Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 22 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:22

وَحُورٌ عِينٌ

“And [for them are] fair women with large, [beautiful] eyes,”

Saheeh International

Essence

Two words, and both are about eyes: a word whose root is washing cloth white, and a word that means wide-eyed.

A reflection

A word from the fuller's workshop

In an old fulling workshop cloth is beaten, washed, stretched and dried until the yellow comes out of it and it goes white. The trade had its own name, and in Arabic the people who did it were called ḥawāriyyūn: whiteners.

That is the root of the first word of this ayah, and almost nobody who recites it knows that.

The lexicons give the root three strands. The first is returning: ḥāra is to go back, and unwinding a turban that had been wound is its ḥawr. The second is turning: the miḥwar is the axle a pulley turns on. The third is whiteness: fullers ḥawwarū cloth, and the finest white flour was ḥuwwārā.

And from that third strand comes ḥawar in an eye: deep black set in clear white, as in the eyes of gazelles.

So ḥūr is not a proper noun, and not the name of a species. It is an adjective about eyes. The contrast of black against white, very clean, as you see it in a wild animal's eye.

The second word says the same thing from another angle. ʿĪn is from the root of the eye and the spring, and the commentaries gloss it as wide of eye.

So both words of this ayah are about eyes, and about clarity, and one of them shares its root with washing something clean.

There is more in that root that the commentaries notice. Muḥāwara is dialogue, words going back and forth, from the same letters. And the ḥawāriyyūn, the whiteners of cloth, became the word for the pure and chosen helpers of a prophet.

So a reader who meets this ayah with one fixed picture is meeting a very wide word. The language uses it for clean cloth, for conversation, for an axle, and for the disciples of 'Isa.

And the Quran uses it, here, of eyes.

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.