Al-Insan · Madani · ayah 13 of 31

Al-Insan 76:13

مُّتَّكِـِٔينَ فِيهَا عَلَى ٱلْأَرَآئِكِ ۖ لَا يَرَوْنَ فِيهَا شَمْسًا وَلَا زَمْهَرِيرًا

“[They will be] reclining therein on adorned couches. They will not see therein any [burning] sun or [freezing] cold.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A line the poets kept for the pampered few, untouched by sun or frost, is given to those who stood in the weather for others.

A reflection

A heaven with no sun in it

Ask a class of ten-year-olds to draw heaven, and many will draw a beach. A yellow sun sits in the top corner, with rays like bicycle spokes. Adults are not so different. Our quiet picture of Paradise is often a holiday that never ends: a lounger, a pool, warm skin.

The ayah removes the first item from that picture. Lā yarawna fīhā shamsan: they will not see a sun there.

The commentaries read it in two ways, and both unsettle the beach. On the first, no sun means no scorching heat, just as no zamharīr means no biting cold. The air is one even mildness that never changes. On the second, zamharīr was the word for the moon in the speech of the tribe of Ṭayyiʾ. Then the ayah says: no sun and no moon, and the Garden is lit by a light of its own.

Either way, the sun is gone. And the sun is the clock of this world. Its root, one lexicon explains, means restlessness. A horse called shamūs bolts when spurred and will not stand still for a rider. The Arabs heard that restlessness in the sun's name, and the Quran shows it running its course (36:38).

Every life under it is set by it. The alarm before dawn, the commute in the dark, the sunset that ends the fast, the short December afternoons that make people low. We are ruled by a restless thing, and we call our days by its movements.

So keep the longing, but loosen the picture. Paradise is not this world with the bad weather taken out. It is a different world with a different light. The ayah does not offer an endless summer. It offers the end of exposure: nothing above you that burns, nothing around you that bites, and nothing restless setting the hours.

The beach in the child's drawing is not wrong to want rest. It has simply drawn the one thing the Garden leaves out.

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.