Al-Infitar · Makki · ayah 15 of 19

Al-Infitar 82:15

يَصْلَوْنَهَا يَوْمَ ٱلدِّينِ

“They will [enter to] burn therein on the Day of Recompense,”

Saheeh International

Essence

The Day they called a fiction is the Day they meet: they enter the fire of which this life gave only warnings.

A reflection

The heat that straightens, and the heat that burns

In a boatyard, a builder feeds a length of oak into a steam box. After an hour it comes out warm and supple. He bends it round a frame into the curve of a hull, and it holds that shape for a century. He is careful about the time. Leave the wood in too long, and it does not bend. It breaks.

Yaṣlawnahā comes from a root about contact with fire. The Arabs said ṣalaytu al-ʿūd bi-l-nār: I held the stick to the flame. Turned over the fire, a crooked staff became straight and supple. A sheep held to it was roasted. Iṣṭalā was to warm yourself at a fire on a cold night. So the same contact could comfort, correct or consume.

The Quran uses the gentle side of the root too. Mūsā (as), walking with his family through a cold desert night, saw a fire on the mountainside. He told them he hoped to bring back a burning brand, 'so that you may warm yourselves' (28:29). The verb there, taṣṭalūn, is from the same root.

One classical derivation even links the word for prayer, ṣalāh, to the picture of the stick turned over the flame. On that view, prayer is the heat that straightens a crooked life. The better-known view derives ṣalāh from supplication, and the lexicons give both.

One reflection follows. In this life, the heat comes to us at a distance. Hardship, loss, a humbling failure. Held to it wisely, we are straightened. The same prayer, five times a day, is a small, steady warmth that keeps us supple.

Refuse every fire that straightens, and one day you meet the fire that only burns. Yaṣlawnahā: they enter it and suffer its heat, the commentators say. The present tense makes the scene vivid, as if it were already happening.

The word that could have meant a family warming themselves by a desert fire has become the word for final loss. That is the tragedy the ayah holds. The same element that could have straightened them is now all they have.

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.