Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 54 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:54

فَشَـٰرِبُونَ عَلَيْهِ مِنَ ٱلْحَمِيمِ

“And drinking on top of it from scalding water”

Saheeh International

Essence

The Arabic for drinking is the word for cloth taking dye, and the relief they reach for is the next thing done to them.

A reflection

Drinking, in Arabic, is what cloth does to dye

Cloth coming out of a dye vat has not been coated. It has drunk. The colour is inside the fibre, and no amount of washing takes it out, because there is nothing on the surface to remove. A dyer will tell you the cloth is not blue. The cloth has become blue.

The Arabic root behind this ayah does that work. The lexicons put drinking first and then everything that resembles it. Shirb is one's share of water, one's turn at the well. A mashrab is where people come down to drink. And then the extension: cloth drinks dye, and a white face drinks a flush of red.

And the last step is the one that matters. When a love soaks into a heart, the heart is said to be ushriba it: made to drink it.

The Quran uses exactly that of a people who had taken something inside themselves. They were made to drink the calf in their hearts, wa-ushribū fī qulūbihim al-ʿijl (2:93). Not that they worshipped it. That it was in the fibre.

So this ayah, read in Arabic, has a double floor. On the surface it is water. Underneath it is the one verb the language keeps for a thing that goes into you and becomes you.

And that is the sober thing to take from it, because it is happening now rather than later. Everything you consume regularly is dyeing you. Not influencing. Dyeing. The register of the voices you listen to becomes the register of your own thoughts. The appetites you feed become the appetites you have. The complaint you repeat becomes the way you see.

Nobody notices the colour going in. You notice it when you try to wash it out.

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.