Al-'Ankabut · Makki · ayah 64 of 69

Al-'Ankabut 29:64

وَمَا هَـٰذِهِ ٱلْحَيَوٰةُ ٱلدُّنْيَآ إِلَّا لَهْوٌ وَلَعِبٌ ۚ وَإِنَّ ٱلدَّارَ ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةَ لَهِىَ ٱلْحَيَوَانُ ۚ لَوْ كَانُوا۟ يَعْلَمُونَ

“And this worldly life is not but diversion and amusement. And indeed, the home of the Hereafter - that is the [eternal] life, if only they knew.”

Saheeh International

Essence

This near life is diversion and play; the home still to come is life itself, at full stir, if only people knew.

A reflection

Not just life, but life at full stir

The ayah could have called the Hereafter al-ḥayāh, life. It chose a rarer word: al-ḥayawān.

Several commentaries stop at that choice. Arabic has a pattern, faʿalān, used for things in motion and agitation. Ghalayān is a pot on the boil. Nazawān is an animal leaping. Lahabān is a fire flaring up. One classical explanation says that life itself is movement, as death is stillness. So a word built on this pattern is life with its full stir in it. The strongest form was chosen where the strongest was needed.

The grammar adds weight. La-hiya: that, truly, is it. One commentary reads the sentence as if the Hereafter were life in its very self. The early commentators summed it up in a few words: life with no death in it.

A reader who knows modern Arabic may stumble, since ḥayawān now usually means 'animal'. One commentator raised the same puzzle centuries ago. He answered that the word is first a verbal noun, meaning living. He added that the Hereafter has growth, 'and more' beyond the best (10:26). It also has full perception, on the day when secrets are tested (86:9). So a word for what grows and perceives suits it well.

Picture a woman just home from cataract surgery. For ten years the world had yellowed so slowly that she never noticed. Now she stops on the pavement, staring at the red of a passing bus. She had not known what she was missing. She had nothing to compare it with.

That is the weight of the closing words: law kānū yaʿlamūn, if only they knew. We measure 'alive' by the only life we have tasted. The ayah says there is far more of it than we think.

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.