exists in great abundance, but there seems no particularly compelling reason to think so in this case.
You’re saying that someone dug up a grave to get a recorder back? Did someone official give permission for this? Was it done without permission? Did the deceased’s relatives know?
I have trouble thinking that someone actually did this. Talked about doing it, maybe. It’s too good a story not to have popped up and circulated. But actually doing it? Without being caught?
Of course, as far as stories go, I can see some guy sneaking around at night, panicked in the cemetery. He gets the grave open and . . . finds out he forgot to push the record button. The thing was only on play. Do you think he’s going to tell his pals he goofed up? No.
Another story. A kid decides to record the angels. He tries to hide the recorder on a dead relative’s body but his mother catches him. Is he going to tell his friends about what comes after that? No.
Stories being stories and people being people, the two stories above wouldn’t circulate among the same people that the angel-malfunction would. But if they found the right group, they’d spread. People would say it happened to a friend, or a cousin, or a friend’s cousin. That’s the way stories go. It would take a whacking big lot of documentation to make me think that the malfunction story actually happened, even without the angels.
My moulvi sahib said it happened, so it must have.
I can’t recall what country it took place in. Might have been Pakistan. Might have been somewhere in the West. (Those uppity Westerners.)
Of course, understanding that there are strict laws concerning graveyards, graves, and burial in the West would cause suspicion to fall upon such a tale.
But, my moulvi sahib said it happened, so it must have.
For those who may not know, a “moulvi sahib” is (supposedly) a man learned in Islam. Such a title is usually bestowed (at least by South Asian Muslims) upon any person who teaches the Qur’an or teaches how to read the Qur’an for a living. They are also excellent conduits for interesting “facts” about Islam.
Quite! The claim is both weak and lacking in specifics. For the sake of argument I decided to accept the OP as a working hypothesis, unsupported assumptions included, and see if that led to contradictions.
The point I was hinting at is that messing with the recording equipment in a supernatural way would be just as much a givaway of angelic activity as leaving an angelic conversation on tape. Especially as they could have simply turned the thing off, did their work and turned it on again as they left.
So even giving the claim more credit than it deserves, it doesn’t really make sense unless the recording malfunction was mundane. Or if the angels didn’t care about leaving evidence of angelic activity about - they both refused to be recorded and sabotaged the equipment out of other motives. I can sense Mr. Ockham wagging his finger at me…
Hmmm, this sand is primarily silicon dioxide with some impurities while this semiconductor is primarily silicon dioxide with some impurities. IT’S A MIRACLE!
Any physical manifestations of interrogation, if they existed, would surely have been captured by now. My question is this: if God is omniscient, why are angels required to interrogate the soul of the deceased? And exactly two, at that?
