The Last Day: The Grave, the Scale and the Abode

“There is no punishment in the grave; the Qurʾān does not mention it”

The response

First, the Qurʾān. The verse of Ghāfir above states that the people of Pharaoh are exposed to the Fire morning and evening before the Hour, and Allah said of the people of Nūḥ: “They were drowned and admitted to a Fire”, with the particle fa, which joins without delay. Allah said: “We will punish them twice, then they will be returned to a great punishment”, and the great punishment is the Hereafter, so one of the two is before it.

Secondly, the Sunnah. The reports of the grave are not from single narrators. The Prophet ﷺ sought refuge from the punishment of the grave in every prayer and commanded it, and it was reported by ʿĀʾishah, Anas, Ibn ʿAbbās, Abū Hurayrah, al-Barāʾ, Zayd ibn Thābit and others, in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and beyond, so that the imams counted them mass-transmitted in meaning.

Thirdly, “we do not see it”. The punishment is of the soul and the body together in a world that the living do not perceive, just as a sleeper is punished in his dream while the one sitting beside him sees nothing. A man’s failure to perceive a thing is not knowledge that it does not exist. The one who believes in the angels and the jinn, whom he does not see, has no ground to deny this.

“The Scale is a figure for justice”

The response

The verse says “We place the scales”, in the plural, and “if there is even the weight of a mustard seed, We will bring it forth”. A figure for justice is not placed, is not plural, and does not weigh a mustard seed. The Prophet ﷺ said that two words are heavy on the Scale, “Glorified is Allah and by His praise, glorified is Allah the Great”, and that the card with “there is no god but Allah” outweighs ninety-nine scrolls.

As for “deeds are accidents”, Allah is able to give them bodies and to weigh them, and He is able to weigh the records in which they are written and the doers themselves, and the Sunnah mentions all three. The objection is the old one: the Muʿtazilī measures what Allah can do by what he can picture.

“Paradise and the Fire will come to an end”

The response

Jahm said it because of his premise that events without end are impossible, the same premise from which he denied that Allah acts. The imams declared his saying disbelief, and al-Ṭaḥāwī wrote in his creed that Paradise and the Fire are created, never perish and never end. Allah said “forever” of both, and the slaughter of death settles it.

The Muslim holds to what the texts say of the disbelievers: “abiding therein forever”. As for what is attributed to Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim on the ending of the Fire, their own words are given in the next section.

“Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim held that the Fire will come to an end”

The response

Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah (raḥimahullāh) reported the agreement of the Salaf on the eternity of Paradise and the Fire in plain words, and he named the one who opposed it.

He said, in Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā:

As for Ibn al-Qayyim (raḥimahullāh), he set out the arguments of those who held that the punishment of the Fire ends in Ḥādī al-Arwāḥ and in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl, reporting the reports attributed to some of the Companions and answering some of them. But in al-Wābil al-Ṣayyib he stated the matter without ambiguity: the abode of the purely wicked does not perish, and the abode that perishes is the abode of the sinful monotheists, who are taken out of the Fire after being punished.

Ibn al-Qayyim said in al-Wābil al-Ṣayyib:

Hence, the saying of Ahl al-Sunnah is that both abodes remain and never perish, and this is the statement of Ibn Taymiyyah in the passage above and of Ibn al-Qayyim in al-Wābil. Whatever is reported from either of them in discussing the arguments of the other view does not change the creed of the Salaf, for the creed is taken from the Book and the Sunnah and the consensus, and not from the discussion of a scholar. Allah said of the disbelievers: “Abiding therein forever” in three places of His Book (al-Nisāʾ 169, al-Aḥzāb 65, al-Jinn 23), and the Prophet ﷺ informed that death will be brought in the form of a ram and slaughtered between Paradise and the Fire, and it will be said: O people of Paradise, eternity without death, and O people of the Fire, eternity without death.

And the comparison with Jahm fails in any case. Jahm said that Paradise and the Fire both perish, and with them all created things, because he held that events without end are impossible. That premise is what the imams declared disbelief, for it denies the eternity of the bliss that Allah promised His servants and denies that Allah continues to act. Ibn Taymiyyah himself named Jahm in the passage above as the one who opposed the consensus. So whoever cites Ibn Taymiyyah in defence of Jahm has cited the man who refuted Jahm on this very question.