Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 25 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:25

لَا يَسْمَعُونَ فِيهَا لَغْوًا وَلَا تَأْثِيمًا

“They will not hear therein ill speech or commission of sin -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The last thing the passage removes is not a discomfort but a kind of talk: the weightless sort, and the sort that blames.

A reflection

The calves that did not count

When blood money was paid in camels, a hundred head had to be delivered. Not every animal in the herd counted towards it. The young calves were laghw: they went along with the drove, and they were not part of the hundred. Present, and not reckoned.

That is the word in this ayah, and English has nothing like it.

Translations say idle speech, ill speech, nonsense. Each is a guess at content. The Arabic is about accounting. Laghw is what is not counted: dropped from the reckoning as of no account.

And speech that is laghw is the same. It adds nothing. The lexicons say it is spoken without thought or intent. Then they give the comparison that fixes the picture. It is like the laghw of birds, their chattering before dawn. One commentary spells that out, saying such speech runs like the laghā, the noise of sparrows and the like of them.

So the first thing removed is not lies, and not cruelty. It is talk with no weight in it.

That is a strange thing to put at the end of a list of gifts, and it is worth asking why it goes there.

Nine ayat have described couches, cups, fruit, meat and company. Then came the reason (56:24). And now this: of everything that could still spoil such a gathering, the thing named first is weightless conversation.

Anybody who has sat through an evening of it knows why. Nothing was wrong. Nobody was unkind. Nothing untrue was said, and nothing was said. You come away having spent three hours and gained nothing, and the particular tiredness it produces has no name in English either.

The lexicons add more. Laghw also covers coarse words, noise made to drown out speech, and an oath the heart did not bind itself to.

So the word covers the unmeant oath and the sparrows at dawn. What they share is that nothing behind them was committed.

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.