Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 7 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:7

إِذَآ أُلْقُوا۟ فِيهَا سَمِعُوا۟ لَهَا شَهِيقًا وَهِىَ تَفُورُ

“When they are thrown into it, they hear from it a [dreadful] inhaling while it boils up.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The sound is not a roar going out but a breath being drawn in, and the pot is boiling with very little in it.

A reflection

A breath drawn in, not a roar

Most of us picture a furnace. Heat, flame, a general roar going outwards, and people inside it. Hell as an oven.

The word in this ayah is not an oven word. Shahīq, the sources say, is the breath dragged back in. Its pair is zafīr, the breath pushed out, and the two are kept distinct. So what they hear on arrival is not something being expelled. It is something inhaling.

And the root carries two more things that change the picture again. It is the root for height: a shāhiq mountain is a towering one. And dhū shāhiq is said of a man whose anger is fierce.

So in one word: a drawing in of breath, from a root meaning towering, used of a man in a rage.

Anyone who has stood near a big breaking-down saw knows how disturbing it is when a machine stops sounding like a machine. The blade runs at a thin high whine on nothing. Then green oak comes into it. The note drops into something low that you feel in your sternum, and the men call it taking hold. Nothing has become alive. But the ear has stopped filing it under equipment.

The commentaries preserve an early description in that register. The Fire brays at them as a mule brays for barley, and then lets out a breath such that nobody is left unafraid. Nothing here rests on that report, and the commentators themselves differ over whose sound this is. What they agree on is the vocabulary. This is not described as fuel burning. It is described with breath.

Which is a different kind of fear from the furnace picture, and a more accurate one. A furnace is indifferent. The ayah does not offer indifference. It offers something that draws breath when you arrive.

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.