MARCO POLO once related a fantastic story about a mysterious leader called the Old Man of the Mountain who fooled his adherents into believing that Paradise could be experienced on earth. The story goes that the Old Man built lush palaces encrusted with jewels and surrounded by gardens graced with fountains of honey, milk, wine, and water. The architecture of the palace compound was astoundingly immense, with each level topped by an even more beautiful garden. At the highest level, the Old Man of the Mountain and his devotees reveled in the finest environment and enjoyed sumptuous food. Female companions adorned in gold and silk attended to every desire, and the Old Man of the Mountain provided drugs. Surrounded by pleasure, the adherents believed that the inner complex of the fortress was Paradise itself. It was there within the palace that the Old Man of the Mountain trained his devotees to kill and dispatched them to eliminate his enemies. He promised that once they completed their missions he would permit them to reenter the complex of supreme bliss. Muslims later designated these devotees as hashishiyya, or “those who take hashish.” Through a subsequent Italian mispronunciation of the name, the killers entered European lore as the “Assassins.”1
While the story is based on the life of Hasan-i Sabbah, the leader of an offshoot branch of Ismai‘ili Shi‘a who took control of a northern Iranian mountain fortress in 1090, it is undoubtedly legendary. Nonetheless, the possibility that heaven could exist on earth both fascinated and threatened medieval Christian and Muslim writers.2 In Marco Polo’s story, the devotees are deluded into believing that they were already in Paradise. Such a deception would have been easy to comprehend, given that the Old Man of the Mountain’s misleading Paradise mirrors the normative Islamic one.
In Islam, heaven and hell are afterworlds where believers and unbelievers can live full, dynamic afterlives. If converting to Islam is a contract with God, then the reward for righteous behavior is the pleasure of heaven and the punishment for wayward behavior is the pain of the hell. Heaven, or al-janna, translates to “the Garden,” while Hell, or al-nar, is “the Fire.” Muslims spoke and wrote about the Garden and the Fire as places of existence; and like most places, they were filled with things. In the Garden, there are gardens, rivers, fountains, golden thrones, silk couches, fine food, pure wine, abundant fruit, luxurious carpets, glorious music, eternal virgins, angels, prophets from the Hebrew Bible, and the presence of the God. Rivers of wine, milk, honey, and water flow through heaven where bricks are made of gold and silver, mortar is composed of musk, pebbles consist of pearls and rubies, and soil is pure saffron. In the Fire, there are fetid waters, blazing sparks, a tree with the heads of demons, and enough pus and decay to contaminate the world in a single drop. These depictions originate in the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the literal word of God.
This book presents the development of the Garden and the Fire from an early doctrinal innovation introduced in the seventh century to a highly formalized ideal of perfection that the afterworld represented beginning in the twelfth century. By tracing the ways that Muslims have related their lived, earthly lives to the yet to be experienced afterlife, the book focuses on how Muslims imagined their afterworlds over the centuries and how those imaginings often had complicated, multivalent relationships with earthly realities. While unvisited during most lifetimes, the afterworld provided a comparison to this world. Through reflections about the future world, Muslims articulated both the realities that informed their earthly lives and their expectations of the otherworldly conditions that would provide them utter respite in the Garden or intensified toil in the Fire. I argue that the complex relationship between world and afterworld in Islamic history found expression through invocations of material objects and realities of the afterlife. From the seventh century, when the afterlife was introduced as a central doctrine of the new faith, to the twelfth century, when writers of eschatological manuals employed earlier canonized traditions to create fully formed narratives, the afterlife was presented as a world with material conditions that were informed by earthly experiences or expectations. As the image of the afterworld crystallized into metaphors beginning in the twelfth century, the afterlife was more often invoked to describe the ideals of the earthly world as illustrated in the case of the Old Man of the Mountain and his deceitful Paradise. While the Garden and the Fire began as a potent doctrine with the power to reform religious behavior and complex spaces with intricate relationships with the earthly world, they also transformed into representations of perfection and injustice. Muslims understood heaven and hell through a distinct material culture, and that culture eventually gave shape to an aesthetic vocabulary that could describe realities that exceeded the capacity to articulate the very best and worst of earthly life.
