Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 19 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:19

لَّا يُصَدَّعُونَ عَنْهَا وَلَا يُنزِفُونَ

“No headache will they have therefrom, nor will they be intoxicated -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The cup is handed over and then, in the same breath, everything that normally comes attached to one is taken away.

A reflection

A crack running through glass, and a well bailed dry

A glazier taps a pane with the back of a knife and listens. If there is a flaw, the sound is dead and the crack runs. The glass does not shatter. A line opens through something that looked whole, and travels, and the pane is finished.

Both of this ayah's verbs are physical like that, and English flattens both.

Ṣadʿ is a crack in something hard: glass, or a wall. Earth that cracks as plants push through is dhāt al-ṣadʿ (86:12). Dawn was ṣadīʿ, because it splits the night. And a headache is ṣudāʿ, because the skull feels as though it is splitting.

The second verb is stranger and better. Nazf is bailing a well out, scoop by scoop, until nothing is left. The lexicons give the root one sense: a thing running out and being cut off. Anzafū means their drink had run dry. Blood nazafa when all of it is gone.

And a drunk man is nazīf: his mind bailed out of him.

So the ayah is not saying "no hangover and no drunkenness". It is saying that nothing will crack, and nobody will be emptied.

The commentaries also record a second recitation of the second verb, read with a different vowel. It gives another sense: their drink will not run out.

And they preserve a list that makes the ayah's shape plain. An early authority said that wine has four traits: it intoxicates, it gives a headache, it brings on vomiting, and it passes through. Allah mentioned the wine of the Garden, he said, and cleared it of these.

So this ayah is a subtraction, and that is the surprise. The Quran gives the cup in one line and in the next removes the four things attached to it.

Which is not how pleasure works anywhere else.

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.