The relationship between violence in this world and the next world in the Islamic tradition can be conceptualized from a number of analytical angles. One might ask, for example, to what extent Muslim thinkers have considered punishment in this world to atone for sins and thus forestall punishment in the hereafter. Opinions on the matter differed considerably. While some jurists believed that the discretionary punishment of the judge (taczlr) served as an expiatory act (kaffāra) for the punished individual, some Ḥanafī scholars were of the opinion that not even the divinely ordained punishments (ḥudūd) could expiate sins.

Here, however, a different approach to the topic is taken. The emphasis is not on theological or legal discussions of the sequence of this-worldy and other-worldy violence but rather, on their structural similarities, viz., their synchronic relationship. Broadly stated, the basic hypothesis pursued in the following pages is this: representations of violence in the Islamic eschatological imagination mirror the structural processes and symbolic imagery of state violence as it was enacted in the socio-political context in which these representations were circulated and given a literary form. As will be argued, hell was often conceived not as a part of the ‘next’ world at all; rather, it was seen as an imaginary ‘other’ world which was coterminous, in spatial, temporal and conceptual terms, with this world. In Western secondary literature, the Muslim hell has often been described as the mirror image of paradise. Here, in contrast, hell will be regarded as an imaginary reflection of life on earth.