The Garden and the Fire: Heaven and Hell in Islamic Culture

By Nerina Rustomji. New York: Columbia University Press, November 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-231-14084-3. $45. 240 pages.

Review by Brooke Sherrard, Florida State University

Nerina Rustomji’s The Garden and the Fire makes a valuable contribution to the field of Islamic studies by identifying, translating, and analyzing traditional Islamic texts’ descriptions of the afterworld. Rustomji contrasts conceptions of heaven and hell, conceived of in the Islamic tradition as a garden and a fire, to Christian conceptions, arguing that Christians have tended to conceive of an afterlife defined by relationships between humans, angels, and the divine, while Muslims have conceived of an afterworld that is above all a material world. Rustomji argues that using a material culture lens to look at Islamic conceptions of the afterworld demonstrates that Muslims’ discussions and writings about the afterworld “culminated in a distinct religious aesthetic that has shaped Islamic culture” (xxii). Muslims, by elaborating on the materials to be found in the garden and the fire, were active shapers of this afterworld.

Rustomji reads a variety of textual productions, including the Qur’an, the hadith, eschatological manuals from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries, and buildings like the Dome of the Rock and the Taj Mahal, which are not only inscribed with texts but which also act as physical foretastes of the garden. The multiplicity of the texts comes through. Some of them described humans enduring punishments in the fire for the smallest of infractions, such as a mustard seed of pride. Others declared that humans would attain the garden if they had in their lifetimes said the shahada—or the Islamic declaration of faith in one God and the prophethood of Muhammad—or if they had just a little goodness, even if it was, repeating a trope, goodness only as small as a mustard seed.

The garden and the fire were discussed often in the Qur’an and early Islamic texts, and were one of the factors that distinguished the new faith from others in the Arabian Peninsula. Rustomji argues that many early believers struggled to accept the idea of a material afterworld because it reconceived of relationships between humans. First, it focused on individualism, in that humans would be judged as individuals. Second, it privileged family units, with whom one would be reunited in the garden, over the tribal ties so critical to pre-Islamic Arabian society. The fire was a place of various types of punishment—such as women guilty of loose behavior being hung by their breasts—but one of the most striking was that humans would be kept in cells in complete isolation.

The materiality of the garden led to criticism from Christians, who interpreted the focus on fine garments, jewels, wine, and honey as proving that Islam was not a spiritual faith. And of course Christian criticism of the Islamic afterworld continues, especially of the idea that Muslim men will enjoy the companionship of virgins—one interpretation of the term “houri,” a large-eyed pure female being—there. Though Rustomji does not elaborate on Western critics, she points out that some contemporary ones even suggest that Muslims who adhere to a sexualized idea of the garden are not “rational and modern” (161). Her tracing of ideas of female companionship in the garden and the ways these ideas have changed is perhaps her most interesting contribution. She does not back away from “the popular understanding of the houri,” which, as she writes, “was (and continues to be) a sexual one” (96). However, she shows that the conception has become more sexualized over time. Earlier texts described the garden as a place populated by servant boys and houris who served reunited families. Over time, the servant boys largely disappeared and the idea of family reunification became marginalized, leaving males and the houris—who increasingly became described with words like “virginal”—in a world “that caters to individual (male) desire” (89). While admiring Rustomji’s unwillingness to join Western critics by explaining away the sexuality of the garden or simply criticizing it, it would have been helpful to read more analysis of what the implications of the increasingly sexualized garden are for Muslims’ gender relations on earth.

The epilogue includes a few contemporary comments, recounting, for example, that Iranian children in the 1980s were given “keys of Paradise” (160) to wear around their necks when they cleaned up landmine fields. The paradise they expected to go to at any moment was one that, even at a young age, they had had ample opportunity to imagine.Rustomji’s clear and accessible text will be of interest to those in Islamic studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, especially those interested in material culture. A portion of it could serve well in undergraduate courses on Islam to evoke the ethos of the Islamic afterworld.