Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 26 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:26

إِلَّا قِيلًا سَلَـٰمًا سَلَـٰمًا

“Only a saying [of] peace, peace.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The whole description of the highest rank ends on one word, said twice, which first meant: there is no war between us.

A reflection

A word called out before you are seen

A traveller comes on a strange camp at dusk. He is alone, and he is in range of whoever is sitting by the fire, and nobody there knows who he is. So before he comes within reach he calls out a word. Not his name, and not his business. A word that says: I am not armed and there is no war between us.

That word is in this ayah, twice.

Most of the root is soundness: being whole and safe, free of every harm and defect, outward and inward. A cow with no blemish is musallama (2:71). A heart free of hidden rot is salīm (26:89).

And the lexicons record that before Islam salām ʿalaykum already carried the traveller's meaning. I come in peace. There is no war here.

From the same letters come other things. Aslama is to hand something over. In one ayah a slave who is salam to one man belongs to him alone, with no quarrelling partners pulling him apart (39:29). A ladder is a sullam, which one lexicon connects to the root because a man climbs it hoping to arrive safe. And al-Salām is a name of Allah: free of all defect, lack and perishing, and the source of all safety.

So the word the Garden ends on is not a pleasantry.

English "peace" has gone soft. It suggests calm, or quiet, or an absence of trouble, and we use it of weather and of afternoons. The Arabic is sharper and more concrete. Nothing is wrong with this. There is no defect in it, no quarrel, no hidden harm, and no weapon anywhere in the camp.

And notice that it is the last word of a twelve-ayah description of the highest rank. Not the couch, not the cup, not the companions. A word a frightened traveller shouts across the dark.

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.