Islam began in Arabia and was revealed to humanity by the Prophet Muhammad. Immune to special pleading, God, in his mercy, reserves the power to save those whom he wills and to look favourably upon those for whom the Prophet Muhammad intercedes. It contradicts the New Testament in that it says Jesus was the forerunner to the Messiah who proclaimed the future coming of Muhammad. The early Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula were predominantly nomadic pastoralists who herded their sheep, goats, and camels through the harsh desert environment. While urban Arabs tend to identify themselves more by nationality than by tribe, village farmers venerate the pastoral nomad’s way of life and claim kinship ties with the great desert tribes of the past and present. Even medium-sized towns (20,000 persons or more) with an established southern enclave had local churches, especially in the middle belt, where both major religions had a strong foothold. The major Islamic schools agree that it is essential to one’s identity as a Muslim to believe in and look forward to the day-or, more pointedly, the hour-when God will bring his creation to an end, raise the dead, reunite them with their souls, judge them one by one, and commit each individual, as he deserves, to the joys of the garden (paradise) or the terrors of the fire (hell).

According to Islamic thought, the existence of hell (Jahannam) bears witness to God’s sovereignty, justice, and mercy and also stands as a warning to individuals and nations of the definitive choice to be made between fidelity and infidelity, righteousness and iniquity, and life and death. The Qurʾān has little to say about the interval (barzakh) between death and resurrection, but later Islamic literature makes the deathbed and the grave the setting of a preliminary judgment. Although all these realms are deemed ultimately illusory, the suffering of hell beings and hungry ghosts (who are tortured by unceasing hunger and thirst) is excruciating, and its vivid depiction in Buddhist literature and art heightens the sense of urgency to perform good deeds, to transfer the merit thus gained to those in need, and to take refuge in the protection of buddhas and bodhisattvas (those who vow to become a buddha and dedicate themselves to helping others achieve enlightenment). In the devotional forms of Hinduism that began to flower in the 12th and 13th centuries and continue to predominate today, the wish to avoid rebirth in hell is a powerful incentive to offer worship and perform selfless acts.

The goal of Hindu practice is to be freed from all forms of birth and to be restored to a state of perfect consciousness and imperishable bliss in communion with the divine. Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. The pastoral desert nomad, the traditional ideal of Arab culture, makes up barely 5 percent of the modern Arab population. In modern usage, it embraces any of the Arabic-speaking peoples living in the vast region from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to southwestern Iran, including the entire Maghrib of North Africa, Egypt and Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Syria and Iraq. Settled Arabs practiced date and cereal agriculture in the oases, which also served as trade centres for the caravans transporting the spices, ivory, and gold of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa to the civilizations farther north. Arabic, the language of the Islamic sacred scripture (the Qurʾān), was adopted throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the rapidly established supremacy of Islam in those regions.

The distinction between the desert nomads, on the one hand, and town dwellers and agriculturists, on the other, still pervades much of the Arab world. Islam, which developed in the west-central Arabian Peninsula in the early 7th century ce, was the religious force that united the desert subsistence nomads-the Bedouins-with the town dwellers of the oases. Muslim religious scholars (ulama) never enjoyed the kind of centralized and institutionalized authority that the medieval European church and its elders did. In 2022, the country was scored 3 out of 4 for religious freedom. Those who die unprepared must be reborn (samsara) to live out the consequences of their past deeds (karma). He created hell, with its seven ordered gates, for a deep purpose but has fixed a limit to the suffering of believers who have sinned. In China the confluence of Buddhist, Daoist, and folk traditions produced an elaborate ceremonial system for relieving the suffering of hungry ghosts and hell beings and exorcising their negative influence on the living. Esoteric rites for opening the gates of hell and feeding the hungry ghosts and hell beings extend this filial compassion from the family to the whole population of suffering beings. Grave sins incur a miserable rebirth in hell or an interval in hell en route to rebirth on a low plane of existence.