Al-Qari'ah · Makki · ayah 10 of 11

Al-Qari'ah 101:10

وَمَآ أَدْرَىٰكَ مَا هِيَهْ

“And what can make you know what that is?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The question ends in a written breath and will not even say the name again: some realities are announced by the silence around them.

A reflection

A breath written into the text

In a piece of music, silence is written down too. A violinist reading a score sees a small symbol on the stave: a rest. For that beat she must not play. The composer has decided where the sound stops, and a good player honours the silence as carefully as the notes.

This ayah ends with a written breath. Wa mā adrāka mā hiyah: and what will make you know what it is? The word for 'it' is normally hiya. Here it is written hiyah, with an extra h at the end. Grammarians call it the hāʾ of pausing. It adds nothing to the meaning. One classical explanation says it was added for stopping and resting.

On the most common way of reciting, the voice arrives at hiyah and stops, breathing out through that final h. Some of the canonical readers drop it when running straight on into the next ayah, and keep it when they pause. Most keep it throughout. One classical commentator states the preferred practice plainly: stop on it, because it is written in the muṣḥaf.

Listen to what that does. The surah has built through a sequence: the moths, the wool, the heavy scale, the light scale, the mother that is a pit. Now, just before naming what the pit is, the text makes you exhale. It is a written rest before the last note.

Anyone who has recited this surah aloud has felt it. The breath goes out on hiyah, and in that half second you are waiting. The answer, when it comes, is two words (101:11). The pause makes them land.

This matters for how we read. It is easy to rush the Quran, especially the short surahs we have known since childhood, as if they were a list to get through. The text itself resists that. It has built places where you must stop, and it asks you to let the meaning arrive before the next line.

So when you next recite this surah, honour the rest. Stop on hiyah. Let the breath go out fully. Then say the next two words slowly, as if hearing them for the first time.

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.