3الَّذي هُم فيهِ مُختَلِفونَMuhammad Asadon which they [so utterly] disagree.1The question which preoccupies man above all others - the question as to whether there is life after death - has been variously answered throughout the ages. It is, of course, impossible to describe the innumerable variations of those answers; nevertheless, a few main lines of thought are clearly discernible, and their mention may be useful for a better understanding of the Qur'anic treatment of this problem. Some people - probably a minority - seem to be convinced that bodily death amounts to total and irreversible extinction, and that, therefore, all talk about a hereafter but an outcome of wishful thinking. Others are of the opinion that after individual death the human "life-essence" returns to the supposed source of its origin - conceived as the "universal soul" - and merges with it entirely. Some believe in a successive transmigration of the individual soul, at the moment of death, into another body, human or animal, but without a continuation of individual consciousness. Others, again, think that only the soul, and not the entire human "personality", continues to live after death - that is, in a purely spiritual, disembodied form. And, lastly, some believe in an undiminished survival of the individual personality and consciousness, and regard death and resurrection as the twin stages of a positive act of re-creation of the entire human personality, in whatever form this may necessarily involve: and this is the Qur'anic view of the life to come.