This is the judgment of God in his wrath: that men be granted their heart’s desires, and that they be by them consumed.

The expression “This is the judgment of God in his wrath: that men be granted their heart’s desires, and that they be by them consumed” turns wish-fulfillment into a sentence of destruction. Gibreel Farishta speaks it amid the unrest in Brickhall, where the desires he has taken in are answered not with consolation but with fire.

Formulation and Meaning

The statement joins gift and punishment in a single judgment. People are granted their deepest desires, yet those desires become the means by which they are consumed. Fulfillment is therefore not presented as an uncomplicated good: the danger lies within the wish itself, and divine wrath takes the form of allowing desire to reach its end.

The Proclamation in Brickhall

Before speaking, Gibreel understands himself as the Archangel of the Recitation, able to draw out the inmost desires of men and women and make them real. In the midnight air he breathes those desires in and nods assent; the answer he gives is fire. He proclaims the judgment to the riotous night, describing a city that has cleansed itself in flame and burned down to the ground.

Fire, Riot, and the Aftermath of Speech

The words arrive as Gibreel walks toward Brickhall with Azraeel in his pocket. The surrounding scene sets the proclamation against concrete signs of racial conflict: high-rise towers carry the names Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift, while two have been renamed Mandela and Toussaint L’Ouverture; groups of residents hurry past, some armed with clubs, bottles, and knives, and each group includes both white and Black youths. Gibreel raises his trumpet and begins to play. The passage places his declaration of consuming desire alongside a city’s violence and the image of fire, without making the speech’s precise effect on the groups explicit.