al-Nabaʾ 78:24-26

Lā yadhūqūna fīhā bardan wa lā sharābā · Illā ḥamīman wa ghassāqā · Jazāʾan wifāqā "They taste in it neither coolness nor drink — except scalding water and pus. As a fitting recompense."

Root: ذ-و-ق. To taste. ذَوْق — the taking of a taste; and from it the Turkish zevk (pleasure).

The choice of verb is striking. "They will not find" or "it will not be given" could have been said. "They will not taste" was said.

Tasting is the nearest of the senses: seeing happens at a distance, hearing happens at a distance, touching requires contact, but tasting requires taking inside.

And the Qurʾān uses this verb for punishment very often: "Taste!" (al-Nabaʾ 78/30; al-Anfāl 8/14; al-Dukhān 44/49 and in many other places). This choice shows that the punishment is related not as something that comes from outside but as something taken inside.

I record this as an observation about the language.

Root: ب-ر-د. Coldness, coolness. بَارِد — cold. بَرَد — hail (ice falling from the sky).

There are two readings:

The second view is worth dwelling on, because the ninth verse of this sūra counted sleep as a favour: وَجَعَلْنَا نَوْمَكُمْ سُبَاتًا.

If bard here means sleep, the sūra will have said this: the favour given in the ninth verse is taken back in the twenty-fourth.

This link is striking and worth recording. But since I do not rely on the certainty of the second view I offer the link as a possibility. The first view is the more widespread and the sounder linguistically.

This too must be added: the two views do not exclude one another. Where there is no coolness there is no sleep either.

Root: ح-م-م. To grow hot, to boil. حَمِيم — boiling water. حَمَّام — a bathhouse; a place where one is warmed.

A note. The word حَامِيَة (scorching) in the last verse of Sūrat al-Qāriʿa is from the root ح-م-ي — which is different from this root. The two roots are neighbours in sense (both convey heat) and the classical lexicons sometimes treat them side by side; but I do not count them one root and I claim no derivation from one to the other.

The word's second sense is striking. In Arabic حَمِيم also means a close friend:

"We have no intercessor and no devoted friend (صَدِيقٍ حَمِيمٍ)." (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/100-101)

"No friend will ask after a friend." (al-Maʿārij 70/10 — lā yasʾalu ḥamīmun ḥamīmā)

"…as though he were a devoted friend." (Fuṣṣilat 41/34)

The same word is both the drink of Hell and the closest friend.

The explanation the lexicographers give for this common ground is: ḥamīm is "the hot one"; heat conveys both scalding and closeness. In English too expressions like "a warm friend" and "warmth" carry the same logic.

I record this as an observation about the language and I draw no meaning from it. Both uses are established in Arabic; I do not claim that the choosing of the word in this sūra carries any hint about friendship.

This word was already named in the section on Sūrat al-Falaq, while غَاسِق (ghāsiq) was being treated, and the finding there will be relied on.

What was recorded there was this: the root غ-س-ق has two wings of meaning — dense darkness and a thick, heavy, flowing thing — and the place where the two meet is a density that flows, seeps, spreads. Darkness, in the conception behind this Arabic root, is not something that "is" but something that flows.

Now let us apply this here.

Ghassāq is on the فَعَّال pattern — the intensive pattern we meet for the third time in this sūra (wahhāj, thajjāj, ghassāq).

The renderings given in the commentaries: pus, the fluid that runs from the wounds of the people of the Fire, an extremely cold and foul drink. All of these renderings come out of the root's sense of "a thick flowing thing".

And the finding from the section on al-Falaq says one thing more here. The root's other wing is darkness. This drink, then, carries darkness inside its name: what is drunk is something that flows like darkness itself.

I record this as an observation arising from reading the two cognates together.

A note on a variant reading. It is transmitted that this word is also read without the doubling, as غَسَاق. The difference of sense between the two readings is not great (the doubled reading adds intensity). Since I cannot state with certainty which authority of the variant readings held which preference, I give no name.

إِلَّا حَمِيمًا وَغَسَّاقًا — "except scalding water and pus."

The grammarians differ over the kind of this exception:

The second view is the sharper and it fits the tone of the verse: the verse does not say "a bad drink is given"; it says "there is no drink" and then names something.

This is a form of mockery and severity in Arabic. Its counterpart in English is roughly: "There is nothing to eat — nothing but stones."

Both views have been defended in the classical sources; I do not impose a preference.

جَزَاء — Root: ج-ز-ي. To give in return, to repay. The word is used for both reward and punishment — it conveys not the kind of the return but its being a return.

وِفَاق — Root: و-ف-ق. Fittingness, equivalence, matching one another. وَفَّقَ — he made fitting. مُوَافَقَة — agreement. تَوْفِيق — bringing into accord.

The word is a verbal noun and is used here as an adjective. In Arabic a verbal noun standing in place of an adjective conveys intensity: not "a fitting recompense" but "a recompense that is fittingness itself."

The principle the verse establishes: the punishment is to the measure of the offence. Neither more nor less.

The Qurʾān states this principle plainly in many places:

"The recompense of an evil is an evil like it." (al-Shūrā 42/40)

"Whoever does an evil is recompensed only with its like." (al-Anʿām 6/160; Ghāfir 40/40)

And the other half of the principle stands in the same verses:

"Whoever brings a good deed shall have ten like it." (al-Anʿām 6/160)

The balance the Qurʾān sets up, that is, is not symmetrical: the punishment is equal, the reward is multiplied.

This sūra sets up the same asymmetry within itself and it is one of the sūra's most notable structural features:

The same word is used on both sides, but their qualifications differ.

On the side of punishment the return is equal and it is not said from whom it comes. On the side of reward the return is a gift and it is said plainly from whom it comes: from your Lord.

I record this as my own reading; but the words of the two verses are in the text and the comparison can be made directly.

Its sense is this: punishment is deserved, reward is not. Punishment is the outcome of a reckoning; reward is a bestowal. A person earns his own punishment; he cannot earn his own reward.