Al-Muzzammil · Makki · ayah 13 of 20

Al-Muzzammil 73:13

وَطَعَامًا ذَا غُصَّةٍ وَعَذَابًا أَلِيمًا

“And food that chokes and a painful punishment -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The very appetite that was never restrained in life meets, in the next, a food it can neither swallow nor refuse.

A reflection

Neither down, nor back up

Wa ṭaʿāman dhā ghuṣṣah. And food that chokes.

A classical scholar of language defines ghussa with simple precision: it is what catches in the throat, something that will neither go down nor come back up. Ordinary food, however plain, has one basic promise built into it: you can eat it, or you can refuse it. This food keeps neither promise. It sits exactly at the point of the throat where choice usually happens, and takes the choice away entirely.

More than one commentator links this to the Quran's other descriptions of what the people of the Fire are given to eat: a bitter, thorny plant that neither nourishes nor satisfies hunger (88:6-7), and a tree whose fruit is described elsewhere as fire itself in the shape of food. The details vary across these ayat; the underlying shape does not. Food, the most basic and constant human comfort, the thing a person reaches for almost without thinking dozens of times a week, is turned into its own undoing.

That reversal is worth sitting with for what it says, not just what it describes. It is not a punishment invented from nothing, some exotic new torment with no connection to ordinary life. It takes the single most familiar daily act there is, eating, and shows what happens when it is no longer under your own control at all.

Think of how much of ordinary comfort runs through exactly this one channel. A hard day is survived with a good meal. A celebration is marked with a shared table. Grief is comforted, in nearly every culture, with food brought by neighbours who do not know what else to offer. Take that single channel, so central that almost every important human moment runs through it somewhere, and imagine it jammed, permanently, at the one point where swallowing happens. The ayah is not describing an unfamiliar torment reached for because nothing else was available. It is reaching for the most familiar comfort there is, and showing exactly what is lost when it stops working.

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.