104. Sūrat al-Humaza

Nine verses; thirty-three words, depending on the method of counting. It takes its name from the word همزة in the first verse.

The sūra draws the portrait of a man. But the striking side of the portrait is that it brings two separate habits together in one and the same person: the first is the belittling of people, the second the accumulating of wealth. At first sight these are two different faults; the one is done with the tongue, the other with the hand. The sūra gathers the two into a single sentence, into a single subject, and then in the third verse states the source they share.

This joining is the sūra's real idea, and it explains the whole of the text. I shall come back to it in a separate section.

The skeleton of the sūra runs as follows:

1. The ruling (1): an attribute is described, and a word is said about that attribute — wayl. 2. The description (2): what that man does — he gathers and he counts. 3. The diagnosis (3): why he does it — he supposes that his wealth has made him immortal. 4. Rejection and outcome (4): kallā — no; and he will be flung. 5. The pause (5): "what made you know what the Crusher is?" 6. The depiction (6-9): what the fire is, where it reaches, how it is closed.

There is a striking proportion here: the man's condition in this world is told in three verses, his outcome in five. The sūra sets aside more room for the consequence than for the act.

There is an agreement close to unanimity that the sūra is Meccan, and in the lists of the order of revelation it is placed among the early ones. The content supports this: short and hard verse-endings, a diagnosis bearing on an economy of trade, a close in a depiction of the hereafter, and the direct targeting of the behaviour the small body of believers met with in the Mecca of that period — mockery and belittlement.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without it.

Waylun li-kulli humazatin lumaza "Woe to every man who slanders behind the back and reproaches to the face."

Root: و-ي-ل. In Arabic it is a word conveying destruction, torment, severe pain. A word of imprecation and of threat; and at the same time the name of calamity itself.

The analysis of this word was carried out in the section on al-Māʿūn; here let us only state the weight it carries in this context. Two points about the word are important:

One. The word does not build a sentence; it proclaims a judgement. Waylun is the subject of the nominal sentence and its predicate is li-kulli humaza. Rendered into English as "woe be to…", it stands there like a formula of prayer; the Arabic usage is rather like a finding of fact: this is what that attribute earns.

Two. There is a widespread saying that wayl is a valley in Hell. This is a piece of information that circulates a great deal in the literature of exegesis and of preaching; but the soundness of the report on which it rests has been disputed by the classical scholars and has not met with definite acceptance. The lexical sense of the word is already sufficient; there is no need to posit the name of a place.

It may be the single most important word of the sūra, and it is generally passed over.

كل here conveys istighrāq: it covers the whole of the genus. The verse does not say "to that humaza" or "to this man". It says "to every humaza".

This has two consequences:

One. The sūra does not take aim at a person; it takes aim at an attribute. Whoever carries that attribute is the one the verse speaks of; whoever does not carry it is not. Identity, affiliation, class and period make no difference.

Two. Whatever the names transmitted as the occasion of revelation may be — and I shall touch on them below — the wording of the text has been left general. The rule known in legal theory works here exactly: what counts is the generality of the wording, not the particularity of the occasion. Even when the Qurʾān comes down upon an event, if it does not record the doer of that event by name but describes his attribute, it has bound the ruling to the attribute.

This settles from the outset how the sūra bears upon the present: the text is not the identification of a class but the description of a behaviour.

Both words have come on the pattern فُعَلَة (fuʿala), and this pattern is the place that carries the meaning of the sūra.

Fuʿala is an intensive form. It conveys the man who does the act much, who has made that work his habit and his trade. Its examples in Arabic:

• ḍuḥaka — one who laughs much
• luʿana — one who curses much
• huzaʾa — one who mocks much

There is a further fine distinction the lexicographers record: فُعَلَة (fuʿala) conveys the agent (the doer), while فُعْلَة (fuʿla) conveys the patient (the one to whom it is done). That is, ḍuḥaka is "one who laughs much" and ḍuḥka is "one who is laughed at"; luʿana is "one who curses much", luʿna "one who is cursed". A single difference in the vowelling reverses the role.

