IN MARCH 1997, Time magazine reported on the belief in the afterlife with the cover story, “Does Heaven Exist?” After treating the intellectual developments and controversies of the afterlife from Genesis to the twentieth century, the article presented a poll of Americans’ religious beliefs. It found that the majority of those polled believe in a heaven where people live forever with God and in a hell where others are punished after they die. Other questions drew out the enduring faith in Saint Peter and angels. In another development, in the summer of 1999, La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit magazine closely affiliated with the Vatican, endorsed the belief that hell does not exist but is rather a state of psychological torment. The Vatican soon gave its nod to the opinion, and Pope John Paul identified hell as the “pain, frustration, and emptiness of life without God.”1 U.S. News and World Report followed the story and, after interviewing scholars, suggested why hell had ended after centuries of profitable existence.2 The twentieth century thus concluded with the continued belief in heaven and the waning faith in hell.3
While the topic of heaven and hell may occasion cover stories for American newsmagazines, there has been a sustained developing interest in religious literature in both American and Arab publishing markets. In the United States, religious fiction has become a publishing category, with Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind multivolume series as its star. The series bases its plot on the events of the Rapture, the coming Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. Written with the tone of a thriller, the series dramatizes the events of the Apocalypse through the lens of an airplane pilot who has his own doubts about faith. As he witnesses those good souls (including his wife) who have been taken from the earth in a single moment, he soon realizes that he is part of humanity who has been left behind to face the Apocalypse. The events are set within contemporary political events, with the Antichrist eventually assuming the position of secretary general of the United Nations. The novels alternate between accounting for the events at the end of time and modeling Christian faith for the reader.
Eschatological drama is not limited to the American publishing market. Popular belief, rarely recorded and often censored from historical record, has an articulate form in contemporary Arab eschatological manuals. Commonly sold in bookstores, marketplaces, and outside large congregational mosques in Amman, Cairo, and Damascus, these booklets and pamphlets act as edifying primers that illustrate Islamic theology through religious traditions and inspirational stories. The first of these manuals may have been published starting in the 1970s; however, their numbers have increased dramatically since the mid-1980s. Alongside Friday sermons, the manuals offer a rich source for understanding the contemporary status of Muslims’ beliefs and practices. The manuals contain religious stories and hadiths that have often been omitted from theological guides over the centuries because the textual material did not meet theologians’ criteria of verifiability. For example, a common saying enjoining reverence for mothers is, “Paradise lies at the feet of mothers.” While this is one of the most popular traditions, readers would be hard pressed to find it in one of the six hadith collections. Through the technological advance of printing, these traditions have surfaced in the religious manuals.
Studying the manuals allows a glimpse into the formation of popular theology for the Muslim individual, family, and community. The works provide easy and inspirational reads for Muslims, and some of the works are published for specific readership, such as distinct Sunni and Shi‘a biographical accounts of companions of the prophet. Works for families, such as The Key to Paradise: Stories for Mothers and The Key to Paradise: Stories for Fathers, narrate inspirational stories to inspire good religious parenting. Other works address what happens after death and prepare the reader for the Resurrection and Judgment. Many of the manuals sport graphic covers of the one-eyed al-Dajjal or the accursed tree of al-Zaqqum and employ eschatological motifs to suggest that the political struggles of Muslims in the Middle East are part of the larger backdrop of the end of time.
While the eschatological manuals are mostly focused on the state of the individual soul, they do sometimes provide descriptions of the Garden and the Fire. The torments of the grave and the Fire are the most prominent themes within the manuals. Hence, the purpose of the manuals seems to be focused on reform through the development of fear. Those works or sections of works that deal with the Garden focus on two major categories: trees and houris. Trees, such as the Lote Tree of the Boundary, are mentioned to indicate the beneficence of the Garden, while the traditions of the houri are the central focus of the life in the Garden. Interestingly, most mentions of houris are qualified by the term abkaran, “virginal,” signifying the calcification of a popular belief about their virginity.
