Mizan

The Mizan is the balance set up on the Day of Resurrection. "We shall set up the scales of justice for the Day of Resurrection, so that no soul will be dealt with unjustly in the least" (21:47); those whose scales are heavy prosper, and those whose scales are light have lost themselves (7:8-9, 23:102-103, 101:6-9). The image is one of the fixed furnishings of Qur'anic eschatology, standing alongside the trumpet, the record given into the right or left hand, and the bridge.

The same word does other work in the Qur'an. God "raised the heaven and set up the balance" (55:7), and the passage moves immediately to a command not to cheat in weighing (55:8-9), as it does again in the denunciation of those who give short measure (83:1-3). Justice in the marketplace and justice at the judgement are named by one word, which is why Muslim ethical writing has treated commercial honesty as a directly theological matter rather than a merely civil one.

How the weighing works was debated. Traditionist and Ash'ari theologians generally affirmed a real balance, differing over whether what is weighed is the deeds themselves, the scrolls recording them, or the agent; Mu'tazili and later rationalist readings took the scales as a figure for perfectly exact justice, since acts are not the kind of thing that has weight. Historians of religion note that a weighing at judgement recurs in Egyptian funerary texts and in Zoroastrian material; whether that reflects transmission or the independent reach of an obvious metaphor for exactness is not settled.

The image of a balance weighing a person's worth at death is one of the oldest and most widely distributed motifs in ancient religious art and text, and setting the Islamic Mizan beside its predecessors shows both how old the image is and how differently each tradition uses it.

In ancient Egyptian funerary religion, the Book of the Dead describes the heart of the deceased weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma'at, the principle of truth and cosmic order, before Osiris and a tribunal of forty-two divine judges; a heart heavier than the feather condemned its owner to be devoured by the monster Ammit, while a heart that balanced the feather permitted passage to the afterlife. The scene, depicted repeatedly in tomb paintings, long predates any Abrahamic text.

Zoroastrian eschatology likewise weighs a person's thoughts, words and deeds on a balance held by the god Rashnu at the individual judgment following death; a favorable balance permits crossing the Chinvat bridge, itself a parallel to the Islamic Sirat, while an unfavorable one casts the soul into torment.

Greek religion supplies a related but structurally different image in Homer's account of Zeus weighing the keres, the death-lots of opposing warriors before Troy, in golden scales to determine which will die, a weighing of destiny rather than moral worth: only the Egyptian, Zoroastrian and Islamic versions weigh conduct against a standard, while Homer's scene weighs an already-fixed fate. Historians of religion generally treat the recurrence of weighing imagery as best explained by the intuitive power of weighing as a metaphor for exactness, available independently to any tradition that reaches for one, rather than a single line of transmission connecting all of them.