Al-'Adiyat · Makki · ayah 10 of 11

Al-'Adiyat 100:10

وَحُصِّلَ مَا فِى ٱلصُّدُورِ

“And that within the breasts is obtained,[1972]”

Saheeh International

Essence

On that Day what the chests have hidden is sifted out like gold from ore: every real intention gathered, separated and brought into the light.

A reflection

Gold in the bottom of the pan

In a cold river in the Scottish Highlands, a man stands knee-deep with a shallow pan. He scoops up gravel and water and begins to swirl. Mud clouds away. Sand washes over the lip. Pebbles are picked out and thrown aside. After ten minutes of patient swirling, only a thin black line of heavy sand is left, and in it, three tiny flakes of gold. Everything else has gone. What remains is what was really there.

That is the picture inside the verb ḥuṣṣila. The lexicons record that the root means gathering, and that some lexicographers make its first sense drawing gold out of the ore. A woman who sifted the earth of a mine was called a muḥaṣṣila. The same root is used for beating grain out of the straw, and a sieve was called a muḥaṣṣil. The ḥāṣil of anything is what remains and holds firm when everything else has gone: the net result of a reckoning. The sense of extracting a kernel from its husk is established; the gold-from-ore sense as the very first is one view among lexicographers.

The sources explain the ayah in several ways that fit the picture. What is in the chests will be gathered and set out in the records. It will be sifted, good separated from bad. It will be brought out into the open, like a kernel from its husk.

The chest, ṣadr, is where the Arabs placed the inner life: the heart with its thoughts, desires, fears and intentions. It is also the front of a person, the first part of him that faces the world. Yet what it holds is hidden.

The sources quote a line of a pre-Islamic poet that captures the whole idea. Every man will one day know the worth of his striving, he said, when the final tallies are gathered before God.

The man in the river worked for his three flakes. On that Day, the sifting will be done for us. The question is what will be left in the pan when everything else has washed away.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.