Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 34 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:34

وَفُرُشٍ مَّرْفُوعَةٍ

“And [upon] beds raised high.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Of all the things that could be said about the bedding of that place, the word chosen first is not soft but raised.

A reflection

Raised comes before soft

In an old sawmill the floor is not really a floor. It is a foot of sawdust, damp underneath, cold all winter, and alive with whatever lives in sawdust. So the man who slept on site did not sleep there. He built a loft at the back, four posts and some planking, and slept above it. Not a better mattress. A different height.

Read the ayah slowly and notice what it does not say. Not wide bedding, not soft bedding, not fine bedding. Raised bedding. One concise commentary says plainly: on the couch frames. Others say they are banked one above another, so that the whole arrangement stands high.

The root carries this. One lexicon gives rafʿ as the exact opposite of waḍʿ, setting something down. You lift a thing off the place where it was resting. You build a wall higher. You take a case up to the ruler. And after the harvest, grain was lifted off the ground and carried to the threshing floor, because grain left on the earth is grain lost.

So the first hearers heard a social fact before they heard a comfort. In their world, and in most of the world since, the question was never the quality of the bedding. It was whether you slept on the ground.

This still decides things. There is the room with a bed in it and the corridor with a mat. There is the berth and the deck. There is a child with a frame and a child on a floor. Height off the ground has always been the cheapest, clearest measure of whether a person is being honoured or merely housed.

And the first thing said about their resting place is that it has been lifted.

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.