The Approaches of Those Who Assert the Everlasting Nature of the Fire Are Four

Those who categorically affirm that the Fire will never cease (1)—I say: those who hold this unwaveringly have, in essence, four lines of argumentation (2):

1. The presumption of consensus. Many people suppose that the matter is unanimously agreed upon, that there is no dissent among the early generations, and that any later disagreement must be the product of innovation.

2. A claim of decisive Qurʼanic proof: the Qurʼan, they say, explicitly informs us in several places that the inhabitants of the Fire will remain therein forever (3).

3. Reliance on the widely transmitted Sunnah, which states that whoever possesses even an atom’s weight of faith will eventually be taken out of the Fire—whereas the disbelievers, they argue, will never be removed (4).

4. The assertion by some that the Messenger himself made this known to us and that the community came to know it thereafter as a self-evident truth, without the need to cite a specific text. Ordinary people say, “We know this only from the narrated reports,” while a small minority has gone so far as to claim that pure reason alone proves the eternal punishment of the disbelievers.

As for the alleged consensus, it is, to begin with, unestablished: in matters such as these one cannot confidently assert an ijmāʿ. One may think there is consensus only until one discovers the existence of dissent—and that dissent, in fact, is of old standing.