Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions

Brill's Islamic History and Civilization

by Christian Lange (Editor)

Islam is often seen as a religious tradition in which hell does not play a particularly prominent role. This volume challenges this hackneyed view. Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions is the first book-length analytic study of the Muslim hell. It maps out a broad spectrum of Islamic attitudes toward hell, from the Quranic vision(s) of hell to the pious cultivation of the fear of the afterlife, theological speculations, metaphorical and psychological understandings, and the modern transformations of hell. Contributors: Frederick Colby, Daniel de Smet, Christiane Gruber, Jon Hoover, Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Christian Lange, Christopher Melchert, Simon O Meara, Samuela Pagani, Tommaso Tesei, Roberto Tottoli, Wim Raven, and Richard van Leeuwen."

Genres: Islam

384 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2015

About the author

Christian Lange (PhD Harvard, 2006) holds the Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Utrecht. His research is on Islamic intellectual and cultural history, particularly in the areas of Islamic eschatology, Islamic law and legal theory, and Islamic mysticism. From 2011-2015, he was the principal investigator of an ERC Starting Grant project, The here and the hereafter in Islamic traditions (HHIT). From 2017-2021, he is the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant project, The senses of Islam (SENSIS).

Reviews

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Christian Lange's Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination, so it's not a big surprise that this volume that he edited on Islamic conceptions of Hell was entertaining. This book covers a lot of ground both temporally and thematically, with the sustained exploration of Islamic universalism striking me as especially interesting. There were a few relative duds, but overall the quality of the articles were very good. And perhaps most importantly, it's FREE through Brill's open access program, so there's no good reason not to give it a try.

[Jimmy Ele · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read up until chapter 4, because I kept picking up on a disturbing trend from the various authors to make it seem as if the Quran stole from the Christian tradition. The book's authors do not seem to even want to entertain the idea that perhaps some of the ideas are the same because Jesus (P.B.U.H.) is a prophet that was sent from the same God that sent Muhammad (P.B.U.H.).

Also, one of the authors accuses the Quran with the "infernalization" of the Jinn. Even though, it is well known from Surah 72 titled Al- Jinn, in the Quran that the Jinn are communities like human beings with the same free will to choose whether they are going to be righteous, or be less righteous.

I don't recommend this book for the aforementioned reasons. I prefer non-biased research into these topics, and not research that seems to be biased towards a certain religion or perspective. I also prefer research that does not accuse a religion with made up theories of infernalization that can not even be backed up by the actual text that the authors are purporting the ideas to have come from.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The contributions to this volume explore the transformations, during the period of the Quran's historical composition and across the following centuries, of canonical and popular Islamic conceptions of the place of punishment in the afterlife - including its nature, its function, its duration, its cosmological location, and its inhabitants (those who suffer, as well as those who administer, God's justice) - and the ideological ends, political as well as spiritual, to which media communicating those concepts could be applied. Parallels and potential origins for some of Islamic eschatology's ideas are identified in the theological and ethical literatures of late antiquity's Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and other religious communities, while rhetorical strategies adopted by writers defending views which were marginalized within Islam itself in their particular time and place are also discussed. The specificity of this collection's individual contents will be a boon for topic and area specialists, while assessed as a whole they make possible the inference of a coherent, broad overview of the field.

[Daniel]

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