Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 67 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:67

بَلْ نَحْنُ مَحْرُومُونَ

“Rather, we have been deprived."”

Saheeh International

Essence

They correct themselves, and the correction is worse: not out of pocket but fenced out, a people with no luck.

A reflection

A word taken from the ground around a well

Read in English, we are deprived sounds almost humble. The Arabic is doing something stranger.

The lexicons give this root two linked senses. The first is barring and tightening: a thing kept back from use or approach. The second is holiness, which is the same act done out of honour. From that root come the sacred months and the Sacred House. From it comes the ring of untouched ground around a desert well, where nobody else may dig.

The image under the word is a fence. And a fence has two sides.

If a thing is inside the fence, the fence is honour. The House is fenced. The months are fenced. A well is fenced so that the water stays clean for everyone who comes.

If a man is outside the fence, the same word means he has been shut out of what he was hoping for. That is the reading the commentaries give here: barred from the yield we were after. Several of them add the blunt gloss: we have no share, no fortune, no luck.

So the growers have reached, under pressure, for a word built on protection. And they have used it to say the protection is not for them.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the sentence of a man standing just outside a boundary he can see. He is not saying there is nothing there. He is saying it was never going to be for him.

And a fence you believe is permanent is the one thing you stop knocking at. A man who thinks he has lost money will ask for money. A man who thinks he has been fenced out asks for nothing, because asking would be ridiculous.

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.