Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
The ambiguity comes from the difference between the Arabic and English vocabulary. The word ‘paradise‘ means ‘jannah‘ in Arabic, while heaven is ‘sama’‘ meaning ‘sky‘. Also, the word ‘heaven’ has many different meanings in English. So, some consider that ‘heaven’ and ‘sky’ are the same in Arabic translation meaning the horizon above us, but they translate ‘paradise’ as ‘jannah‘.
In responding to your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
Jannah (paradise) and jahannam (hell) are dimensions or worlds hidden from us. Being outside the ordinary dimension of reality that we are able to perceive by our ordinary means of cognition, they defy articulation.
It may do well for us to recognize the simple fact that the human language is intended to describe realities that are amenable to human cognition and not to describe the matters of ghayb (unseen) realities that lie beyond them.
Therefore, when we use the language we run into difficulties. So, one should not rush to deny the existence of heaven and hell or paradise or hell, because of such discrepancies in expressing them.
Furthermore, heaven and paradise are the words used in English; in the Islamic languages, paradise is called jannah and not sama’.
Allah Almighty knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.