The nature of hell is a far more grave moral matter than whether God simply loves or does not love all people, for withholding affection from them, if that is what the Quran means by love (Allah is still presented as just despite not loving everyone [1]), does not mean Allah over-punishes according to the standards of Quranic Islam. What those standards are for eschatological justice are not the same as the Biblical ones and, more importantly, are logically impossible. Called the Fire, the hell of Islam is mentioned very early in the Quran and is frequently spoken of throughout the following Surahs. From verses like Surah 2:24, where it is said that people and stones are fuel for the Fire, or Surah 4:56, where it is said that a person's skin will be remade when hellfire burns it away to be burned all over again, one could not tell the duration of this punishment.
These statements on their own only mention that Islam involves an afterlife of some kind sometimes called the Hereafter, with flames reserved for the wicked. There is also the inevitability of great torment in this Fire. Nothing is addressed here about whether the Quran teaches annihilationism or the irrationalistic injustice of eternal torture for a finite amount of finite human sins. Even in the Quran, despite these limits being far more severe than those of the Bible, there are boundaries for terrestrial justice, such as only cutting off the hand of a thief and not torturing them for as many days as they can survive (Surah 5:38; contrast with Exodus 21:1, 3-4). These would be grounded in Allah's nature, including "eye for eye" matching for permanent physical injuries (Surah 5:45, though in Islam, like in Christianity, eye for eye does not encompass all prescribed sins and punishments, such as for theft).
Other verses contradict the Quran's own version of proportionality. Surah 2:81 says that the wicked will enter the Fire, there to remain (2:81-82). Those tormented in the Hereafter will not be helped (2:86), and they will not leave the Fire (2:167). The inmates of the Fire will abide there forever (2:217, 2:275-276). In Surah 3:24, it is said that those who say the Fire will only touch them for a limited number of days are misled by delusion. This could not be the case if the suffering in hell, for whether a realm hypothetically outlasts its residents is a different matter, was to have a just, fixed ending point. For yet another relevant verse, Surah 4:121 says that there is no escape from the Fire, or the Islamic hell. While not every relevant Quranic verse to the issue of a punitive afterlife tackles whether the torment is endless, plenty others do, and they make it clear that the torment has no end.
It is possible for there to be no such thing as righteousness and therefore justice if God does not have a moral nature. The deity of Islam, though, could not be just because if morality does exist, and thus the potential for sin and justice with it, then it is logically impossible for endless torment of any kind to be proportionate to any amount of individual sins with a fixed scope, as is the nature of every particular sin. Christianity does not have this inherent falsity as one of its doctrines because it specifies over and over that the ultimate penalty for sin is the literal cessation of being, the total, permanent end to life (Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23, John 3:16, Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Revelation 20:15, and so on). All passages that seemingly speak of eternal torture either refer to a particular subset of God's enemies, actually teach blatant annihilationism and are just misunderstood by traditionalists, or are clarified by passages that insist the opposite for the same beings in question (such as Ezekiel 28:11-19 seems to do for Satan as compared with Revelation 20:10).
Torture is worse than death if it continues forever or reaches certain thresholds, but such torture is unjust on the Biblical worldview both in this life and the next because the same deity's nature dictates justice in all things, and it does not contradict itself in different contexts. What idiot would prefer to be loved, or "loved," by an entity that tortures them eternally? Even on a subjective level, after 50 trillion years of agony, it would take an enormous fool to not be longing for release either by reconciliation to God or by annihilation of the conscious soul. Christians who think God loves everyone but sends people to hell for perpetual torment do not understand the Biblical notion of hell. In Islam, there is no such thing as permanent annihilation or redemption from the Fire, so an annihilationist Muslim is the heretic according to the Quran's impossible idea of cosmic justice. In Christianity, the heretic is the one who thinks Yahweh's justice involves the eternal torture of unrepentant humans.
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