Understanding Hell as Mercy: Reading Ibn Arabi on some Problems of Afterlife

The deeper or comprehensive meaning of Quranic descriptions about hell as mawla – friend (Q. 57:15) – and umm – mother (Q. 101:9), as something for which we ought to be thankful in the chapter Rehman, and use of such words as azab derived from the root word azb meaning sweet thing haven’t been given due attention by mainstream Muslim scholarship. The distinction of Ibn Arabi lies in providing an alternative understanding of hell that finds deep resonance in our hearts and minds besides opening up new vistas on various verses of the Quran. Ibn Arabi declared that his life-long mission is to broadcast the Mercy centric message of Islam – he deciphered the universe’s relationship to the Breath of the All-Merciful  and need to appreciate the dimension of beauty or aesthetic point of view – so that no servant ever despairs. Let us read how he applies his ontology of mercy to non-believers and hell in light of a few statements and works of William Chittick and Muhammad Khalil.

    Ibn Arabi states, “If God were to take people to account for error, He would take every possessor of a belief to account. Every believer has delimited his Lord with his reason and consideration and has thereby restricted Him. But nothing is worthy of God except nondelimitation.” Quoting the verse “We do not punish until We send a Messenger” (Q. 17:15), Ibn Arabi adds that “Note that He did not say, ‘until We send forth a person.’ Hence the Message of the one who is sent must be established for the one to whom it is directed. There must be clear and manifest proofs established for each person to whom the Messenger is sent, for many a sign [āyah] has within it obscurity or equivocality such that some people do not perceive what it proves. The clarity of the proof must be such that it establishes the person’s Messengerhood for each person to whom he is sent. Only then, if the person refuses it, will he be taken to account. Hence, this verse has within it a tremendous mercy, because of the diversity of human dispositions that lead to a diversity of views.”  Further, Ibn Arabi cites Q. 17:15, which speaks of God only punishing those who have received a Messenger – which, "in light of the Arabic phrasing, many have argued to be a reference to punishment in this life,” and Q. 7:156, which speaks of God’s mercy encompassing all things. For Ibn Arabi the ‘People of Hellfire’ will suffer, “until they finally recognize that they are servants of God.  And the chastisement of the ‘wretched’ results only from themselves as they protest and inquire about the reasons for God’s actions. Eventually, however, their ‘wretchedness’ (shaqā’) will cease because they will end their discord (shiqāq) and deviation from God.”

    Given that God is just, Hell’s inhabitants “will come to appreciate their situation because it is God Himself who determined where they would reside. In the final analysis, what comes to matter is not in which abode one resides, but rather, as Ibn Arabi puts it “what is accepted by the constitution and desired by the soul. [Thus, wherever] agreeableness of nature and attainment of desire are found, that is the person’s bliss.” For Ibn Arabi, in Chittick’s paraphrase, “God keeps the bitter cold of Gehenna [Jahannam] for those with hot constitutions and the fire for those with cold constitutions. They enjoy themselves in Gehenna. If they were to enter the Garden with the constitutions that they have, they would suffer chastisement, because of the Garden’s equilibrium.” For him “the transformation from ‘chastisement’ to ‘sweetness’ will begin to occur when the ‘wretched’ resign themselves to their fate, and surrender any hope of leaving Hell. At that point, the fire will become cool (as it was cooled for Abraham), and they will become happy. After this first bliss, their pains will vanish, and they will begin to find their perpetual chastisement to be sweet and pleasant.” Ibn Arabī states that the ‘People of Hellfire’ will not die since they will “find relief through the removal of pain,” and they will not live since they will not enjoy the same bliss enjoyed by the ‘People of Heaven’ – “a bliss that would be something in addition to the fact that He has relieved them in the abode of wretchedness.” Thus, Ibn Arabī interprets the Qur’anic statement “each party [of idolaters] rejoicing in what is theirs” (30:32) as referring to the next life. This is because such rejoicing is “not known in this life, or rather, it occurs for many but not all.”

    Citing and paraphrasing The Meccan Revelations, Chittick notes that “a soul’s wretchedness derives from its refusal to submit to God’s wisdom and to accept its own nature. People suffer the fire of hell because they do not trust God and insist that the world needs to be changed to accord with their own personal desires. The wretched have chastisement only from themselves, for they are made to stand in the station of protest. They seek the reasons for God’s acts among His servants.” “Why did such and such happen?” “If such and such had been, it would have been better and more appropriate.” Explicating the Master, Chittick elaborates:

By protesting against the way things are, people dispute with the Real, who has given everything its creation. Eventually, however,their state changes and they come to realize that there is no profit in questioning God and refusing to submit to their own nature. Then the chastisement is removed from their inwardness and they achieve ease in their abode.They find an enjoyment known by none but God, for they have chosen what God has chosen for them, and at that point they come to know that their chastisement had been only from themselves.

When the denizens of hell accept their own natures, they realize that they will never leave the Fire. This makes them secure in their places, for they no longer wonder if they will be among those who, according to a hadith, had done no good whatsoever in the world but would be taken out of hell by the Most Merciful.

When they give up the thought of leaving, they become happy, so they enjoy bliss in this measure. This is the first bliss they find...Thereby they find that the chastisement is sweet, for the pains disappear, even though the chastisement remains.

    When we note purgatorial function of hell – most/all its denizens become entitled to heaven/bliss after some stay – and how it is a manifestation of Divine Names of Majesty and how it is a painful realization of one’s failure to be true to oneself or divine image in man and how its nature gets changed or its chastisement turns sweet (the root word ‘azb’ for azab means sweet/tasty thing) or how it continues, at every moment, to be penetrable to divine mercy that keeps its denizens alive and enjoying certain concomitant things – analogous to relief from itching by scratching clot, as noted by al-Jili – and in heightened state of awareness removing the veil or imposed imagined separation from the Beloved, we see it is not disassociated from all pervading Divine Mercy.

    Final words of Ibn Arabi regarding those who are not comfortable with God’s vast mercy:

[When you reach this understanding] you will come to know the difference between him who desires the spreading of God’s mercy among His servants – whether they be obedient or disobedient – and him who desires to take God’s mercy away from some of His servants. This second person is the one who prohibits the mercy of God that embraces all things, but he does not prohibit it to himself. Were it not for the fact that God’s mercy takes precedence over His wrath, the possessor of this attribute would never attain to God’s mercy.