In order to trace the ways that the Garden and the Fire within Sunni Islam transformed over time, this book spans several centuries over seven chapters. The book begins in the seventh century with the advent of the prophet Muhammad’s revelations and continues its analysis until the thirteenth century, when the descriptions of the Garden and the Fire adhered to a set narrative form. The book also introduces some of the ways that Muslims used images to represent the Garden on earth from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. Some of the images are artistic representations of the afterworld, while other sites became reinterpreted and imbued with eschatological significance over time.
Chapter 1, “The Garden, the Fire, and Islamic Origins,” questions the governing assumption in Islamic narratives that faith in the afterlife was automatic. By studying Ibn Ishaq’s Sira Rasul Allah, an eighth-century chronicle of Muhammad’s life, it situates Muslims’ developing faith in the afterlife in the persecution by and battle with their enemies, the Meccans. Chapter 2, “Visions of the Afterworld,” continues the examination of the Sira Rasul Allah alongside prophetic traditions (hadiths) and argues that Muhammad’s visions during an eclipse and his journey to the heavens reinforced the promise of an afterworld. The chapter suggests that Muhammad’s special access to the afterworld encouraged a culture of envisioning the Garden, since certain Muslims began to dream of scenes of the Garden within their earthly lives. After tracing the concept of both the afterlife and afterworld in early Islamic narratives, the book turns to chapter 3, “Material Culture and an Islamic Ethic,” which demonstrates how faith in the Garden and the Fire helped formulate an Islamic code of ethics that was linked to the idea of eschatological consequences and the practice of rejecting certain material objects, such as silk and silver vessels. By employing prophetic traditions, the chapter also explores why the majority in hell will be women and how the possibility of intercession links the prophet Muhammad with the behavior of his community.
Chapters 4 and 5 draw on Qur’anic verses and prophetic traditions in order to explore the contours of the afterworld. Chapter 4, “Otherworldly Landscapes and Earthly Realities,” studies the topography and geography of the afterworld through objects, such as fountains, rivers, trees, perfumes, precious metals and stones, animals, and fire. It suggests that descriptions of the Garden and the Fire in the Qur’an were tied to the material realities of the Hijaz region of Arabia; however, traditions expanded Qur’anic descriptions until they acquired other symbolic meanings. Chapter 5, “Humanity, Servants, and Companions,” examines the social life of the afterworld by focusing on the transformation of human bodies and the conception of households. It pays particular attention to the tension between replicating family structures and fulfilling individual desires. It also analyzes the retinue of the Garden, which includes servant boys (wildan and ghilman) and pure female companions (houris) and argues that while they are beings, they, too, were considered material objects of the Garden.
In chapter 6, “Individualized Gardens and Expanding Fires,” the book presents later eschatological manuals from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries in order to demonstrate how theologians developed narratives that could be used to reinforce fear of eventual judgment. The chapter also demonstrates how the Garden was seen to be a realm of individual pleasure, which did not include familial companionship, while the Fire expanded in scale so that it was filled with a greater number of demons and forms of punishment. By the twelfth century, both the Garden and the Fire evinced a definite function and architecture. After presenting the developed images of the Garden and the Fire through eschatological manuals, the book explores in the seventh and final chapter, “Legacy of Gardens,” the ways that the image of the Garden and the Fire shaped artistic forms. The chapter also considers epistemological concerns about how not to be deceived when trying to perceive the unseen world and surveys some ways that believers could have imagined the Garden through mosque mosaics, illustrated manuscripts, and landscape architecture. One note: the book examines the development of the afterworld for the majority of Muslims, who are Sunni, through an analysis of Arabic and Persian religious texts and images. While the work does not focus on Shi‘a, Sufi, and poetic texts, it does make reference to them in relevant chapters.
