The chapter
The Codex ends where every sound heart was always pointed. "And those who feared their Lord will be driven to the Garden in companies, until, when they reach it, its gates are opened, and its keepers say: Peace be upon you; you have become pure; so enter it, abiding eternally." Eight gates, among them one the fasting alone may use: "In Jannah is a gate called ar-Rayyan; those who fasted enter through it, and when they have entered, it is closed." At the gates, on the record of the Sahihayn: "I will come to the gate of Jannah on the Day of Resurrection and ask for it to be opened. The keeper will say: Who are you? I will say: Muhammad. He will say: For you I was commanded, I open for no one before you."
What is inside was placed, by design, beyond the reach of preview: "I have prepared for My righteous servants what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no human heart has ever conceived." The Qur'an's descriptions, rivers of water, milk, honey, and wine that does not wound; gardens beneath which rivers flow; couches, brocade, pearls, pavilions, are, the scholars say, names borrowed from the world for realities that outgrow the names. The dimensions hint at the scale: a width like the heavens and the earth; a hundred levels between each of which is the distance of sky to earth: "so when you ask Allah, ask Him for al-Firdaws, for it is the middle of Jannah and the highest of it, and above it is the Throne of the Most Merciful, and from it the rivers spring." A tree in whose shade a rider travels a hundred years without crossing it. A market kept for every Jumu'ah, where a wind from the north lifts beauty onto the faces of a people already beautiful. The lowest citizen, the last man dragged across, receives ten times this entire world, and is made to feel he has been favored.
The residents arrive re-made: upon the form of their father Adam, sixty cubits, thirty-three years old, hearts like one heart, rancor extracted by decree, the disease of the first murder surgically removed at the door: "We remove whatever is in their breasts of resentment, brothers, on couches, facing one another." Families are reunited across the ranks: "We join their descendants to them, and We deprive them of nothing of their deeds", and the keepers enter upon them from every gate: "Peace upon you for what you patiently endured, how excellent is the final home."
Then the tradition's two closing ceremonies, than which nothing higher exists. Death itself is brought "in the form of a fine ram" and slaughtered between the Garden and the Fire: "O people of Jannah, eternity, no death; O people of the Fire, eternity, no death." And the address from above: "Allah will say to the people of Jannah: O people of Jannah! They will say: At Your service, our Lord. He will say: Are you pleased? They will say: How could we not be pleased when You have given us what You gave no one of Your creation? He will say: Shall I not give you better than that? They will say: What could be better? He will say: I bestow upon you My pleasure, and I will never be angry with you after it, forever."
And above even the pleasure, the sight the whole Path has been walking toward, promised in the Qur'an's calmest sentence and confirmed in the Sahihayn's brightest hadith: "Faces that Day radiant, looking at their Lord.": "You will see your Lord as you see the full moon, without crowding." What Musa was denied at the mountain is granted to the least believer at home. The ziyada: "for those who do good: the best, and more", is, he ﷺ said, that the veil is lifted; "and they are given nothing more beloved to them than the look at His Face."
From the Throne over the water at the first node to the Throne above Firdaws at the last, from كن at the opening to سلام at the gates, the Codex closes its own circle here, and leaves the reader one working instruction, his ﷺ own: when you ask, ask for Firdaws.