Heaven is not a garden. Hell is not a fire.

These are not literal places. There are no rivers of wine, no seventy-two of anything, no gates, no bridges thinner than a hair, and no pits of boiling oil.

Heaven and Hell are states of consciousness — and they are beyond our full understanding.

Shafafi Islam does not pretend to describe them in detail, because anyone claiming a detailed floor plan of the afterlife is describing their own imagination.

What the 7th-century descriptions actually were: metaphors, delivered to a desert people, in terms that a desert people would find vivid. Shade, water, fruit, and cool gardens to a population that knew heat and thirst. Fire to a population that knew fire. God used the local imagery available. Clerics then froze the metaphor and sold tickets.