HEAVEN AND HELL: A COMPARISON
Islamic eschatology provides an afterworld, while Christian eschatology focuses on an afterlife. While some Eastern Christian texts incorporate metaphors of a physical world, Christian texts in general present the quality of future lives through relationships with humans, angels, and the divine. By contrast, Muslims enjoy an afterlife within the parameters of a physically described afterworld. The connotation of “The Garden” and “The Fire” involves spaces or objects more than states of being. The closest approximation that a Christian work ever reaches to the Islamic afterworld is Dante’s Divine Comedy. Teodolinda Barolini suggests that Dante encourages readers to accept that he is telling the truth when he claims to have visited these places.3 Ironically, Miguel Asin presents a theory that Dante based his vision of Paradise on a philosophical manual discussing the prophet Muhammad’s Ascension and Night Journey to the heavens (al-isra’ wa-l-mi‘raj), when, Muslims believe, the angel Gabriel led Muhammad through the levels of hell and heaven.4 Even the textual culmination of Christian vision of heaven and hell as places may have been intrinsically shaped by Islamic conceptions of the afterworld.
Beyond the distinction between an afterlife and an afterworld, the Islamic concepts of the Garden and the Fire intimate a closer connection with the material world than the English terms “heaven” and “hell.” In the Oxford English Dictionary, “heaven” is defined as an expanse by which the sun, moon, and stars can be seen, indicating the notion of the sky above, which is in opposition to the earth below. Heaven is also the region in space where the heavenly bodies move, and so the term is linked with cosmography and astrology. In this sense, heaven is the place for divine beings. Heaven, then, opposes earth in a physical, cosmological, and ontological sense. It is above the earth and the realm of the planets and other celestial objects. It stands apart from the matter and purpose of the earth. Quite simply, heaven is not earth, and it is not for humans. It is the domain of God, God’s providence, or the deities of the various pantheons. It is for this reason that heaven stands apart from the location and timeframe of human experience.
“Hell” is more closely identified as a physical site that acts as an abode. It is the place of departed spirits and the infernal regions or “lower world,” regarded as a place of existence after death, the grave, or Hades. Since it is part of this world, hell shares attributes with the earthly world. Its identification as the lower world is a metaphor for the grave. In this sense, “hell” appears in the Bible of 1611 as a translation of the Hebrew sheol. It also appears as a translation of “grave,” “pit,” the Greek “Hades,” and the Hebrew “Gehenna.” The opposition of heaven and earth, then, is one of direction and of substance. Heaven is up there and filled with ether. Hell is down below and filled with the emptiness found below the dirt.
In its earliest conception, all souls rested in the realm of hell because it was the abode of the souls. It is only at a later stage that hell transformed from its neutral locale to one that is charged with a sense of torment, condemned spirits, and punishment for the wicked.5 In medieval Christian theology, the righteous experienced the glory of Christ in the heavens, while those who did not prove themselves extraordinary were assigned to the lower realms that continued the grit of earthly life: filled with dirt, a certain emptiness, and identification with mortality. Hell is a continuation of life on earth, but heaven is a different state altogether. In heaven, one gains the immortal life like God; in hell, one earns the everlasting taint of mortality. Heaven acts as a transformed state, not an actual locale.
Unlike the terms “heaven” and “hell,” al-janna and al-nar operate in different semantic fields. They are simultaneously places and things. One can walk into the Garden or the Fire. There are also several traditions in which the Garden and the Fire are animated beings. They act as beasts or at least form a classification of God’s creatures. Yet, when the Garden and the Fire are promised, it is their spatial dimensions that are invoked. A preacher is once to have said: “O people of eternity and perpetuity. You were not created to be destroyed; you were created only for eternal existence. You will merely be transferred from one house to another, from the womb to the world, from this world to the grave, from the grave to the Judgment, from the Judgment to eternal existence in either the Garden or the Fire.”6 The idea of location is emphasized in the journey from womb to grave to Judgment and eventually to Garden or Fire. Humans transfer through one state of existence to another, and these states are marked by their differing locales and timeframes.
