Muslim Beliefs on Death, Marriage, Heaven, and Hell

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Growing up in Croatia (a region whose history bears countless traces of encounters with Islam) I became familiar with different aspects of Muslim beliefs earlier than I realized. 

What began as a curiosity shaped by geography and culture gradually developed into a deeper intellectual interest. Islam is, after all, not only one of the world’s major religious traditions but also a civilization whose ideas, literature, and practices continue to shape the lives of more than a billion people today.

Even though my own scholarly research led me decisively toward the history of early and late antique Christianity, I remained drawn to the critical study of Islam: its origins, its sacred text, and the remarkable diversity of its theological and social expressions.

Yet, when speaking about Islam (especially in popular Western discourse) one often encounters oversimplifications. 

Sometimes Islam is treated as if it were a monolithic tradition, when, in fact, it encompasses a wide spectrum of theological schools, interpretive approaches, and cultural contexts. What most Muslims share, however, are certain fundamental beliefs about God, prophecy, scripture, morality, and the afterlife.

This article therefore focuses on the beliefs that shape Islamic understandings of human life and destiny. It will not offer a detailed analysis of ritual practice, legal structures, or daily religious observance, topics that deserve separate and fuller treatment.

Instead, the goal here is more basic and foundational: to explore how Muslims conceptualize God and divine revelation, how they understand prophecy, and how these beliefs inform broader moral and eschatological ideas, including the position of women in Islam.

The Five Pillars of Islam: A Brief Look

Every discussion of Muslim beliefs, however, must begin with the foundational framework known as the Five Pillars of Islam. 

For Muslims, these pillars are, as Bernard Lewis observes in Islam: The Religion and the People, the condicio sine qua non of belonging to the religious community. In other words, one cannot be fully part of the Ummah (the worldwide community of believers) without affirming and practicing them. 

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They are less a list of optional devotions than a basic architecture of faith, orienting Muslims toward God, one another, and the moral responsibilities that define Islamic life.

The first pillar, the Shahāda, is the testimony of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” 

This concise confession affirms God’s absolute unity and Muhammad’s prophetic role, functioning as the theological core from which all other Islamic convictions derive.

Referring to the significance of Shahāda, Christopher Partridge notes:

The second pillar, Ṣalāt (the five daily prayers) provides a rhythmic structure to everyday life. Performed at specific times, these prayers embody submission, mindfulness, and communal solidarity, whether they are offered alone or in congregation.

However, we shouldn’t equate these prayers with the ones we know from the Christian tradition. As Lewis explains:

The third pillar, Zakāt, refers to obligatory almsgiving. More than a simple act of charity, it reflects Islam’s strong emphasis on social justice, wealth redistribution, and the ethical responsibility of caring for the vulnerable.

In his book The Islamic World: Past and Present, John L. Esposito notes:

The fourth pillar, Ṣawm, is the month-long fast of Ramadan, during which Muslims abstain from food, drink, and other physical pleasures from dawn to sunset. Fasting functions as a form of spiritual discipline, cultivating self-control, empathy for the less fortunate, and renewed attentiveness to God. 

Finally, the Ḥajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, is required once in a lifetime for those physically and financially able. It brings Muslims from across the world together in a shared ritual reenacting episodes from sacred history, reinforcing unity, humility, and the sense of standing equal before God.

Now that we have briefly covered the Five Pillars, we can turn to the core theological framework that gives them meaning, beginning with how Muslims understand the nature of God.

Muslim Beliefs: God and His Attributes

Muslim beliefs about God are rooted above all in the Qur’an, which presents God as singular, eternal, all-powerful, and merciful, and in the rich theological tradition that subsequently developed to clarify and defend these claims.

Over the centuries, Muslim scholars worked to articulate what God’s unity (tawḥīd) means, how divine attributes should be understood, and how human beings relate to God’s power and justice. 

As Daniel W. Brown notes in A New Introduction to Islam, early Muslim theology wasn’t a marginal discipline but a vibrant, often contentious field devoted to defining the boundaries of correct belief. The result is a nuanced and intellectually sophisticated portrait of God that has shaped Islamic thought from the earliest centuries to the present.

Central to Islamic belief is the conviction that God is absolutely One, without partners, divisions, or likeness (Qur’an 112). 