MATERIAL CULTURE OF THE AFTERWORLD
More than anything else, the Garden and the Fire have been understood through their materials. Over time, certain materials figure more prominently than others. Rivers, for example, do not predominate in the eschatological manuals from the ninth to twelfth century; however, jewels do. Slave boys are not discussed in later manuals; however, houris were still popular. It is likely that the objects transformed into tropes that epitomized the luxury of the Garden or the punishment of the Fire. By contrast, the twentieth century has offered a more contested approach to the materials of the Garden. Twentieth-century theologians rejected the literal pleasures that materials of the Garden offer in favor of a metaphorical perspective where the goods are symbolic indications of blessedness.
Popular expressions of Islam still draw on the material dimension of the Garden and the Fire. An excellent example is when Iran used children to clear minefields during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–89.4 According to the nonprofit foundation Center of War and the Child, a variety of methods were employed to encourage students to volunteer to be human minesweepers. Sound trucks rolled through villages; radio and television messages linked patriotism with religious belief. Government representatives promised parents that if their children were killed, families would be entitled to greater rations and money. During training, children were lectured on the beauties of the hereafter and wore headbands with religious slogans and khaki jackets imprinted with the phrase, “With permission given to enter heaven by the imam.” The children were often fed “martyrs’ syrup,” essentially sugar water, and sent to the front with wooden sticks to detonate mines. When children worked in the minefields, they wore “keys of Paradise” around their necks to guarantee their entry into heaven in case the landmines detonated.5 The objects that the children wore not only had a didactic purpose; the keys also offered the children a physical intermediary whose purpose was not to preserve the children’s lives, but to guarantee speedy entry into Paradise if they were killed.
The image of the Garden also inspires celebrations. Examples include the state-sponsored projects of the Gulf nations. In September 2000, President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan was to return to Abu Dhabi from surgery abroad. To celebrate his recovery, a contract was negotiated with a French company to perfume the air of Abu Dhabi and to have perfume sprayed through its fountains for three days.6 The United Arab Emirates unveiled a plan to build a resort of two hundred private villas and forty luxury hotels in the Persian Gulf. The planned community, called The Palm, is now in the shape of a symmetrical palm tree, and its contour is prominent enough to be visible from the moon.7 The aesthetic inspirations for these developments derive from Qur’anic images of the Garden.
What does the invocation of material objects in the afterworld reveal about Islamic faith and practice? Medieval Christian theologians suggested that the traditions of the Garden evinced the crude character of Arabs and the fraudulent nature of Muhammad’s prophecy, since Christians shunned the corporeal delights of the Garden. It was one thing to taste, hear, see, and feel pleasure; it was quite another to have that heightened sensual celebration in the place where the Christian pilgrim achieves his or her pure state to meet and commune with the Lord. For Christian theologians, Islamic Paradise provided the ultimate example that Islam was a religion that lacked spirituality.8 Instead, Islam offered materiality: the promise of a physical world where one could live a life filled with sensation and surrounded by things. For Christians, the spiritual and the material were in opposition. If the material was corrupted with original sin, then it was clearly the wrong location for divine blessing. Islam, by contrast, privileged the pleasures by enjoining that if one abstained from them in this life, one would obtain myriad in quality and quantity in the next. Contemporary American representations of the Garden, specifically with a focus on the houri, also evince limited insight into a different kind of afterworld. In many articles and Internet sites, Muslims are charged as being perverted for desiring a sexual paradise. Some articles even question if Muslims are rational and modern for not questioning whether houris are pure females or something radically different, such as white raisins.9 Just as medieval Christian theologians could not understand the material dimension of the Islamic afterworld due to an inherently antimaterial sensibility, contemporary American media cannot assess the role of female companionship in the Islamic afterworld without projecting perceptions of Islam as driven by sex and violence.
