Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions.

• Author: Riddell, Peter G.
• Position: Book review

Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions. By CHRISTIAN LANGE. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. Pp. xvii + 365. $84.99, [pounds sterling]54.99 (cloth); $29.99, [pounds sterling]18.99 (paper); $24 (ebook)

Christian Lange divides his book--winner of the 2016 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize-into two almost equal parts. In the first part he examines the textual foundations of Islamic eschatological thinking, while in the second part he moves the attention from textual foundations to the lived reality of Muslim engagement with eschatological and apocalyptic thinking, with particular reference to the twin themes of paradise and hell.

In part one, the first text to be examined for references to paradise and hell is the Quran. Lange points out (p. 37) that "[rjoughly a tenth of the Qur'an, perhaps more, deals with matters eschatological." He provides precise statistics about the frequency of use of the terms for this world (dunya) and the otherworld (akhira), making much of this binary divide, which is helpfully presented in two charts. He then reflects on the balance within the Quran between paradise and hell, concluding (p. 46) that "the Qur'anic landscape of hell is more developed and detailed than that of paradise."

Lange considers the matter of Quranic chronology and observes with circumspection (p. 48) that "whether the actual chronological sequence of suras and verses can be reconstructed, is a matter of controversy among scholars." Notwithstanding that reservation, he proceeds to draw a series of fascinating observations about the developing understanding of the themes of paradise and hell that emerge from a reading of the Quran according to the Noldeke chronology.

While the decision to begin the discussion of textual foundations with the Quran is understandable, in many ways it represents merely a prolegomenon to the study of eschatological themes in Islamic literature. As Lange observes (p. 71), "as rich as the Qur'an is in eschatological ideas and images, it only provides the skeleton for the variegated body of texts that form the Islamic tradition of imagining paradise and hell." And just as the Quran pictures paradise and hell in intimately concrete and worldly terms, this is even more the case in the tradition materials. The author proceeds to examine the rich eschatological material in the literature on Islamic tradition writing, from the early formative period, including but not limited to the six core Sunni...