George Sale, The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, translated into English immediately from the original Arabic; with Explanatory Notes, taken from the most approved Commentators. To which is prefixed A Preliminary Discource (1734)

particulars. The former place an angel as a guard over each of these infernal apartments, and suppose he will intercede for the miserable wretches there imprisoned, who will openly acknowledge the justice of God in their condemnation ¹. They also teach that the wicked will suffer a diversity of punishments, and that by intolerable cold ² as well as heat, and that their faces shall become black ³; and believe those of their own religion shall also be punished in hell hereafter, according to their crimes, (for they hold that few or none will be found so exactly righteous as to deserve no punishment at all), but will soon be delivered thence, when they shall be sufficiently purged from their sins, by their father Abraham, or at the intercession of him or some other of the prophets ⁴. The Magians allow but one angel to preside over all the seven hells, who is named by them Vanánd Yezád, and, as they teach, assigns punishments proportionate to each person’s crimes, restraining also the tyranny and excessive cruelty of the devil, who would, if left to himself, torment the damned beyond their sentence ⁵. Those of this religion do also mention and describe various kinds of torments, wherewith the wicked will be punished in the next life; among which tho’ they reckon extream cold to be one, yet they do not admit fire, out of respect, as it seems, to that element, which they take to be the representation of the divine nature; and therefore they rather chuse to describe the damned souls as suffering by other kinds of punishments: such as an intolerable stink, the stinging and biting of serpents and wild beasts, the cutting and tearing of the flesh by the devils, excessive hunger and thirst, and the like ⁶.

Of the wall between paradise and hell.
Before we proceed to a description of the Mohammedan paradise, we must not forget to say something of the wall or partition which they imagine to be between that place and hell, and seems to be copied from the great gulph of separation mentioned in scripture ⁷. They call it al Orf, and more frequently in the plural, al Arâf, a word derived from the verb arafa, which signifies to distinguish between things, or to part them; tho’ some commentators give another reason for the imposition of this name, because, say they, those who stand on this partition, will know and distinguish the blessed from the damned, by their respective marks or characteristics ⁸: and others say the word properly intends any thing that is high raised or elevated, as such a wall of separation must be supposed to be ⁹. The Mohammedan writers