Al-A'la · Makki · ayah 13 of 19

Al-A'la 87:13

ثُمَّ لَا يَمُوتُ فِيهَا وَلَا يَحْيَىٰ

“Neither dying therein nor living.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The worst of the Fire is not only its heat but its stalemate: no death to end it, and no life worth the name.

A reflection

Stuck in the throat

A night train stalls in a snowdrift somewhere in the mountains. By four in the morning the heating has failed and the buffet is empty. A passenger texts her sister: I'm not dead, but I'm not exactly alive either. Everyone who reads it knows what she means.

The Arabs had the same idiom. When they described someone caught in unbearable hardship, they said: he is neither alive nor dead. Some commentators say the ayah speaks to its first hearers in their own speech.

Others read it more literally. The soul of the one in the Fire, they said, rises to his throat and stays there. It does not leave, so that he dies. It does not go back to its place, so that he lives.

Most readings join the two halves with a short gloss. He does not die, and so find rest. He does not live a life that does him any good. A line of old Arabic verse, quoted in one commentary, puts it as a lament. Why can a soul neither die, so its toil ends, nor live a life with any taste to it?

So the ayah is not a riddle about biology. He is alive enough to feel, and one commentary notes that feeling is exactly how the punishment reaches him. He is not alive in any sense that matters.

One classical writer finds a mirror in this. In this world, he says, such a person never lived the real life he was created for. His life was like that of grazing animals: eating, sleeping, feeling. Yet he was not dead either. So the next life takes the same shape, because the recompense matches the deed.

He gives a picture from this world too. A man lives with a disease so heavy that it bars him from every pleasure the healthy enjoy. He wishes for death, and it does not come. He is neither with the living nor with the dead.

The passenger on the train was reached at dawn. The ayah describes a night with no dawn in it. That is why it is told to us now, while dawn still comes.

The full entry has 4 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.