This affirmation isn’t merely numerical but metaphysical: nothing in creation resembles God, and nothing can be compared to Him. Yet the Qur’an also speaks of God through a set of attributes such as knowledge, life, power, and mercy.

Early Muslim theologians wrestled with how to preserve God’s uncompromising unity while affirming these scriptural descriptions. 

Some thinkers insisted that God’s attributes must be understood as subordinate to God’s essence, lest one introduce plurality into God’s being; others accepted the attributes as real and eternal but carefully distinguished them from the divine essence. 

Despite these debates, the mainstream Islamic tradition affirms that God possesses all perfections, that these perfections are eternal, and that they do not compromise the divine unity.

Another defining feature of Islamic theology is the balance it strikes between divine justice and divine power. 

On the one hand, God is described as the all-powerful creator who decrees and sustains all things. On the other hand, God is just and holds human beings accountable for their actions.

Classical Muslim thinkers debated the precise relationship between these two truths. Some early theologians emphasized God’s absolute determination of all events, including human actions, while others argued that genuine moral responsibility requires genuine human freedom. 

What unites these positions is the shared conviction that everything unfolds within God’s knowledge and sovereignty, and that God never acts unjustly. 

The Qur’an’s repeated insistence that God rewards good and punishes evil ultimately motivated Muslim theologians to articulate sophisticated models of divine justice that maintained both God’s power and human accountability.

A further aspect of Muslim belief about God concerns the language used to describe the divine. The Qur’an speaks of God’s “hand,” “face,” “throne,” and “speech,” raising questions about how such expressions should be understood. 

Some early Muslims read these descriptions more literally, while others insisted that they must be interpreted metaphorically to safeguard God’s transcendence. This debate became especially significant in discussions about the Qur’an itself. 

If the Qur’an is God’s speech, is it eternal and uncreated, or was it brought into being in time? The dominant Sunni position eventually affirmed the Qur’an as the uncreated word of God while avoiding overly literal interpretations of anthropomorphic expressions.

Across these debates runs a clear thread: Muslims affirm a God who is absolutely transcendent, utterly beyond human limitation, yet who reveals Himself in language accessible to human understanding.

Muslim Beliefs About Muhammad and Scripture

There are many similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. One of those is certainly the fact that all three religions are grounded in history and shaped by specific individuals who became foundational for their respective traditions. In Judaism, there is, of course, Abraham and later Moses, regardless of ongoing debates about their historical existence.

In Christianity, there is Jesus. The religion also features other influential figures such as Peter, John, James, and, most importantly for the formation of Christian thought, the apostle Paul. Islam, too, is a historical religion that took shape in the 7th century within a specific cultural and social landscape of Arabia.

Partridge explains:

Within this setting, the figure of Muhammad occupies an absolutely central role. Muslims believe that Muhammad, born in Mecca around 570 CE, was the final prophet in a long line of messengers stretching back to Abraham. Although he isn’t considered divine in any sense, his life and teachings are regarded as the authoritative model of faithful submission to God. 

Early Islamic sources present him as a man known for his moral integrity, concern for justice, and leadership ability, qualities that gave credibility to his prophetic message. 

According to Islamic tradition, when Muhammad was about 40 years old, he began receiving revelations through the angel Gabriel. These revelations were later collected and preserved in what became the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Islam.

Muhammad’s significance, however, extends well beyond the simple role of a transmitter of revelation. 

Over the centuries, the Muslim community developed a rich body of literature known as hadith, which preserves reports about his sayings, actions, and judgments. These traditions became essential for understanding the Qur’an, for shaping Islamic law, and for defining what it means to live in accordance with God’s will. 

The task of understanding Muhammad is complicated by the layers of devotion, criticism, and mythmaking that surround all major founders of religious traditions. Historians must, therefore, navigate carefully between reverence and skepticism.

As Claude Cahen notes in his book Der Islam I. Vom Ursprung bis zu den Anfängen des Osmanenreiche (Islam I. From its origins to the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire):

Despite all the complexities historians have to face, in the Islamic tradition Muhammad is both the messenger who delivered God’s final revelation and the exemplar whose life illuminates how that revelation should be put into practice.

