The Fire, and Its Gates of Degree

Jahannam is the Islamic hell, and the Quran describes it with a vivid and concrete vocabulary of punishment: a blazing Fire, boiling water (hamim), scalding wind, chains and shackles, garments of fire, and the tree of Zaqqum whose fruit, sprouting like devils' heads, is the food of the damned and burns in their bellies. It is described as having gates, traditionally seven, and the tradition understands these as levels or degrees, so that the severity of the punishment corresponds to the gravity of the wrongdoing, an architecture of graded penalty mirroring the graded rewards of the garden. Yet Islamic theology has long debated the crucial question of duration.

While the unbelievers are described as remaining in the Fire, a strong strand of tradition holds that Muslim sinners who enter Jahannam will eventually be brought out through God's mercy and the Prophet's intercession, once their sins are purged, and some scholars have argued (controversially) that the Fire itself may not be strictly eternal. Jahannam functions in Islamic ethics as the counterweight to Jannah: the whole moral urgency of the Quran's preaching turns on the choice between the two, held constantly before the believer as the real and lasting consequence of how a life is lived.