Fanā’ al-Nār Within Early Kalām and Mysticism

The annihilation of the fire (fanā’ al-nār), is an expression used by Ibn Taymiyya in Al-Radd ‘alā man Qāla bi-Fanā’ al-Janna wa-l-Nār.  It acts as a rejoinder to those who maintain that the annihilation of the Garden and the Fire within Islamic theology is a fascinating theory that could quite easily be confused with the Christian Patristic apokatastasis  or the falsafa  cosmological hypothesis, which emerged in the works of al-Kindī (d. 873) and Fakhr ad-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209). Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, in The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (New York: OUP, 2012), supported the argument that the nature of Heaven and Hell has been subjected to a range of interpretations stretching from the purely literal to the utterly allegorical. Hell is a place of just chastisement for sin, an everlasting location for sinning believers; whether or not any punishment there would be truly eternal, has been the subject of considerable dispute. My objective in this article is not to focus on al-Ghazālī or Ibn al-Taymiyya, but on those scholars who, at an earlier stage, had elaborated a rational speculation on the fanā’ al-nār. At the same time, this article does not set out to provide a comparative analysis linked with the late Patristic authors or Manichean and Zoroastrian influences which, conversely, appear as possible theories. The main goal is to uncover the backgrounds of the authors in Islamic kalām and mysticism who, preceding the Ghazalian phase, were engaged in elaborating the annihilation of the fire. Al-Baghdādī (‘Abd al-Qāhir b. Ṭāhir, d. 1037) in Al-Farq bayna al-Firaq, argues that the Mu‘tazilite Abū al-Hudhayl al-‘Allāf (d. 850), probably influenced by Ḍirār ibn ‘Amr (d. unknown) and Jahm Ibn Safwān (d. 746), were the first to theorise on the finiteness of both Heaven and Hell. However, it  is plausible that different early Muslim mystics from the same century also supported the annihilation of at least the latter. All options remain open to debate.