sends others in their place, constantly making the factory of the universe run. Weaving corporeal products, He makes the earth into a seed-bed of the hereafter and Paradise. In fact, in order to gratify man’s physical stomach, he listens to and accepts the prayer for immortality his stomach makes through the tongue of disposition, affording it the greatest importance, and in order to answer it, prepares in corporeality incalculable numbers of innumerable sorts and kinds of artistic foods and precious bounties, all affording different pleasures. This demonstrates self-evidently and without doubt that in the hereafter, the most numerous and various of the pleasures of Paradise will be corporeal, and that the bounties of the eternal abode of bliss, which everyone wants and is familiar with, will be corporeal.
Is it at all possible that the Most Compassionate All-Powerful One, the All-Knowing and Munificent One, Who accepts the prayer offered through the tongue of disposition by the common stomach, and gratifying it with infinitely miraculous physical foods, always replies in fact, intentionally and without chance, would not accept the numerous, general prayers of man —who is the most important result of the universe, the Divine vicegerent on earth, and the Creator’s choice being and worshipper— which he offers through the supreme stomach of humanity for universal, elevated corporeal pleasures in the eternal realm, which he always desires and with which he is familiar and which by nature he wants; that He should not respond in fact with bodily resurrection, and not gratify him eternally? Should He hear the buzz of the fly, and not hear the crashing thunder? Should He equip a common soldier to perfection, and ignore the army, giving it no importance? To do so would be impossible and absurd.
Yes, in accordance with the explicit statement of the verse:
There will be there all that the souls could desire, all that the eyes could delight in,1
man will experience in Paradise in fitting form the physical pleasures with which he is most familiar and samples of which he has tasted in this world. The rewards for the sincere thanks and particular worship each of his members, like the tongue, eye, and ear, offers, will be given through physical pleasures particular to those members. The Qur’an of Miraculous Exposition describes the physical pleasures so explicitly, it is impossible not to accept the apparent meaning, and to make forced interpretations of them.
The fruits and results of belief in the hereafter, then, show that just as the reality and needs of the stomach, one of the human members, are
Qur’an, 43:71.