Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 66 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:66

إِنَّا لَمُغْرَمُونَ

“[Saying], "Indeed, we are [now] in debt;”

Saheeh International

Essence

Their first sentence in the ruined field comes out of the counting house, by a word that pictures a creditor who will not leave.

A reflection

Five readings, and every one in the first person

This ayah is not Allah speaking. It is a transcript. The previous ayah said the growers would spend the day talking, and here is the talk, quoted without so much as a said.

The commentaries read the one word in it five different ways, and the list is worth setting out.

We are punished. We are dogged, singled out, picked on. We are thrown to misfortune. We have lost what we laid out and got nothing back for it. We are being held to account.

Those are real differences. One is about pain, one about being targeted, one about luck, one about money, one about reckoning. The early readers were not guessing; the word genuinely carries all of it.

Now notice what all five have in common. Every one of them is about the speaker.

There is no second person anywhere in the sentence. Nobody in that field says You. They have a word rich enough to carry punishment, pursuit, loss and audit, and they spend it entirely on themselves. The sentence is a mirror held up at arm's length.

That is the quiet horror of the quotation, and it is why it was worth quoting. These are not people who deny that rain comes from the sky. Asked directly, they would have said the right thing. The failure is in the sentence they reach for when nobody is asking.

And this is testable in your own mouth. Think of the last hard week you described to someone. Were the grammatical subjects mostly I and we? Was there a second person in it at all, besides the person listening?

A sentence can be completely true and still have no door in it. That is what is being shown here: five accurate meanings, and not one of them goes anywhere.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.