IntroductionAccording to legend, after the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khat t a b's (r. He went to his companions and told them about it. His story was brought before ʿUmar b. al-Khat t a b, who said: "Shall a man from this community enter the Garden while he is alive among you? Look at the leaves! If they have withered, they are not from the Garden. If they haven't withered, they are." . . . And indeed, the leaves had not withered. 1 Shurayk is said to have kept the leaves he brought from his subterranean visit to paradise, guarding them in his personal copy of the Qurʾa n until his death, and to have been buried with them, placed delicately between his chest and the burial shroud covering his corpse, when he was laid to rest in the Syrian village of al-Salamiyya. 2 Some thirteen centuries later, between 1938 and 1942, archaeologists excavated what appeared to be the remains of the well inside the al-Aqs a mosque. 3 To this day, one can see, to the left of the entrance to the mosque, the stairway leading down into the vast system 1 Wa sit ı , Fad a ʾil , 93-4 (#154: H adı th al-waraqa t ). The story also appears in Maqdisı , Muthı r al-ghara m , 58; Nuwayrı , Niha yat al-arab , I, 339; Suyu t ı , Durr , I, 136. For the little biographical information that is available for al-Wa sit ı , see ʿUlaymı , Uns , II, 482.

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How was the use of violence against Muslims explained and justified in medieval Islam? What role did state punishment play in delineating the private from the public sphere? What strategies were deployed to cope with the suffering caused by punishment? These questions are explored in Christian Lange's in-depth study of the phenomenon of punishment, both divine and human, in eleventh-to-thirteenth-century Islamic society. The book examines the relationship between state and society in meting out justice, Muslim attitudes to hell and the punishments that were in store in the afterlife, and the legal dimensions of punishment. The cross-disciplinary approach embraced in this study, which is based on a wide variety of Persian and Arabic sources, sheds light on the interplay between theory and practice in Islamic criminal law, and between executive power and the religious imagination of medieval Muslim society at large.

Ignominious parading (tashhÊr) was a crucial element of Islamic punitive practice well into the 19th century CE. In the context of a cultural-legal tradition for which the distinction between private and public was allimportant, a punishment consisting, literally, in "making someone public" had a fundamental role to play. However, tashhÊr has gone largely unnoticed by historians of Islamic law, despite the fact that it features prominently in legal discussions as the penalty for perjury (shah §dat al-zår). This essay, based for the most part on sources from the late-classical period (5th/11th and 6th/12th centuries), not only analyzes the place of tashhÊr in fiqh, but it also takes into account instances of tashhÊr in Islamic historiography and in the eschatological literature, thus uncovering the symbolic structure that underlies the tashhÊr ritual.

In regard to the afterlife, scholars of Islam in the West have demonstrated a remarkably irenic temper, preferring to give far more attention to paradise than to hell. The Islamic hell, for the most part, has been viewed as no more than the mirror image of paradise, an ugly reflection of the beauties and the joys in heaven. Consequently, it has been considered a phenomenon of secondary logical and ontological order, as well as interest. The few general overviews of Islamic eschatology largely bypass the infernal regions,1 and the dedicated studies of the Islamic paradise, of which there are a fair number,2 cannot be said to be paralleled by the same number of scholarly forays into the Islamic hell.3 While the entry on paradise in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1954Islam ( -2005

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human(oid) body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti (Ash’ari, Egypt, d. 1505) and al-Majlisi (Persia, d. 1699), suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi (Syria, d. 1191) and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought.

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