The words in the verse are in the agent pattern. That is, the man described is not the one mocked but the one who mocks; and not incidentally, but with continuity and with intensity.

This is the most important limit the pattern sets: the sūra does not describe a rudeness committed once. A word said in anger, a moment's contempt, a piece of mockery later regretted — these are not what this pattern describes. The pattern conveys that the behaviour has settled into the personality, has become a way of looking. Not the man who does the act, but the man who has become the act.

What these two roots mean, and what the difference between them is, has been one of the much-discussed questions of classical exegesis. Let us first give the concrete senses of the roots.

همز — root ه-م-ز. Its primary sense in the lexicon is to press, to squeeze, to break, to prod. To bear down on a thing and crush it. The name of the letter hamza in the Arabic alphabet comes from here as well: the sound produced by a constriction and a cutting-off in the throat.

Its usages in the Qurʾān:

• "Say: My Lord, I take refuge with You from the promptings of the satans" (al-Muʾminūn 23/97). Hamazāt — prodding, incitement.
• "A constant fault-finder, a carrier of slander" (al-Qalam 68/11). Hammāz — again in an intensive form, from the same root, and again within the portrait of a man.

لمز — root ل-م-ز. To reproach, to find fault, to belittle with a movement of the eyebrow and the eye, to point at someone in a way that lowers him in the eyes of others.

Its usages in the Qurʾān:

• "Do not find fault with one another" (al-Ḥujurāt 49/11). Note: not "one another" but, in the letter of it, "yourselves" — anfusakum. That is, whoever finds fault with another has found fault with himself. The same verse also forbids the giving of nicknames and mockery.
• "And among them are those who find fault with you over the alms" (al-Tawba 9/58).
• "Those who find fault with the believers who give alms voluntarily…" (al-Tawba 9/79).

This last is particularly important for Sūrat al-Humaza. Al-Tawba 9/79 places the verb lamz directly into the context of wealth: those who look at who gave what and belittle them. The Qurʾān, that is, makes the link between mockery and wealth outside Sūrat al-Humaza too. That the first two verses of al-Humaza stand side by side is not an isolated joining.

The classical exegetes see a difference between the two, but the descriptions they give of what that difference is contradict one another. It is right to record the views as they stand:

What must be noticed in the table is that the rows cancel one another. The same distinction has been transmitted both in one direction and in the reverse. This shows that the distinction had not settled definitely in the first generations — the sources agree that there is a difference and differ over what it is.

The reasonable conclusion that comes out of this — and I write it as my own assessment — is: the common ground of the two words is the act itself, to make someone small; and the difference lies in the instruments of that act. Hand, tongue, eye, hint, absence, face to face. By setting the two words side by side, the sūra covers all of these instruments. So even if the distinction is not settled, the function of using the two words together is clear: to enumerate every form of belittling.

If we return to the concrete senses of the roots, one further kinship appears. Hamz is "to press, to crush"; lamz is "to mark a fault". Both handle a human being as an object: the one an object to be pressed down, the other an object on which faults are to be sought. This makes a silent link with what follows in the sūra — with the man counting his wealth: he who treats people as objects lives by counting objects.

Reports are transmitted to the effect that this sūra came down concerning a particular person, and several names occur in the reports. These names are ascribed in different places in the exegetical literature to different sūras as well, and the reports do not agree with one another. For that reason I transmit none of them in a definite language, and I avoid giving names.

What can be said with certainty is this: the type of person the reports describe is historically extremely realistic. Mecca was a city of trade; there was a direct link between wealth and standing; and the leading men of the city met the new message, and most of the powerless people who followed it, with belittlement. The Qurʾān records this behaviour many times over:

• "When they see you they only take you for mockery: 'Is this the one God has sent as a messenger?'" (al-Furqān 25/41).
• "Those who committed crimes used to laugh at those who believed" (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/29).
• "And they said: Should this Qurʾān not have been sent down upon a great man of the two towns?" (al-Zukhruf 43/31).

