وَأَمَّا مَنْ خَفَّتْ مَوَٰزِينُهُۥ · فَأُمُّهُۥ هَاوِيَةٌ
Wa ammā man khaffat mawāzīnuh · Fa-ummuhū hāwiya "And as for him whose scales weigh light, his mother is Hāwiya."
This last derivative is worth pausing on. In Arabic the same root carries both lightness on the scale and not taking a thing seriously. English has the same relation: we say "to make light of" something.
This is an observation about the language, and I make no claim about how tight the bond between the two senses is. But it adds a layer to the reading of the verse: the one who weighs light on the scale is the one who has made light of things.
| The heavy pan (6-7) | The light pan (8-9) | |
|---|---|---|
| The condition | man thaqulat mawāzīnuh | man khaffat mawāzīnuh |
| The apodosis | fa-huwa fī ʿīshatin rāḍiya | fa-ummuhū hāwiya |
The conditional clauses are exactly symmetrical: the same structure, the same words, only the verb reversed.
In the first apodosis the subject is the person: "he is in a life." In the second the subject is not the person but his mother: "his mother is Hāwiya."
The symmetry one expects would have been: fa-huwa fī nārin ḥāmiya — "he is in a blazing fire." That sentence could have been built; indeed the eleventh verse very nearly says it. But the sūra inserts a sentence of another kind.
This break is deliberate, and the surprise of it is the verse's own work. By breaking the expected pattern the text brings the reader to a halt. And in the tenth verse it will itself acknowledge the strangeness of what it has said: "And what made you know what it is?"
هَاوِيَة — Root: ه-و-ي. Hawā — to fall from a height. هَاوِيَة is an active participle: the one that falls, or (in a passive sense) the thing fallen into, that is, a deep abyss.
- "By the star when it sets." (al-Najm 53/1). The verb is hawā — to go down.
- "Whoever associates anything with God is as though he had fallen from the sky and the birds had snatched him up, or the wind had swept him away to some far place." (al-Ḥajj 22/31). This verse is striking: both being swept away by the wind and falling are in the same sentence. The same cluster of images as the sūra's two similes and its ninth verse.
- ٱلْهَوَىٰ — hawā, the craving of the self. "He followed his craving" (al-Aʿrāf 7/176); "Have you seen the one who has taken his own craving as his god?" (al-Jāthiya 45/23).
The last item is important. In Arabic "craving" and "falling" come from the same root. What the lexicographers say about this connection is this: hawā is what pulls a person downwards; the word itself contains the fall.
That is: the one who goes after his craving arrives at the Hāwiya. The two words are from the same root. I record this connection as a relation established by the language itself; I do not ascribe it to any particular exegete.
هَاوِيَة is one of the names of hell. As was recorded in the sections on al-Takāthur and al-Humaza, the Qurʾān uses many names for hell: jahannam, nār, jaḥīm, saqar, laẓā, saʿīr, ḥuṭama and hāwiya. Each name brings one aspect of the fire forward; hāwiya is unique in the aspect it brings forward: it names not the heat of the fire but the manner of arriving at it. The place reached by falling.
| View | Explanation | Its ground | Its weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| A refuge / the place one comes to | Umm means "origin, source, the place one takes refuge in". As a child takes refuge with its mother, so this person will take refuge there — he has no other shelter | In Arabic uses in the sense of "origin/centre" are common: umm al-qurā (Mecca, al-Anʿām 6/92), umm al-kitāb (Āl ʿImrān 3/7); and a mother's being a refuge is a universal association | It requires the assumption of a figure of speech |
| A continuation of a pattern of imprecation | In Arabic hawat ummuhū ("may his mother lose him", "may his mother sit in mourning") is a curse of destruction. The expression carries the trace of this pattern | The pattern is settled in the Arabic language and occurs in poetry | The verse has a nominal sentence, not a verb; it is not the exact counterpart of the pattern |
| The crown of the head | Umm al-raʾs means the crown of the head, the brain. Since the person is to be flung headfirst into the fire, "his head falls" | Umm al-raʾs is used in Arabic; being flung headfirst occurs in the Qurʾān: "Their faces will be dragged in the fire" (al-Naml 27/90) | That hāwiya is a name of hell weakens this reading; and in verses 10-11 the thing asked about as "it" is answered as a place |
The first view is the most widespread and the one most consistent with the rest of the sūra: that the tenth verse asks "what is it?" and the eleventh answers "a blazing fire" shows that hāwiya is a place.
A mother is the first and safest refuge in a person's life. All the associations of the word run on protection, on shelter, on a place one can return to.
And in doing so it says one thing more: this person has no other refuge. To say "his mother is Hāwiya" is to say "that is the place he can go back to". The person is not merely thrown somewhere; he arrives at the place he belongs to.
On the matter of taking refuge this builds a closing that runs in the opposite direction to what was treated earlier in this commentary. Sūrat al-Falaq and Sūrat al-Nās opened with taking refuge: "I take refuge with the Lord of…" Al-Qāriʿa closes with the story of the one who has no refuge.
There is an oddity here that anyone reading the sūra attentively will notice, and it is worth pausing on.
In a real balance the heavy pan goes down and the light pan rises. The direction of weight is downwards.
- The one whose scales weigh heavy does not go up; he is found within a life.
- The one whose scales weigh light does not rise; he falls — hāwiya is the place one falls into.
That is, lightness brings not a rising but a falling. The person whose pan rises goes downward himself.
I record this as my own reading. But the sūra's words are there in plain sight: khaffat (weighed light) and hāwiya (the place fallen into) are in the same sentence.
And this reversal links up with the first half of the sūra. The moth and the carded wool are blown about because they have become light — they cannot carry themselves. Lightness here is not a rising but a loss of control. It is being left to the wind. The picture at al-Ḥajj 22/31 is exactly this: the wind sweeps him away to some far place.