While al-janna and al-nar are the main terms used to designate the Islamic afterworld, the Qur’an employs others as well, such as al-samawat, “the heavens,” and al-akhira, “the hereafter.” Certain texts conflate al-janna with al-firdaws, often translated as “Paradise” and represented as the highest level of the Garden. Aside from al-nar, other terms are also translated as “hell.” They include hawiya (abyss), jahim (hellfire), sa‘ir (fire), jahannam (hell), laza (flame), saqar (blaze) and hutama (furnace).7 By the twelfth century, each of the terms designated a different gate of the Fire. While the use of al-janna and al-firdaws tends to be distinct, the invocation of al-nar at some points and al-jahannam at others remains unclear. English equivalents for the terms will be used, and all variations in terminology will be noted throughout the book.
METHODOLOGY
The history of the Garden and the Fire is one of how Muslims related their lives to the world of the unseen. Muslims understood the seen by often invoking the unseen; and conversely, came to terms with the unseen with the help of the seen. The relationship between the world that was made manifest was inextricably linked to the invisible world that was not tangible, yet shaped life. While daily life may have been rooted in mundane experiences and practices, its foundation was not solely earth-based. The Garden and the Fire provide potent illustrations, since faith in the afterlife shaped aspects of daily practices, and earthly life was understood through the prism of life to come.
The challenge of studying the relationship between earthly life and the afterworld lies in understanding a state or place in time that has yet to occur. For this reason, a history of the afterlife necessarily involves examining human expectations, fears, longings, and imaginings. Furthermore, the non-event-driven Garden and Fire are so ubiquitous within Islamic texts that they do more than provide details of the life to come; they inform a sensibility. Nearly every sura, or section, in the Qur’an invokes the Garden and the Fire, and many theological and literary works employ metaphors about the Garden. References to the afterlife are so pervasive that the concept loses visibility as an article of faith.
How to write a narrative of an article of faith that is so central that it often disappears within texts? The answer rests in understanding what can be achieved when trying to link earthly experience with otherworldly sensibilities. The history of heaven and hell in Islam, with a particular focus on material culture, is neither a history of imagination, nor a history of mentalities, nor a genealogy. A history of imagination focuses on the active agency of humans; yet, for believers, the afterlife may be imagined, but it is not a figment of their imagination. A history of mentalities assumes that subconscious drives inform cultures; but it is a believer’s conscious longings to know the future that directs historical discourse. A history of genealogy may show origins of recorded doctrine, but it detracts from lived, historical experience. Muslims had faith in the Garden and the Fire without necessary knowledge of the Zoroastrian tradition of religious Judgment or Judaic or Ethiopian philological roots in Arabic.
Instead of seeking origins of a doctrine or specific agents who gave shape to the way the doctrine was defined and disseminated, this book analyzes descriptions and their contexts within texts in order to demonstrate that faith in the afterlife has a history. The historical development from article of faith to realm of imaging to refined metaphor depends on Muslims’ expanding interest in material culture. Whether understood as metaphorical or literal, the afterworld was discussed through its objects. The “Islamic culture” in the title of the work, then, refers less to the religious culture invoked by texts than to the landscape, objects, and social realities that informed the Islamic afterworld. For this reason, the book reads texts in order to evaluate how they describe the afterworld instead of assessing sources for their veracity.
The texts used in this book each pose historiographic challenges. The Qur’an is ambiguous about certain issues such as female companions. Furthermore, it took about three centuries to record, systematize, and fully vocalize revelations. Ibn Ishaq’s (d. 767) Sira Rasul Allah presents a chronology of Muhammad and his community in Mecca and Medina, but was recorded at least a century and a half after the death of the prophet in 632. Its current rescission, edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 828 or 823), dates from nearly three centuries after the death of the prophet. Traditions of the prophet Muhammad, or hadiths, offer rich material about the afterlife, but they present canonical material that tell us more about what the religious learned (‘ulama) wanted to record in terms of chains of transmission (isnad) and content (matn). For example, the canonical Sunni hadith collections that the book draws upon, date from the eighth to the ninth centuries, but they do not indicate whether, when, or where the traditions circulated.8 Instead, the compilers of hadiths were more concerned with the status of the traditions and developed a system to classify them (mainly based on their isnads) as sound (sahih) or weak (gharib). It is also possible that some hadiths were exaggerated and perhaps in some cases fabricated.