The explanations for a material character of the Islamic afterworld often depend on judgment of a misunderstood phenomenon. Sometimes the explanations are overly deterministic. Rivers do not predominate in the Garden because Muhammad lived in a desert locale. Instead, geography may have played a role in early texts, but it is not the sole cause of the compelling image of rivers and foundations. Geography also does not explain why later texts written by authors in different contexts invoke the same images. Houris do not emerge as the central object of the Garden because Muslim men are starved for female companionship. Instead, the role of female companions in the afterworld was contingent on complex relationships between Muslims and their servants or slaves, and that relationship had a metaphorical dimension that extended into and transforms in contemporary times. As a warning against resorting to the easy explanation, Aziz al-Azmeh counsels against understanding the sensuality of the Garden as a result of “the desires of impotent men living in desert surroundings.”10
To return to our question, then, what does the material character imply about the early formation of the Islamic afterworld? This book suggests that material culture is contingent on the correspondence between seen and unseen worlds. Not only are the two worlds temporally linked, but the unseen afterworld can also be experienced only after being rewarded or paying the consequences for the way that Muslims conducted their earthly lives. As realms of existence and meaning, the earthly world and the afterworld are entangled in complicated ways that can be glimpsed through articulations of the future world to come. In this book, I have argued that these visions, whether deemed literal or metaphorical, are not limited to the beatific interactions with cosmic beings. The material character of the Islamic afterworld allowed human longings for and fears of a future life to actualize into visions of a future world.
The range of visions of the future world affected Islamic traditions and practices in several ways. In the case of the formation of the Muslim community in Mecca and Medina, the promise that a future world followed an earthly one provided motivation for community formation and physical defense. Muslims drew on the image of the Garden and the Fire to provide solace in the face of battle with the Meccans and to develop anticipation of a better time and place to come. In the case of ethical impact, the connecting of the world with the afterworld offered a foundation to establish a behavioral code for the early community. The distinction between the believer and the unbeliever was understood through where one chose to enjoy sumptuous goods. Those who venerated God and rid themselves of the love for opulent materials were rewarded the objects of the Garden. Those who sought goods instead of submission to God were met with the pain of the Fire. Women occupied an intermediary place in the ethics of the afterworld, since they were allowed silk fabrics but also condemned to be the majority of the Fire.
In the case of constructing images of the afterworld, Muslim imaginings created future physical worlds that reflected certain aspirations, such as lush green landscapes, while ignoring other realities, such as the economic place of domesticated animals. The privileging of certain aspects of earthly life over others becomes even clearer when it comes to the realities of social life and relationships. Banquets that depend on servant classes predominate so that believers could enjoy a glorious life, while domestic lives with families became less important over time. In the case of preaching and religious instruction, the developed images of the afterworld became the focus of meditations on the importance of realizing that earthly life had consequences. When the visions of the future world began to formalize into a set rubric of scenes, rewards, and punishments, a distinct aesthetic of the afterworld emerged. The Garden and the Fire not only were mechanisms for offering spiritual and ethical instruction, but they also became metaphors for the very best and worst that life could offer. Within the realm of aesthetics, certain gardens transformed through metaphor into the Garden on earth, while political strife in the Middle East is sometimes understood through metaphor as the prefiguring of the Fire to come.11
The Garden and Fire acted as doctrines of faith, promises of future lives, spaces for human imaginings, motivations for ethical behavior, mechanisms for reform, and a vocabulary to express the extremes bounties and horrors of human imagination. Their functions were expansive not just because the concept of the afterworld is an enduring idea in human society, but also because Muslims were able to comprehend and fashion their visions of the afterworld through objects, beings, and social realities. In creating a world, as opposed to just extending life, Muslims developed an Islamic afterworld that had the power to introduce the faith, guide believers to follow appropriate behaviors, and admonish those who needed reform. The Garden and the Fire provided spaces that allowed believers to imagine the consequences of their earthly choices. While reflecting on where their earthly choices would lead, Muslims envisioned, constructed, and developed their future worlds.