Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 79 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:79

لَّا يَمَسُّهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱلْمُطَهَّرُونَ

“None touch it except the purified [i.e., the angels].”

Saheeh International

Essence

The word is passive: not those who made themselves clean, but those who were purified by someone else.

A reflection

Nothing on that tray cleaned itself

Nothing on a sterile instrument tray cleaned itself. Every item on it was washed, packed, run through a cycle at a temperature it did not choose, and sealed by somebody else. The tray is not a collection of careful objects. It is the output of a process.

The word in this ayah is built on that distinction, and the grammarians will not let it go.

The Arabic has two available forms. One means the man who purifies himself. The other means the man whom somebody else purified. The ayah uses the second.

One commentary makes an argument out of it. Had the sense been the man who performs an ablution, it says, the other form would have been used. That is the form in the ayah where Allah loves those who purify themselves. So: the angels are purified; the believers purify themselves.

That is a grammatical observation and it has a long reach. However the practical question is settled, the word on the page is passive.

Which means the sentence is not a league table of effort. It does not say: only the diligent touch it. It says: only those who were made clean touch it, and the making clean was done to them.

There are also other recitations known for this word, some of them active, so the grammar is not the end of the matter. The commentaries record them without resolving the question.

But the dominant reading is the passive one, and it points somewhere a reader does not expect. If access to this Book depends on being purified rather than on purifying yourself, then the honest first move is not an effort. It is a request.

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.