The field of Islamic history responds to the challenges that the sources present in different ways. One school of thought accepts generally the narrative provided by Muslim tradition: that Muhammad was a man who lived in the town of Mecca in the seventh century, and who received a series of revelations, believed by Muslims to be the word of Allah (literally, “the God”). He delivered these revelations to the people of Mecca who worshipped local Arabian gods and goddesses. Historians of this school, thus, do not deny the imprint of later time periods on the sources; however, they accept the narrative of Islamic origins as legitimate. Another more skeptical school of thought has a discomfort with the later sources and has developed various approaches that do not assume that oral transmission was a legitimate carrier of tradition. Some works cast doubt about the nature of the Qur’an, the narrative projected in the Sira Rasul Allah, and the validity of hadiths. Historians of this school have undermined the accepted Islamic narrative and intimate that the actual origins of Islam may derive from a different region, a later century, or perhaps by Jews or Christians.
In many respects, these two approaches battle over narrative authenticity. While determining whether a narrative is historically sound is a valid enterprise, it is not the aim of this book for two reasons. First, the book is not concerned with the questions of origins (as will be discussed in chapter 1) because trying to find an origin for faith in heaven and hell leads us away from human experience and into a world of abstract intellection. Instead, the book is more concerned with finding how the afterworld as a concept developed within the parameters of a narrative that Muslims believed to have been true over the centuries. Second, because the textual traditions about the afterworld are an extension of human imaginings, they do not require the same scrutiny that other topics require. For example, hadiths about legal matters that have been fabricated pose more problems for jurists and theologians than traditions about the afterlife. Indeed, chapter 6 analyzes a critique of preachers that suggests that certain narrative license was seen as acceptable when it came to traditions about the Garden and the Fire as long as the traditions encouraged religious reform. Sifting through traditions to see if hadiths were exaggerated when some exaggeration was tolerated is moot. The chief purpose of the traditions of the afterworld was to affect listeners and to satiate their curiosity about the world to come.
While the approach of the book is tailored for its subject matter, there have been a few eschatological studies that use other frameworks. These works shed light on the entire continuum from dying to being judged. The social development of rites involving death, burial, and the body is examined in Leor Halevi’s Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. An intellectual history of eschatological events from death to the Last Judgment based on several classical Sunni manuals and contemporary works is provided by Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s Islamic Understanding of the Afterlife. The temporal, spiritual, and spatial significance of barzakh, the intermediate state between life and death, is discussed in Ragnar Eklund’s Life Between Death and Resurrection According to Islam. Additionally, apocalyptic traditions within early and contemporary Islam are addressed in David Cook’s Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature.
Aside from journal articles and essays in the exhibit catalogue Images of Paradise in Islamic Art, there are three works that focus on the afterworld. Soubi el-Saleh’s La vie future selon le Coran (The Afterlife According to the Qur’an) catalogues texts that mention the Garden and the Fire and eventually describes and determines the parameters of their discourse. Shemuel Tamari’s Iconotextual Studies in the Muslim Vision of Paradise uses a distinct methodology to examine Judeo-Muslim eschatological motifs. Ibrahim Mahmoud’s Jughrafiyat al-maladhdhat al-jins fi al-janna (Geography of Pleasures: Sex in Paradise) employs several methodological frameworks, including Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, to read the afterlife with particular focus on the senses. The present work benefits from these studies; however, it makes a different contribution in topic and method. It demonstrates how Muslims, through reflections, discussions, and constructions, actively shaped and constructed their afterworlds. By employing material culture as a mode of historical inquiry, the work reveals for the first time that imaginings about the afterworld culminated in a distinct religious aesthetic that has shaped Islamic culture.