Other Dimensions111ninety-nine-hundredths of all goodness, and �by virtue of the hundredth part left on earth �all His creatures are animated by love and the horse lifts up its hoof for fear of hurting the child.' Moreover, if heaven and hell are so close to us �as the Prophet said they are �then, at least in a certain sense, we already live in these dimensions, though for the most part unaware of them, and no more than a thin membrane separates us from the Joy and from the Fire. It is said often enough that 'we are all human', and so we are; but it might be added that our outward 'humanity* is no more than a veneer covering a deeper identity. Here and now, in our daily Hves, we already rub shoulders with 'the people of Paradise' and 'the people of the Fire.' Even in the physical environment which surrounds us, these extraterrestrial dimensions are perceptible to those gifted with sharp sight, and Islam is certainly not alone in making this point; according to the Christian writer, William Law, 'There cannot be the smallest thing or the smallest quality of anything in this w^orld, but it is a quality of Heaven or of hell, discovered under a temporal form.' It is in terms of this perspective, with its clear implication that beauty �far from being a luxury �is a means of salvation, and ugliness a way to damnation, that we may judge the importance of the environment which people make for themselves and in the midst of which they prefer to live; and it is in the same terms that we may judge the significance of the cult of ugliness (usually called 'realism') which overshadows a good deal of contemporary thought and contemporary art. There is a common assumption today that the ugly is in some curious way 'more real' than the beautiful, and this amounts to saying that hell is closer to us than heaven (as well it may be in this age). Modern art provides the most terrifying evidence for this. An art critic, for example, describes a painting by Lucien Freud in these words: ' A young man with long fairish hair lies completely naked on a chaise-longue, his legs drawn up and splayed apart. In his left hand he holds a small black rat with beady eyes; its long, snake-like tail lies across his right thigh near his penis. The young man stares up at the ceiling. His expression is of one who has seen horror or some profound emptiness . . . ' ' It might not be easy to find, at least on public view, a contemporary painting which bears witness to the closeness of Paradise as powerfully as does this to the closeness of hell. Since God is both our origin and our end and is present with us in each moment of time, these reflections of His Beautv and of His Wrath are always at hand, but it is His Presence as such which dominates every possible dimension. Those who do not in some measure find Him in this life or, at the very least, turn towards Him 'though they see Him not', are those who, according to the Quran, will be raised up blind when the only alternatives, stark and simple, are light or darkness, presence or absence. People forget the relativity of time and the fact that it is a purely local condition. Here and now we are what we will be. Even if we know this in theory, we fall very easily into the habit of looking no further than our bodily senses can reach and treating this world^The Times (London), 2 March 1978.
