Al-Ghashiyah · Makki · ayah 6 of 26

Al-Ghashiyah 88:6

لَّيْسَ لَهُمْ طَعَامٌ إِلَّا مِن ضَرِيعٍ

“For them there will be no food except from a poisonous, thorny plant”

Saheeh International

Essence

Their only food is a desert thorn that camels graze while green and shun once dried to poison: sweet in its season, deadly after.

A reflection

Green in spring, poison in summer

Out in the Arabian scrub grew a thorny plant that hugged the ground. In spring, green and full of sap, it was grazed gladly by the camels. Quraysh called it shibriq then. When summer came and it dried, the same plant took a different name: ḍarīʿ. Then no animal would touch it. One early authority, recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, says that in its dry form it is poison.

An old poet caught the moment of change. The camel grazed the juicy shibriq until it withered and turned ḍarīʿ; then even the hungry she-camels drew away from it. Another poet describes camels penned in a pasture of broken ḍarīʿ. They stand hunched, forelegs bloody from the thorns, udders dry.

So when the Quran says their only food is ḍarīʿ, the first hearers saw more than thorns. They saw a plant they knew in two seasons. Sweet in its time. Poison after it.

That is the lifecycle of most wrongdoing. It rarely arrives dry and thorny. It arrives green. The flattering lie that smooths a meeting. The small fiddle on the expenses that nobody checks. The friendship built on mocking others, such fun at twenty. The habit that feels like comfort in its first year. In its spring, every one of these is grazed gladly.

Then the season turns. The lie needs another lie. The fiddle becomes a pattern. The friendship curdles into distrust. The comfort becomes a cage. What once fed us now cuts the mouth and gives nothing back. The Quran's picture is the end of that road: a whole life's grazing gone dry, and nothing else left to eat.

The mercy is that we still live in the spring of things. The plant is still green. We can see what it will become, and walk away while walking away is easy.

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.