Having ended the preceding chapter with an examination of the eschatological thought of al-Suhrawardī, we begin the present chapter with the observation that his ideas found a particularly receptive audience in Shiʿism. Shiʿi thinkers, in many instances, developed al-Suhrawardī's concept of a “world of suspended images” and took it to a new level, by consistently framing it in terms of an autonomous, and often spatially defined, “world of image” (ʿālam al-mithāl). Most contemporary scholarship on Shiʿi teachings about the afterlife in fact focuses almost exclusively on the world of image, particularly as it was developed in the thought of the so-called School of Isfahan (fl. eleventh/seventeenth c.) and of the Shaykhi and Babi movements of later centuries. However, one should not underestimate the important strands of traditionist, that is, hadith-based, thinking about the otherworld in Shiʿism. Neither must we fail to pay attention to the eschatological doctrines of Shiʿi dialectic theology (kalām). The first three sections of this chapter, then, survey Shiʿi philosophical, traditionist, and kalām views of the otherworld as they were formulated in Imami (or Twelver Shiʿi) writings. The concluding section is devoted to the philosophical eschatology of Ismaʿilism (or Sevener Shiʿism). The Shiʿi paradise and hell, it should be noted, is a topic so rich that it would deserve a separate book-length investigation. Here, we must restrict ourselves to highlighting some of its salient features. In the process, we shall not only review a number of Shiʿi doctrines on the afterlife, but also sketch the general contours of the history of Shiʿi literature on paradise and hell.

The World of Image in Shiʿi Thought

In the centuries following al-Suhrawardī, the thinkers referring back to him sought to elaborate and conceptually consolidate the “world of suspended images,” the world of image (ʿālam al-mithāl), as they came to call it. In the Shiʿi world, an illustration of this process can be found in the exegesis of the Qurʾānic verse “the people of the garden today are happy in what occupies them” (36:55) by Mullā Ṣadrā of Shīrāz (d. 1050/1640). Ṣadrā infers from this verse that the blessed in paradise determine the pleasures they experience on the strength of their imagination.