Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and the Political Functions of Punishment in the Islamic Hell

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 723/1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) argued in favour of the eventual annihilation of hell. Numerous recent studies have drawn attention to the alleged similarity between this particular aspect of late Ḥanbalī thought and the optimistic eschatology of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). The fact is all the more intriguing because the two Ḥanbalī theologians are well-known for their criticism of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrines, and Ibn Taymiyya rejected Ibn ʿArabī’s views of hell. In this paper, I focus on the concept of punishment that lies at the root of Ibn ʿArabī’s theory, in order to compare the two theories further. In contrast to Ibn Qayyim, Ibn Arabi finds a legal model for eschatological punishment in retaliation (qisas), rather than in hudud. Retaliation is remissible because it belongs to private law, and the Qur’an itself recommends the renouncement to the exacting of vengeance. Hudud, on the contrary, are inescapable, because they belong to public law, namely, to the “rights of God”. Adopting qisas as a model for otherworldly punishment, Ibn ‘Arabi not only opens the way to pardon as the prevailing principle in the afterlife, but also explicitly stresses the discontinuity between worldly and otherworldly justice.