Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions

Abstract

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.

The Ontology, Arrangement, and Appearance of Paradise in Castilian Kabbalah in Light of Contemporary Islamic Traditions from al-Andalus

“…Another main theme is the relationship between the observance of Sharia and the sites of specific recompense in these Gardens. A central hadith, repeatedly cited by Ibn al-'Arabī from the collection of al-Bukhārī, states that the Garden has eight gates (Lange 2016) that correspond to the eight central directives of Islam (prayer, charity, fasting, jihād, and more). Entrants to Paradise are directed to the gate that fits their deeds: devotees of prayers are assigned to the gate of prayer, devotees of jihād to the gate of jihād, and so on (S .…”

Variations in Eight Manuscript Versions of al-Kisâ'ï's Depiction of Seven Heavens

“…According to some Qurʾānic exegeses, the seven heavens being layered one above another form a dome-like structure over the Earth, and Paradise stretches above all that. However, the borders (if any) are far from clearly set (Lange 2016: 41-42, Heinen 1995). 34 The Islamic Profession of Faith: Lā ilāha illa l-Lāh.…”

Negotiating paradise lost: Refugee narratives of pre-war Syria – A discursive approach to memory, metaphors and religious identifications

“…Added to this, and when contextualizing Syrian narratives explicitly, the rich legacy which the conceptual idea of paradise has in Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious language should not be underestimated. As shown by Christian Lange (2015) in Paradise and Hell in Islamic Tradition , many geographical locations within Syria and the Fertile Crescent as a whole are referred to as ‘eutopian, paradisiacal space’ in early literary sources (p. 251).…”