Does Allah Create a People for the Fire?

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Does Allah Create a People for the Fire?

This article studies a difficult wording found in one route of a well-known hadith concerning Paradise and Hell. The central question is whether the narration should be understood to mean that Allah creates a people specifically for the Fire, or whether that wording is the result of inversion, transmission error, or a report requiring interpretation.

The author begins by laying out the relevant hadith material from Sahih al-Bukhari, then notes that many scholars regarded the wording about creating for the Fire as unusual when compared with the better-known wording that Allah creates for Paradise. From there, the article presents the scholarly discussion as a three-way debate.

The first and most prominent path is the path of weakening that specific wording and judging it a mistake in transmission. Scholars such as al-Qabisi, Ibn al-Mulaqqin, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Kathir, and Ibn al-Wazir are cited as holding that the wording was inverted by a narrator and that the stronger narrations and Qur’anic principles support the reading that creation in excess belongs to Paradise, not Hell.

The second path accepts the narration but interprets it away from its most immediate surface meaning. Here the article cites figures such as al-Qadi ‘Iyad, al-Bulqini, and Ibn Hajar, who explored interpretive readings that would preserve the report without implying unjust punishment of an uncharged creation. These readings often turn on whether “creating for the Fire” means something other than creating a new morally responsible people solely to be tormented.

The third path accepts the wording more directly and treats it as an instance of the absolute divine will that does not admit rational objection. The article notes that this view has also been represented among Sunni scholars, though even there discussion remains careful because of the larger scriptural principles involved. The conclusion is that, whichever view one adopts, the debate itself shows the precision of hadith criticism and the intellectual seriousness with which Sunni scholars handled difficult narrations rather than receiving every wording without analysis.

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