The Quran Verses
Surah 88:4–7:
They will burn in an intensely hot Fire. They will be given to drink from a boiling spring. For them there will be no food except from a poisonous, thorny plant (ḍarīʿ), which neither nourishes nor avails against hunger.
The Psychological Framing: To a behavioral psychologist, the descriptions of Hell (Jahannam) across these early Surahs operate through primitive sensory terror. The punishment is not framed as spiritual alienation from truth or an existential state of despair; it is intensely physical, centering on somatic agony and digestive torture.
The Regional Foliage: The food of the damned is identified as ḍarīʿ—which early commentators like Ibn Abbas identified as a bitter, toxic, thorny desert shrub (Shubruq) that livestock refused to eat once it dried up under the sun. The text uses the most wretched, localized environmental hazards of the Arabian desert to construct its vision of cosmic torture, weaponizing immediate physical phobias to force psychological and political submission to the early Islamic movement.