An Answer to the Objection That the Punishment Is Too Harsh

An objection is often raised at this point: is this not a little harsh? All human beings make mistakes — why should God be so severe that a person must burn in Jahannam forever? One answer would be simply that the rule is not of anyone's own making, and leave it there. But Allah (swt), out of infinite mercy, has shown the path to Paradise and has given every person will, irādah, the power to choose, and does not interfere with it. He has given intelligence; He has given a heart, the centre of that intelligence; He has given perception, so that the right choices can be made — and says, in effect: here is My path, sabīlī, and there is the path of whatever is other than Me; the freedom to choose is complete. Whoever chooses His path has eternity in Paradise as the reward for that simple choice. Whoever does not make that choice, deliberately and proactively, has only to wait for eternal punishment.

The objection may still not rest easily. In early Islam, after the Prophet (peace be upon him) passed away, many factions, firaq, arose, and some of these deviant factions began to say that no one, Muslim or disbeliever, could stay in Jahannam forever: after burning for billions of years they would eventually go to Paradise, and Jahannam would become useless. That was their creed, their fundamental belief. It is not the belief of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah, which holds that those condemned to Jahannam forever, on account of the wrong choice they deliberately made, will stay there forever.

A further objection follows: is it not, after all, only a little choice? It is not a little choice; it is a continuous, perpetual choice. Compare it to an ordinary mistake. A man wants to buy a car, likes the red colour, likes the mag wheels, hotted up nicely, and buys it on a split-second, emotional decision; it turns out to be a lemon, and he ends up paying ten times the amount to keep it going. It was silly of him, and he paid for that one small mistake — that happens to everybody. Compare it instead to the punishment fixed in law for murdering someone deliberately — a serial murderer, say, though take one victim first. In certain countries — not Australia — there is capital punishment: a life for a life, a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. In this country the killer is locked up in a cell, with a colour television and a comfortable life, for the term of his natural life. And for what? For killing an innocent person. Yet how long does it take to kill a person with a gun? A decision is made, the little finger clicks, and in less than a second — one split second — a person is dead. For that split second of deliberate choice the killer loses sixty, seventy, eighty years of his own life. Is this fair? According to human beings, it is. But suppose a single button were pressed, and with that one button five billion people were killed: if the one who pressed it were to live five billion years, would people allow him out of jail? Just one button, one time. And suppose the hand were kept on the button, and every living thing that came within reach of the explosion were destroyed — is there a jail in which to lock such a person forever? There is none.

This is the position of one who denies Allah (swt). Whoever denies Allah denies the art of Allah, the creation of Allah (swt), in its whole number — Allah did not create this one, nor that one, not a single atom — and does so constantly, each moment, each second: killing, denying Allah's creation. That is what kufr is. Kufr is a constant, perpetual, continual murder, a covering-up of the truth of Allah (swt). Looked at from this perspective, the crime a disbeliever commits cannot be equalled by anything, which is why no jail in this life could ever encompass it, and why he or she remains in Jahannam forever and forever and forever. Similarly, a person who constantly acknowledges and remembers Allah (swt) — who makes dhikr of the Creator, al-Khāliq, the Maker of such beautiful art and creation across the whole universe, taken together — deserves a reward that is absolutely eternal, and that is Paradise. Allah knows best. Therefore the key of entry into Paradise is none other than lā ilāha illallāh.