Given Muhammad’s role as the bearer of divine revelation, the Qur’an (available to read here) occupies a unique and unparalleled status within Islam. Muslims believe it to be the literal word of God, revealed in Arabic and preserved without corruption. 

Traditionally, the Qur’an is understood to have been transmitted orally by Muhammad to his followers, who memorized its chapters and verses. 

After Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E., these recitations were collected, arranged, and eventually written down in a more standardized form. The Qur’an is composed of 114 chapters (sūras) of varying length and addresses a wide range of themes: the nature of God, ethical conduct, stories about earlier prophets, and visions of the afterlife.

The story of how the Qur’an became a fixed and authoritative text has long been the subject of both traditional accounts and modern scholarly debate. 

The conventional Islamic narrative maintains that, during the caliphate of Uthman (r. 644-656 C.E.), the dispersed Qur’anic manuscripts and oral recitations were collected into a single official version. Copies of this standardized text were then sent to major regions of the empire, while other variant materials were destroyed to preserve unity. 

According to this account, the Qur’an’s written form was firmly established within a generation of Muhammad’s death, ensuring its reliability and safeguarding it from alteration.

This was an accepted theory among many critical scholars as well. Perhaps the best illustration is Cahen who notes:

In recent years, however, some scholars have proposed alternative reconstructions of the Qur’an’s textual history. One influential argument comes from Stephen Shoemaker in his book Creating the Qur’an, where he suggests that the final process of canonization may have occurred somewhat later, during the reign of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685-705 C.E.).

Shoemaker’s view doesn’t dispute the existence of earlier Qur’anic materials or the importance of Uthman’s efforts but argues that the Qur’an’s definitive form likely crystallized in the later decades of the 7th century, in the context of empire-building and emerging Islamic identity.

To make things even more complicated, Fred M. Donner rejects both the radical late-canonization theories and the fully traditional Uthmanic narrative, noting:

Despite such scholarly debates, what remains clear is that the Qur’an has always been regarded by Muslims as the supreme source of spiritual, theological, and moral authority in Islam.

And as we turn to the issues of divine judgment, heaven, and hell, it’s very important to keep that in mind. Qu’ran, after all, is at the heart of the Islamic religion, no matter when its canonization happened!

Muslim Beliefs About Heaven and Hell

Other similarities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam emerge as soon as we begin talking about the divine realm: heaven, hell, and the final judgment. It seems that major religions, when they aren’t discussing ethics or community, gravitate rather naturally toward the “tough stuff,” explaining what happens to people after they die.

Islam is no exception. From its earliest period, the Qur’an presented a vivid moral universe in which human actions have consequences that extend beyond this world. The afterlife isn’t a philosophical abstraction but a central component of the religious imagination that shapes how Muslims understand the purpose of life itself.

At the heart of Islamic eschatology lies a profound belief that all human beings will ultimately stand before God for judgment. According to the Qur’an, God will resurrect the dead, gather mankind, and evaluate every word, deed, and intention. Nothing escapes divine knowledge, and nothing is forgotten.

The divine judgment is portrayed as both just and merciful, yet it’s uncompromising in its moral seriousness. Those who have lived righteously will find themselves welcomed into God’s mercy. Those who persist in wrongdoing, oppression, or disbelief will face the consequences of their actions. 

This division between the saved and the condemned forms the backbone of Islamic views of the afterlife.

As you can imagine, Muslim belief in heaven (janna) and hell (jahannam) flows directly from the Qur’an, which offers some of the most evocative depictions of the afterlife found in any religious text.

To put it more bluntly, The Qur’an employs rich imagery to convey the joy of paradise and the terror of damnation, aiming not merely to describe but to persuade and transform. As Esposito asserts:

This combination of reward and punishment serves a clear ethical function in the Qur’an: it underscores that earthly life is morally consequential. Human beings are free to choose their actions, but they cannot escape the moral structure in which those choices are made.

Now that we have explored these central Islamic beliefs about heaven, hell, and the final judgment, we can turn to another significant topic in Islamic thought, namely, the role and status of women within the religious and social framework of Muslim belief.

Muslim Beliefs About Women

Within the Islamic tradition, beliefs about the nature and role of women emerge from a combination of Qur’anic teaching, early Muslim practice, and centuries of interpretation. 

