يَحْسَبُ أَنَّ مَالَهُۥٓ أَخْلَدَهُۥ
The diagnostic verse of the sūra. The two preceding verses described the behaviour; this verse states the belief that lies beneath the behaviour.
- حَسَبَ يَحْسُبُ — he counted, he reckoned. From here ḥisāb (reckoning) and muḥāsaba.
- حَسِبَ يَحْسَبُ — he supposed, he thought. From here the yaḥsabu of the verse.
So "to count" and "to suppose" are from the same root. This is not to be counted a coincidence; the lexicographers record that beneath the root lies the idea of "evaluating a thing according to a particular reckoning", and that from there both numerical calculation and settled opinion are derived.
The arrangement of the verse appears to make use of this kinship: in the preceding verse he counted (ʿaddada), in this verse he supposed (yaḥsabu). The man who counts is making a wrong reckoning. I write this as my own reading — I do not present it as a link established in the classical sources — but that the two words come from the same root is a fact standing in the text.
That the verb comes in the imperfect. The two verbs in the preceding verse were in the perfect: jamaʿa, ʿaddada. This verb is in the imperfect: yaḥsabu.
In Arabic this passage is meaningful. The perfect (māḍī) conveys what has been completed, the imperfect (muḍāriʿ) what is ongoing and renewed. That is: his gathering and his counting happened in the past; his supposing is still going on. The supposition is not a mistake left behind in the past; it is an assumption at work at this moment.
Root: خ-ل-د. Khuld — permanence, remaining continuously in one state, continuing without change. Khālid — the one who abides. From the same root, jannat al-khuld (the garden of permanence) and mukhalladūn.
"Had We willed, We would have raised him by those signs; but he clung to the earth and followed his own desire." (al-Aʿrāf 7/176)
The verb there is أخلد إلى الأرض: "he made himself abide towards the earth" — that is, he was pinned to the ground, he became unable to part from it. The same root here describes the failure to rise. That the search for permanence fixes a man to the ground is a silent link set up between the two verses.
That the verb comes in the perfect. The expected form would have been the future: "he supposes that his wealth will make him immortal." The verse uses the perfect: "it made him immortal."
This is a recognised usage in Arabic: a thing expected to happen in the future is told in the past form as though its occurrence were certain. Its function is to convey certainty.
But here the certainty is not the speaker's; it is the certainty in the mind of the man who supposes. That is, the verse says this: this man is not hoping for something that will happen; he supposes it a thing already done and finished. Permanence is for him not a hope but a result already obtained. The choice of this form shows how deep the supposition runs.
In saying what the man who accumulates wealth supposes, the verse does something unexpected. It could have said the following, and all of them would have been reasonable:
- He supposes that his wealth has made him strong.
- He supposes that his wealth has made him secure.
- He supposes that his wealth has made him superior.
The diagnosis, that is, does not stay at the economic or the social layer; it descends to the lowest layer of all. Beneath the behaviour of accumulating lies a search for security, beneath the search for security a search for control, and at the very bottom helplessness in the face of death. The sūra goes straight down to the bottom.
The fine side of this diagnosis is that nobody thinks it openly. No one who accumulates wealth says "with this I shall become immortal"; if he were asked, he would deny it. But the verb in the verse is yaḥsabu — "he supposes" — and this describes not a declared belief but an assumption at work. The behaviour itself carries a belief, even if the man never defends that belief in words.
The verse looks not at what a man says but at what his behaviour assumes. This is the real property that carries the sūra into the present.
The link between the consciousness of death and accumulation is a link that has been made independently in the modern human sciences. We can transmit it without forcing anything, but it must be stated at the outset: this literature does not confirm the verse, and the verse does not announce this literature in advance. The two look at the same phenomenon out of two different languages.
The material record. One of the most widespread kinds of archaeological find is grave goods. Cultures independent of one another — in Egypt, on the steppe, in northern Europe, in China, in the Americas — have buried their dead together with their wealth: jewellery, weapons, vessels, animals, sometimes a boat, sometimes a building. A part of this is explained by belief in the hereafter, a part by the display of status after death as well. But the practice itself is beyond dispute: people have tried to carry wealth beyond death. The supposition the sūra describes has a tangible, non-metaphorical history.
Other forms of the same line: having a monument built, leaving behind a building that bears one's name, continuing the family name, founding an endowment. The structure common to all of them is binding oneself to an object that will remain after one is gone.
The theoretical frame. The anthropologist and thinker Ernest Becker put forward the following thesis in his book The Denial of Death, published in 1973: a great part of human culture is a defensive apparatus built in order to cope with the consciousness of death; people try to overcome annihilation symbolically by producing "immortality projects" that will remain after them.
Working from this thesis, from the 1980s onward a research programme was developed in psychology under the name of terror management theory. The experimental core of the programme is this: when people are given a stimulus that reminds them of their death, an increase has been measured in their attachment to their own cultural worldview, to markers of status and to material possessions. Some studies have reported that a reminder of death directly increases the tendency to consume and to accumulate.
Honesty is required about this literature. Some of the findings of the research programme in question have in recent years become the subject of debates about replicability, and the theory is not a body of knowledge accepted without question. For that reason I transmit it here not as a proof but as a line of thought and research that makes the same link independently.
Where the overlap lies. The single point at which the verse and this literature meet is this: that the behaviour of accumulating wealth can carry an anxiety about death which the man does not admit to himself. The verse says this in one sentence and emphasises it besides by the form of a verb. The modern literature tries to measure the same thing with experimental designs. The difference between the two should be recorded as well: the literature describes it as a mechanism and carries no value judgement; the verse qualifies it as a wrong — kallā, no.