الهمزة · الآية 1

Commentary

In Arabic, the word rendered "woe" does not express a bare calling down of evil. Wayl is a noun: the name of what cuts off the road of the one who takes it, or of the cry of someone who has just looked over a place of ruin. The sound itself, way, is the wail that escapes one who has seen what is not taken back; the lām then seals it and makes it a noun, until it became a word of alarm thrown into the face of one who is about to fall.

The verse places the word before the one it describes, and for a reason: the speech means to shake the one who is going to hear the Surah before it acquaints him with the one on whom it falls. The cry comes first and the face is uncovered afterwards, so every listener receives it as though it might be meant for him, before it becomes clear that it concerns someone else. This is what the Surah intends: to halt the reader so that he first examines whether there is in him anything of what is about to be named.

It is plain, moreover, that the Qurʾān places wayl where it does not recur without design. In al-Baqara it reads: ﴿فَوَيْلٌ لِلَّذِينَ يَكْتُبُونَ الْكِتَابَ بِأَيْدِيهِمْ﴾. The one described there is whoever corrupted the written book, while here it is whoever corrupts the book of people's honour. The two corruptions answer each other: that one in the guarded text, this one in the honour of the absent.

In the speech of the Arabs the root h-m-z turns on a hidden push delivered with a small tool. Hamaza the horse with his mihmāz: he pricked it with something sharp at the tip. Hamaza the word in pronouncing it: he pressed upon it with a cutting of the throat. In writing, the hamza is drawn as a single point that abridges that whole cutting, so every hamz in the language is a pricking gathered into a point.

The humazah of the Surah is the one who has made pricking his trade. He does not lay people's standing open by an outward word that can be answered; he pricks it with a sign of the eyebrow, a wink of the eye, or a motion of the finger. This is the slightest movement a human being possesses, and he has made it his tool. It is also the basest means of injury: the doer can deny it if he is questioned, because the one pricked is absent and the pricking is too hidden to be caught.

The pattern fuʿalah in humazah moves the word from an event over into a trait. He did not prick once; pricking became the very cast of his face. Whoever looks at him sees his eye searching, in everything it turns toward, for a point to prick, and whoever has come to this has turned his whole self to the work of the needle.

In the speech of the Arabs the root l-m-z turns on a hidden thrust made in speech, or on a pinching of the lips and the face. Lamaza the man means that he charged him with a fault, to his face or in his absence, with a word that wounds without speaking plainly. The fine distinction between hamz and lamz in the speech of the Arabs is that the first works in absence and by gesture, the second in the presence of the one stabbed, through a twisted speech he understands and cannot push back.

So the Surah, with two words, encloses the kinds of harm that hide behind people's gatherings: a pinch in the back and a stab in the face. It is as though it said that whoever has made this his craft has no way out, neither in people's absence nor in their presence. Here too the pattern fuʿalah binds the act to its agent: a lumazah is one in whom stabbing has grown frequent until he keeps to it, as a person keeps to his own gait.

Setting the two words side by side carries a sense that only an attentive ear catches: the matching rhythm suggests that the two acts are one thing at bottom, and that this one thing issues through two doors. When the door of pinching by gesture is closed upon a man, the door of stabbing by speech opens for him, and the Surah shuts both doors together.

"Every" in the verse gathers what gathers only under this description. No particular person is named, nor any people by their names; the one meant is whoever has settled within himself to make the pricking and stabbing of people a trade. This generality makes the Surah fit for every age in which the tools of pinching and stabbing are renewed.

In the reader's time the tools have multiplied: the wink has become a mocking comment, and the stab a post that draws the laughter of followers. The substance is one: the pricking of someone absent, and a fault running on the tongue in someone's presence. The pattern the Qurʾān chose stretches over all these shapes; whoever has made them his form has entered into "every," and it is no help to him that his age has brought tools other than those the word first named.

The Surah opens with a cry, not with news. "Woe" is indefinite: it releases the threat without confining it, and "to every" gathers whoever the description reaches, in any time and any place. In Arabic, wayl is a word that escapes the mouth as an alarm at a pit: whoever has stood in this place has looked over what is not safe. Al-Baqara uses it in the face of whoever corrupted the written book: ﴿فَوَيْلٌ لِلَّذِينَ يَكْتُبُونَ الْكِتَابَ بِأَيْدِيهِمْ﴾; here the woe is in the face of whoever corrupts the book of people's honour.

The description then comes in a heavy pattern: humazah lumazah. The pattern fuʿalah binds the act to its owner until it becomes a settled trait rather than a passing event, and the humazah is the one whose pinching has become the very form in which he breathes. The two words stand side by side in a parallel rhythm: two different letters at the head, and then the building is one. The root h-m-z turns on a pricking gathered into a point, while the root l-m-z denotes a fault cast by the tongue or by gesture. The first works by the eye, the second by the tongue, and both gnaw at the honour of the absent from where he cannot see.

The Surah will show in its verses how the act turns back upon its doer: toward whoever has made the lessening of people his trade goes a fire that climbs over what is finer than anything he pinched with. "Woe" is a word that opens the door of the pit before it describes it.

Two Readings

The two readings do not conflict. The first preserves the inherited gloss and a reported occasion; the second listens for the practice written into the two roots. This book chooses the additional listening.