Nakir is one of the two angels of the grave in Islamic tradition: with his companion [munkar], the angel who comes to the newly buried dead in the grave to question them about their faith — their God, their religion, and their Prophet — determining, by their answers, whether the grave shall be a place of light and peace or of darkness and torment until the Day of Judgment. He is an angel of the grave, the questioner of the dead.
The Companion of Munkar
Nakir, with his companion [munkar], is one of the two angels of the grave in Islamic tradition — the awesome pair of angels who come to the dead in the tomb to administer the test of the grave. The two are almost always named and act together, Munkar and Nakir, and they perform the same office: when a person has been buried and the mourners have left, the two angels come to the deceased, raise them in the grave, and question them. They are described as fearsome and mighty in aspect, dark, with flashing or blue eyes, of dread appearance.
The Three Questions
Nakir and Munkar put to the dead the three great questions of faith: “Who is your Lord?” “What is your religion?” and “Who is your Prophet?” The true believer answers with firm faith — “My Lord is Allah; my religion is Islam; my Prophet is Muhammad” — and for them the grave is widened, filled with light, and made a garden of peace and ease, a foretaste of Paradise, where they rest in comfort. The unbeliever or the hypocrite, unable to answer truly, faces the punishment of the grave: the tomb becomes narrow, dark, and full of torment, a foretaste of the Fire, until the Resurrection. Thus the answers given to Nakir and Munkar determine the state of the soul during the barzakh — the intermediate period between death and the final Judgment.
The Test of the Grave
Nakir (whose name, like Munkar’s, is connected to the testing and the “unknown” or “denied”) and his companion thus represent the first reckoning that every soul faces after death — the questioning in the grave that is a central element of Islamic belief about death, the afterlife, and the importance of dying in true faith. The two angels are solemn and well-known figures, and the prospect of their questioning is a powerful spur to faith and right living. As one of the two angels of the grave who question the dead and determine their state until the Judgment, Nakir holds his place among the angels of Islamic tradition. In Nakir, Islamic tradition gave form to an angel of the grave — the awesome questioner who, with Munkar, comes to the buried dead to test their faith and determine whether the grave shall be light or darkness until the Day of Judgment, the angel of the test of the tomb.