Recent years have witnessed a step change in academic scholarship on the much-neglected topic of Islamic eschatology. Monographs and edited volumes by Christian Lange, Mohammad Hassan Khalil and Nerina Rustomji have taken the study of salvation and the hereafter in Islam well beyond the earlier studies of Soubhi El-Saleh, Jane Smith, Yvonne Haddad and others. The edited collection under review constitutes a massive new contribution to the field with two thick volumes containing 57 chapters in English and a substantial “Zum Geleit” (Foreword) by Josef van Ess in German. These two volumes originated in a 2009 conference at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
The first three chapters set the stage. Chapters 2 and 3 comprise the conference opening addresses: Tilman Nagel calls attention to the porous border between this life and the hereafter in the Islamic imagination, and Mahmoud Zakzouk presents an overview of Muslim eschatological beliefs from the Quran. In chapter 1, the editors Sebastian Günther and Todd Lawson highlight essential concepts, survey the relevant modern research, and provide short summaries of all the contributions. The editors frame the two volumes broadly in terms of eschatology, that is, matters of death, judgement, heaven, hell, signs of the end of the world, and this-worldly apocalyptic and messianic movements. However, almost all of the contributions take their cue from the project title “Roads to Paradise” and focus on something related to Islamic heaven. Important exceptions are Feras Hamza's analysis of temporary hellfire (chapter 16), and Niall Christie's “Paradise and Hell in the Kitāb al-Jihād of ʿAlī b. Ṭāhir al-Sulamī (d. 500/1106)” (chapter 17). Hamza notes that the Quran does not bear explicit witness to a purgatorial hellfire leading to the eventual salvation of all professing Muslims. This doctrine is rather the result of a proto-Sunni ecumenical drive to neutralize sectarian conflict within the Muslim community. Christie explains how al-Sulamī uses both depictions of the punishment of hell and the reward of heaven to motivate jihād against the Crusader invaders of the Levant.
The bulk of this publication – chapters 4–57 – is divided thematically into eleven parts. The studies in Part 1 analyse the Quran, while Part 2 zeros in on “The pleasures of paradise”, largely from the Quran and the Quranic commentary tradition. Part 3 examines “The afterlife in Sunni tradition and theology”. Parts 4 and 5 discuss philosophical views on eschatology and different kinds of vision in the hereafter, respectively. Part 6, the last in the first volume, looks at Shii, Ahl-i Ḥaqq, and Ḥurūf ī views on eschatology. These last three parts taken together highlight the great variety of eschatological visions found within the Islamic tradition. Part 7, the first in the second volume, extends even beyond Islam by including not one but two articles by Martin Tamcke on eastern Christianity. The delightful studies in Part 8 look at Islamic eschatological themes in literary works, including Dante's Divine Comedy. Part 9 examines representations of the hereafter in architecture and art – the colour pictures in this section greatly enhance the presentation – while Part 10 touches on issues relating to Western scholarship and the natural sciences (more on this below). The eleventh and final part looks at how the Islamic Paradise has fared in the modern world.
A review of this length unfortunately cannot aspire to give proper recognition to each study in these two volumes. It must suffice to note that the editors' thematic organization contains within it considerable methodological and topical diversity. Methodological plurality is nowhere more evident than in the six chapters of Part 1 on the Quran. Two of the studies seek to tone down more extreme readings of the Quran through closer attention to the text itself and the Islamic interpretive tradition: Muhammad Abdel Haleem argues that the Quranic Paradise is not as sensuous as English-language translators have often made it out to be, while Asma Afsaruddin shows that being “slain in the path of God” (e.g. Q. 2: 154) does not refer to military martyrdom unequivocally. Three further chapters take a different tack by contextualizing the Quran within prior literary traditions: Angelika Neuwirth shows Surat al-Rāḥmān (Q. 54) to be a reworking of Psalm 136; Todd Lawson considers what it means for the Quran to be an apocalypse; and Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila examines nature imagery in pre-Islamic poetry and Quranic visions of Paradise. A still different approach is found in the sixth study by Sebastian Günther which focuses on the elaboration of Quranic eschatological imagery in the ḥadīth collection of al-Bukhārī, the Sīra of Ibn Hishām, and al-Ghazālī’s Al-Durra al-fākhira.
As for evident topical diversity, Part 10 “Heavens and the hereafter in scholarship and natural sciences” contains three articles that do not easily fit together and do not fit anywhere else either. Here, Ingrid Hehmeyer examines the ancient backgrounds to astronomy in the Islamic world; Ludmila Hanisch explains that nineteenth-century German orientalists were not much interested in Islamic eschatology; and Anver Emon draws attention to the role that the hereafter plays in Muslim legal reasoning and illustrates it through a fascinating study of Muslim attitudes towards dogs.
There is also the occasional chapter that one hopes gave the editors pause. A prime example is Wilferd Madelung's “Al-Ghazālī on resurrection and the road to paradise” (chapter 18), a mere six pages and three footnotes. Madelung assumes that the book al-Maḍnūn bihi is authentically Ghazālian without justification (but probably on the basis of Afifi al-Akiti's recent research cited in a footnote), and he provides a brief summary of the text's Avicennan metaphorical interpretations of various eschatological terms. While Madelung tantalizes, he does not sufficiently substantiate and explain, and it appears that we must wait for the publication of al-Akiti's research to get the full account.
Overall, these two volumes on Paradise in Islam provide an incredibly rich panoply of studies. The research presented is almost always cutting edge, and the editors are to be thanked for pulling together a stimulating publication that will stand as a landmark in the study of Islamic eschatology for some time to come.
