Is hell eternal in Islam?

Few questions weigh on the heart like this one. Is hell eternal in Islam? The answer that best fits the Quran and the mercy of Allah is that the fire is real and serious, and that it is not everlasting torment. The Quran ties its duration to Allah’s will, the Prophet ﷺ described Allah drawing people out of it by the handful, and some of the greatest scholars of the tradition argued that the fire itself will one day pass away.

What does the Quran say about how long hell lasts?

The Quran describes the people of the fire as abiding there (khālidīn, خالدين), and then, in two places, it adds a striking exception. Sūrat Hūd says:

خَٰلِدِينَ فِيهَا مَا دَامَتِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتُ وَٱلۡأَرۡضُ إِلَّا مَا شَآءَ رَبُّكَۚ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ فَعَّالٞ لِّمَا يُرِيدُ

“They will remain there as long as the heavens and the earth endure, except as your Lord wills. Your Lord does whatever He wills.”

Quran 11:107

The same exception, “except as Allah wills,” closes the verse about the fire in Sūrat al-Anʿām (Quran 6:128). Readers have long noticed a difference within Sūrat Hūd itself. The verse about Paradise that follows also contains the exception, and then ends “a gift that will never be cut off” (11:108). The verse about the fire ends instead with Allah’s freedom to do as He wills.

Sūrat al-Nabaʾ describes the wrongdoers in the fire with a word of measured time:

لَّـٰبِثِينَ فِيهَآ أَحۡقَابٗا

“They will remain in it for long ages.”

Quran 78:23

An aḥqāb (أحقاب) is a span of ages: very long, and countable.

Did any classical scholars say hell will end?

Yes, and they include names that strict modern movements claim as their own. A saying attributed to the caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (may Allah be pleased with him), preserved in an early Quran commentary, holds that even if the people of the fire stayed in it as long as the grains of sand in the desert of ʿĀlij, they would still have a day on which they come out.

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) devoted a treatise, al-Radd ʿalā man qāla bi-fanāʾ al-janna wa-l-nār, to the question. He defended the eternity of Paradise and argued that the fire will pass away, because Allah’s mercy is overwhelming and every punishment He sends serves a wise purpose. He read the “long ages” of 78:23 as ages that end. His student Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350) set out the same arguments at length in Ḥādī al-Arwāḥ and again in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl, describing the fire as a treatment for souls, and closed by entrusting the matter to the verse “Your Lord does whatever He wills.”

Most Sunni and Shia theologians held the other view, that the fire is everlasting for those who reject faith, and many Muslims hold it today. It is a respected opinion. The view that the fire ends is the one that best fits the Quran’s exceptions and the overwhelming mercy described in the Sunnah.

What did Ibn ʿArabi say about the people of the fire?

The Andalusian master Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240) went further still. In the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam and al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya he observed that the Arabic word for punishment, ʿadhāb (عذاب), shares its root with ʿudhūba (عذوبة), sweetness. He taught that for those who remain in the fire, its punishment will turn into a state that suits them and becomes sweet, so that Allah’s mercy reaches even there. For Ibn ʿArabi, mercy is the first and last word of creation.

What do the hadith say about mercy on the Day of Judgment?

The Prophet ﷺ taught that the mercy we see in this world is a single share of Allah’s mercy:

«إِنَّ اللَّهَ خَلَقَ الرَّحْمَةَ يَوْمَ خَلَقَهَا مِائَةَ رَحْمَةٍ، فَأَمْسَكَ عِنْدَهُ تِسْعًا وَتِسْعِينَ رَحْمَةً، وَأَرْسَلَ فِي خَلْقِهِ كُلِّهِمْ رَحْمَةً وَاحِدَةً، فَلَوْ يَعْلَمُ الْكَافِرُ بِكُلِّ الَّذِي عِنْدَ اللَّهِ مِنَ الرَّحْمَةِ لَمْ يَيْأَسْ مِنَ الْجَنَّةِ»

“On the day Allah created mercy, He made it a hundred parts. He kept ninety-nine with Himself and sent one part among all His creatures. If the unbeliever knew all the mercy that is with Allah, he would never despair of Paradise.”

Sahih al-Bukhari 6469

In Sahih Muslim the Prophet ﷺ adds that Allah has kept back those ninety-nine parts to show mercy to His servants on the Day of Resurrection (Sahih Muslim 2752c).

In the long hadith of intercession, after the angels, the prophets and the believers have interceded, Allah says that none remains but the Most Merciful of the merciful:

«فَيَقْبِضُ قَبْضَةً مِنَ النَّارِ فَيُخْرِجُ مِنْهَا قَوْمًا لَمْ يَعْمَلُوا خَيْرًا قَطُّ»

“Then He takes a handful from the fire and brings out of it people who never did any good at all.”

Sahih Muslim 183a

They are cast into the River of Life at the gate of Paradise, the hadith continues, and they spring up like a seed in the silt of a flood. The Prophet ﷺ also described the last man to leave the fire, who crawls out and is told to enter Paradise with ten times the world for his own. When the man asked whether Allah was laughing at him, the Prophet ﷺ himself laughed (Sahih al-Bukhari 6571).

Is hell a place of purification?

Many Muslims, classical and modern, read the fire as a picture of the soul’s purification, like gold in the smith’s furnace. The poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, called hell “a corrective experience which may make a hardened ego once more sensitive to the living breeze of Divine Grace.”

This reading keeps the full seriousness of sin. The fire is also Allah’s justice for the wronged: the tyrant, the abuser and the thief will answer for every harm, and no victim’s tears are forgotten. Justice and mercy belong together, and Allah’s mercy is the greater (see Does Allah forgive all sins?). Believers who sin are not left in the fire forever, as explained in Will Muslims go to hell for their sins?, and the fate of people of other faiths is treated in Do non-Muslims go to hell?.

Living between fear and hope

The scholars taught that a believer walks between fear (khawf) and hope (rajāʾ), like a bird with two wings. Fear keeps us awake to the harm we do; hope keeps us turning back to the One who is waiting for us. Let the fire move you to repair what you have broken, and let the mercy of Allah, which “embraces all things” (Quran 7:156), be the last thought in your heart each night. For more on the life to come, see What happens after death in Islam?.