Az-Zukhruf · Makki · ayah 73 of 89

Az-Zukhruf 43:73

لَكُمْ فِيهَا فَـٰكِهَةٌ كَثِيرَةٌ مِّنْهَا تَأْكُلُونَ

“For you therein is much fruit[1448] from which you will eat.”

Saheeh International

Essence

After food and drink comes fruit, eaten for delight not survival, in such abundance that every branch stays laden and nothing is ever used up.

A reflection

Eating that wears nothing away

Minhā taʾkulūn: from it you will eat. Two small details turn this simple phrase into a quiet marvel.

The first is the root ʾ-k-l. The lexicons give it one core meaning beneath many branches: diminishing, wearing away. Food is eaten and it is gone. Fire eats firewood. Stones wear down the nails. Age eats the teeth. Even a man's portion of this world is called his ukul, his share that gets used up. To an Arab ear, eating meant consuming: making something less.

The second is the little word min, from. One linguist reads it as 'some of': you eat only part of it, and the rest remains on the trees. So the trees are always adorned with fruit, always laden. You never see a tree stripped bare, as in this world. A concise commentary adds that whatever is eaten is replaced. The commentaries also preserve a report that no one plucks a fruit there but two grow in its place.

Put those together. The verb of wearing away is used for an eating that wears nothing away.

Picture a nine-year-old boy with the last piece of his grandmother's homemade baklava. She made a tray of it before she went into hospital. He eats it in tiny bites at the kitchen table, as slowly as he can. He knows that when it is gone, it is gone. Every child learns this early: the good things run out.

The Garden reverses that lesson. There, nothing good runs out. The fruit is eaten and the branch is still full. The pleasure is taken and nothing is lost.

This is why the ayah does not need to promise more. It promises enjoyment without depletion. In this world, every enjoyment is shadowed by its ending. In the Garden, eating is pure gain.

The boy at the table cannot make the baklava last. But he can know, as a believer, that a day is coming when nothing he loves will have to be eaten slowly.

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.