3 - The Ultimate Boundary Crossing: Paradise and Hell in the Commentaries

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we give an overview of the dominant eschatological themes found in the commentaries, starting with a discussion of the existing literature on eschatology in the formative and ‘classical’ periods of Sufism and offering a typology of themes. After this, we analyse sayings about the Qurʾanic verses on Paradise and Hell collected in al-Sulamī's Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr, and to a lesser extent in Ziyādāt Ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr. Through his works we try to reconstruct the developments in Sufi thought on Paradise and Hell in the formative period. From there, we move on to the other four commentaries. We seek to understand if, how and why conceptions of the hereafter changed, what main topics and themes are shared by all commentaries, as well as any significant differences between the approaches of the commentators towards the hereafter.

Attitudes towards the Hereafter in the Formative Period of Sufism

In a recent study on Sufi eschatological conceptions, Christian Lange discerned seven attitudes towards the hereafter. The first two attitudes are both rooted in the early renunciant movement (zuhd) in Islam. The general tendency within the zuhd movement was to stress that a pious person should strive for the hereafter by disentangling themselves from this lower life and struggling against worldly desires and aspirations. This roughly led to two attitudes, emphasising either the punishment or the reward in the hereafter. The first attitude emphasised the fear of Hell (khawf) as a way to cultivate piety. The second attitude focused on the longing for Paradise (rajāʾ). The third and fourth attitudes took shape as a ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ antithesis to the attitudes of these early zuhhād. Both take as axiomatic that an exaggerated fixation on either the enjoyment of Paradise or the punishment of Hell distracts from what truly matters in the hereafter: God Himself, His contentment, being near Him and the vision of Him. The ‘cold’ response did not deny the reality of the otherworldly reward and punishment, but merely stressed that the true reward and punishment was to be either near to or far from God. The ‘hot’ response, then, was a form of dhamm al-ākhira, an outright contempt of Paradise and Hell, considering them something that veils the believer from God.