Islamic eschatology holds that the trial of the dead does not wait for the Last Day but begins in the grave itself, shortly after burial, when two angels, traditionally named Munkar and Nakir, question the deceased about their faith. The questions are consistently reported across hadith sources in a fixed form: who is your Lord, what is your religion, and who is this man, referring to the Prophet Muhammad. A believer answers correctly and is granted a glimpse of their place in paradise and a measure of peace until the resurrection; someone who cannot answer, historically read as an unbeliever or a hypocrite, is struck and the grave is made to constrict around them, a foretaste of punishment rather than its full measure.
The doctrine rests on hadith rather than the Quran directly, which speaks of trial and questioning after death in more general terms, and its detailed form, including the angels' names, developed through the hadith literature in the first Islamic centuries. Sunni and Shia traditions both affirm the trial of the grave, though details of transmission and emphasis differ between schools and between the hadith collections each tradition treats as most authoritative. Some later commentators extended the same interrogation, with variation, to include questions about a believer's specific religious practice, though the three core questions remain constant across the classical hadith accounts.