By contrast, to forgive the oppressor and let the savage beast roam free would mean showing mercy to the criminal and mercilessness to hun¬dreds of hapless creatures. So too, the unbeliever who enters the prison of Hell has, by virtue of his unbelief, transgressed against the rights of the Divine Names through his denial of them; he has transgressed against the rights of those beings who bear witness to the Names by his rejection of them; he has transgressed against the rights of those creatures who proclaim God's glory by his spurning their duty and function; and he has also transgressed against the rights of the whole cos¬mos, by denying its function of reflecting and mirroring, by way of worship, the manifestation of Divine dominicality, which is the purpose of creation, and the cause of all being and its preser¬vation. All this constitutes so grave a crime and offence that there can be no possibility of forgive¬ness; and the sinner deserves the threat contained in the verse:
God forgives not [the sin] joining other gods with Him.⁴ Not to cast him into Hell-fire would be a mis¬placed act of mercy to him, and multiple and in-finile mercilessness to those countless plaintiffs whose rights have been outraged. Those plaintiffs not only demand the existence of Hell, but also require that it should be most majestic and utterly awesome.
If some arrogant rebel oppresses the people and insults the dignity of a majestic judge by telling him, "You cannot put me in jail or make a prison for me," even if there is not a jail in that city, the judge will have one constructed for that shameless criminal and have him cast into it. So too, the absolute unbeliever insults the supreme majesty of God with his unbelief, challenges His ineffable power with his denial, and offends His perfect dominicality with his transgression. Even if Hell had not been created for various functions and numerous providential purposes, İt would become incumbent on God's dignity and majesty to create Hell for such unbelievers and to cast them into it.
The very nature of unbelief in itself conveys an idea of the existence of Hell. In the same way that if the nature of faith were to take on external form, it would assume the shape of a miniature Paradise, together with all of its pleasures, thus implicity declaring the existence of Paradise, so too unbelief (and especially absolute unbelief), hypocrisy and apostasy contain within themselves such dark and awesome pains and inner torments that were they to take on outward form, they would become a private Hell for the apostate, thus implicitly declaring the existence of Hell. Just as the minute truths and realities sown in the seed¬bed that is the world grow to maturity in the Hereafter, so too the poisonous seed of unbelief is the herald of the infernal tree of Zaqqum. "I am the substance from which Zaqqum is fashioned," it says, "and my fruit is a specimen of the tree of Zaqqum, destined for that luckless individual who bears me in his heart."
If unbelief constitutes transgression against innumerable rights it follows that it is a crime of infinite porportions, and that it is deserving of a punishment of similarly infinite proportions. If man's sense of justice is able to accept and regard as being in the public interest the penalty of fif¬teen years' (or close to eight million minutes') imprisonment for a murder that takes but a min¬ute, then it is in full conformity with justice that a minute of absolute unbelief, which is equivalent to one thousand murders, should be punished with a torment lasting almost eight billion minutes.
Similarly, one who spends one year of his life in unbelief, will be deserving of a torment lasting almost two trillion, eight hundred and eighty bil¬lion minutes, and the sense of God's words They will dwell therein for ever ⁵ will be made manifest in him.
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4. Qur'an, 4:116.
5. Qur'an, 93:8.