Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 55 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:55

فَشَـٰرِبُونَ شُرْبَ ٱلْهِيمِ

“And will drink as the drinking of thirsty camels.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The comparison is not to a thirsty animal but to a named sickness: the thirst that drinking makes worse.

A reflection

A thirst that drinking does not touch

There is a sickness that takes camels at the water. The animal drinks, and drinks, and is not satisfied, and goes on drinking until it dies. Afterwards it wanders off across the valleys and does not graze. The Arabs had a name for the disease, huyām, and a word for the animal that has it. That word is the last word of this ayah.

The commentaries are unanimous on the picture and they say it plainly. The hīm, they say, are camels in the grip of a thirst that is never quenched, because of a disease that is in them. One adds that they drink until they are destroyed by it.

So the comparison is not to being very thirsty. It is to a condition in which drinking is no longer connected to thirst at all.

And that is the most recognisable sentence in this entire passage for anybody living now. Everyone knows this animal. The scroll that does not satisfy, continued for an hour. The spending that does not become enough, continued for a decade. The food eaten standing up with no hunger anywhere in it. The attention sought from a person who has already given it and is not believed.

In each case the instinct is intact and the circuit is broken. The drinking does not report back.

The lexicons give the same root one more application, and it finishes the picture. From that disease the Arabs called a lover hayamān: off on his own, with no direction left in him. The animal and the man are described with one word, because both are moving constantly and neither is going anywhere.

And there is one mercy in the way this is written. The sickness is named. A thing with a name is a thing you can ask to be cured of.

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.