How many hells?

I've been meaning to do this, but Rosalind B has beaten me to it. Her email is the last one, just before the comments.

She asks why many commenters are disturbed by the constant hellfire, and to make her point she crunches some numbers. She counts all the verses which mention Hell, and all the verses which mention fire. Then, with admirable logic, she subtracts all the verses which mention both, and all the verses which mention fire but not in the context of burning people. This gives her a total of 238 references to hellfire - rather more than the 170 uses of the word fire I identified in my first casual search.

She then searches for references to Heaven and/or Paradise by the same method (I assume), and comes up with 250. This means about 4% of the Qur'an is devoted to hellfire, and perhaps a fraction more to Paradise. A total of between 8% and 9% to punishment and reward.

I can see an arithmetical problem with her method. Some of the hellfire passages run over several verses, and not all verses have the words hell or fire in them. For instance, 7:44-7:51 has eight verses which are all about punishment, in which the word fire appears three times only, and the word hell not at all.

Still, at least someone from the opposing camp, if not the author of the blog, has engaged with the seamier side of the Qur'an. I have to say I'm surprised by her conclusions, though.

Therefore the conclusion I draw is that the Qur'an seems to give at least equivalent consideration to punishment and reward. And these themes seem not to even occupy ten per cent of the total themes covered in the Quran. I am none the wiser as to why so many people have found it so threatening. Even a horror movie would leave a good feeling when the end is happy, the Qur'an seems to fail to do that for some mysterious reason.

Let's start with the reference to horror films. The main difference between horror films and the Qur'an is that everyone realises horror films are made up. The whole point of Qur'anic video nasties is that they're meant to describe actual forthcoming events. Sardar waves the word metaphor at them without explaining how that mitigates their horror or what they could possibly be a metaphor for, but no-one suggests they're a kind of medieval Day of the Dead.

That isn't half as strange as her other argument, though, which is that the threat of hellfire is mitigated by being limited to only 4% of the book. I don't know about you, but I manage to get through most days without going around threatening to put people on a bonfire anything like 4% of the time. Even the Old Testament isn't as gruesome as this.

In fact, in the Christian tradition hellfire derives from verses ascribed directly to Jesus, and occupies a comparatively small percentage of the text. When it is used it's gruesome, but that's hardly surprising, given that he's threatening to burn people on a big fire. Old Testament punishments are inflicted in this life rather than the next one.

Well, they do say the Qur'an is based on the work of the prophets, and old Mohammed certainly picked up on Jesus' eschatological Bonfire Nights.

So just to spell it out, Rosalind, the problem I have with the text is that it tells me that I'm going to burn in hell about once a page. I'm not immediately seeing why that should seem mysterious. As you may have noticed in your research, the majority of the threats are explicitly aimed at unbelievers, and that's me. Sometimes they are just passing references, sometimes they are joyous paeans to the glorious nature of my future agony.

The one thing I cannot comprehend is that, having promoted a book which does this, Sardar then feels able to accuse us of being rude. If I ever tell him it would be a wonderful thing and a sign of the mercy and wisdom of God if he was burnt in a fire until all his skin came off, then the skin was magically regrown so he could continue to taste the chastisement, then he might have some kind of complaint.

But such is not my way. In my modest way, in my own little corner of the Internet, I stand with the Oscar Wildes and the Jonathan Swifts against the Mohammeds and the Jesuses. Compared with them I have much to be modest about, but I can still find a bon mot or two for the tyrants of hellfire.