At the level of foundational doctrine, the Qur’an positions men and women as morally and spiritually equal before God. Both are addressed directly in the sacred text, and both are charged with the same obligations of faith, worship, charity, and ethical conduct. 

This spiritual egalitarianism has long shaped Muslim understandings of human dignity and religious responsibility. For many Muslims today, the starting point of belief is precisely this conviction: that men and women share an identical moral status before their Creator.

At the same time, the Qur’an also established a social and legal structure for marriage and family life that reflected the patriarchal conditions of 7th-century Arabia. Men were given certain responsibilities (such as financial maintenance and broader public roles), and these were often interpreted historically as implying a degree of authority within the household.

Later jurists developed these ideas in ways that emphasized male leadership and female dependence, producing legal systems that varied greatly across different Muslim societies. 

As Yvonne Y. Haddad and John L. Esposito note in their book Islam, Gender and Social Change, this combination of spiritual equality and social hierarchy has produced a “dialectic of change” in which Muslim beliefs about women coexist with immense diversity in cultural practice, ranging from societies with extensive female participation in education and public life to those with far stricter interpretations of gender roles.

Because the Qur’an presents both egalitarian ideals and socially embedded regulations, Muslim beliefs about women have always been interpreted through a tension between ethical principles and inherited patriarchal norms.

This tension is vividly illustrated when one turns to early Islamic history. As Leila Ahmed notes in her book Women and Gender in Islam:

This portrait (which includes figures such as Khadija, Aisha, Umm Salama, and numerous other women active in public life) demonstrates that the earliest Muslim community understood women’s participation in markedly broader terms than later societies would often allow.

Over time, however, the Islamic tradition encountered cultures with far more restrictive views of gender, particularly in the urban centers of the Middle East. As Islam expanded into regions shaped by Byzantine, Persian, and late antique social norms, jurists and political authorities increasingly emphasized the more hierarchical aspects of the Qur’anic marriage structure.

Practices such as veiling, seclusion, and limitations on women’s public participation (initially confined largely to the Prophet’s household) spread more widely and were reinterpreted as universally binding. 

These developments shaped the classical legal tradition, which in turn influenced what many Muslims came to believe about the appropriate roles of women. 

This historical layering helps explain why Muslim beliefs about women today can appear internally diverse: some aspects derive directly from the Qur’an, others from cultural environments that became fused with Islamic law during the formative centuries of the tradition. 

Despite these complexities, many Muslims maintain that the Qur’an’s spiritual egalitarianism remains the ultimate reference point for understanding the role of women in Islam. 

In this view, any system of norms must reconcile social regulations with the deeper ethical vision articulated in verses emphasizing equality, justice, and mutual responsibility. However, others disagree, asserting a more patriarchal picture on the women’s status and their relationship toward men.

These ongoing debates continue to shape Muslim beliefs about women today, producing a rich and evolving conversation within the global Muslim community.

Conclusion

Exploring Muslim beliefs (from the Five Pillars to the nature of God, from the role of Muhammad to the promise of heaven and the realities of hell, and finally to the complex question of women in Islam) reveals a religious tradition both deeply rooted in history and remarkably dynamic.

While shaped by its 7th-century Arabian origins, Islam developed into a global civilization whose theological reflections, legal structures, and ethical ideals continue to guide the spiritual lives of more than a billion people.

What unites these diverse strands are the central convictions that God has spoken, that human beings bear responsibility for their actions, and that divine revelation offers meaning, purpose, and moral orientation in a world often marked by uncertainty.

At the same time, the richness of Islamic belief resists simple summaries. Muslims have long debated how best to understand the Qur’an, how to interpret Muhammad’s example, how to conceptualize the afterlife, and how to reconcile spiritual equality with social arrangements that emerged in very different cultural settings.

And if navigating all this leaves the reader feeling that the Islamic intellectual world is both profound and occasionally dizzying, take comfort: historians feel the same way. 

After all, when a single article must cover everything from divine attributes to eschatology and gender norms, even the author may suspect that the Day of Judgment will arrive before the debates do!

But it’s precisely this combination of complexity, continuity, and creativity that makes the study of Muslim belief so enduringly fascinating.