Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 21 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:21

وَلَحْمِ طَيْرٍ مِّمَّا يَشْتَهُونَ

“And the meat of fowl, from whatever they desire.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The word used here for desire is the word that names the struggle of a lifetime, and in this ayah it is simply answered.

A reflection

The word of the struggle, used of the reward

There is a man who was taught, somewhere in boyhood, that wanting anything is the problem. He is not an ascetic and does not think of himself as unhappy. He simply treats every appetite as a suspect, and has done for forty years, and is slightly uneasy whenever something pleases him.

This ayah uses, of the reward of the highest rank, the exact word that man has spent his life distrusting.

Yashtahūn is from shahwa. One lexicon says the root is really a single word. Another defines it as the self's pull towards what it wants.

And then the lexicons do something careful that we almost never do. They divide it in two.

A true desire is one the body suffers without, like hunger for food. A false desire is one the body can do without. Both are shahwa. The word itself carries no verdict, and the sources note that one ayah of the Quran can hold both senses at once (3:14).

So the Arabic does not have a word for appetite that means sin. It has a word for the pull, and then a question about what is being pulled towards.

That is worth getting right, because the man in the first paragraph has made a specific mistake, and it is a pious-sounding one. He treated the pull itself as the enemy. The sources treat it as a faculty, with a true use and a false one.

And look at the pairing in the surah. The ayah before this one gives fruit "of what they choose" (56:20), using the root of leaning towards the better. This one gives meat "of what they desire", using the root of the self's pull.

Two verbs, side by side, deliberately different. The higher faculty and the lower one, and both are satisfied.

So the reward is not described as the end of appetite. It is described as appetite with nothing wrong left in it.

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.