This third one is the key to understanding the logic of the sūra. The objection is not theological but positional: the truth of the message is not being disputed; what is being disputed is the rank of the man who carries the message. It is assumed that for a word to be true its speaker must be rich and great.

And this is exactly the logic of humaza-lumaza. To bind worth to position, and position to wealth. Once this assumption is set up, mockery becomes not a fault but a consistent conclusion: you belittle what you count worthless.

That the sūra names this man not by his name but by his attribute keeps the diagnosis from stopping at a single Meccan and turns it upon the assumption itself.

Alladhī jamaʿa mālan wa ʿaddadah "He who gathered wealth and counted it over and over."

Alladhī is a relative pronoun, and it is an adjective to the humaza lumaza of the preceding verse: "every humaza lumaza who…"

There is a point of grammar here. Alladhī is singular, whereas the word it qualifies has come with kull and conveys plurality in sense. In Arabic it is permissible to treat kull as singular according to its wording and as plural according to its sense; here the sūra uses the singular, and in the eighth verse (ʿalayhim — "over them") it will use the plural. This is not an inconsistency but the separate use of the two faces of kull.

In respect of meaning, what follows is this: a relative pronoun gives not an identity but a description. It does not say "such-and-such a man"; it says "the man who does this". The identity indefinite, the behaviour definite.

جمع — to bring together, to gather, to build up a store.

مالًا has come indefinite. Not "the wealth" but "a wealth". In Arabic indefiniteness conveys either belittlement or magnification; here the exegetes defend both. But it has a more important consequence: the kind of the wealth, its quantity and its source are not stated.

This is a deliberate gap. The sūra does not say "unlawful wealth", does not say "stolen wealth", does not say "wealth earned by usury". The method of earning never comes up at all. The criticism is directed not at where the wealth came from but at the relationship formed with the wealth.

This is the first point that separates the sūra from a criticism of income.

The densest word of the sūra.

Pattern: the تفعيل (tafʿīl) form. One of the functions of this form is takthīr: it conveys the multiplicity of the act, its repetition, its intensity. As in kasara (he broke) → kassara (he broke into pieces); or qattala (he killed many).

So ʿaddada is not "he counted" but "he counted over and over". Not an operation done once, but an operation repeated.

There is disagreement over the meaning of the word, and two main readings stand together in the sources:

A third, less widespread reading is also transmitted: to diversify — to increase the kinds of the wealth, to multiply its items.

All three come out at the same place in the text: the wealth becoming, instead of something used, an object that is kept. But the first reading is the one that overlaps best with the rest of the sūra; for the verb that is to come in the third verse (yaḥsabu — he supposes) is a verb of the mind, and counting too is an operation of the mind. There is a natural passage between the two.

The structure of the sentence looks simple, but it holds a complete diagnosis.

Gathering is an act done once. An operation is carried out, the wealth increases, it is over. Counting is repetitive — and the tafʿīl pattern registers this grammatically. The verse, that is, shows two separate stages in the life of wealth: it is acquired once, it is counted continually.

The verbs that are not said are at least as important as those that are. The verse does not say: he spent, he ate, he used, he gave, he invested, he put it to work, he distributed. Wealth does not appear at all as an economic instrument. Only two things happen: it accumulates, and it is counted.

This is the description of wealth's ceasing to be a means and becoming an end. The value of a means lies in its use; the value of an end lies in its existence. The act of counting is exactly the sign of this change: if you count a thing again and again, you are not using it.

Why does a man count what he owns again and again?

Number has a function, and that function is not economic but mental: number makes uncertainty measurable. You cannot say anything definite about the situation you are in; but you can say something definite about the quantity of what you own. Number extracts a controllable figure out of an uncontrollable field.

The consequence of this is that the relief counting gives is short-lived. For the number does not remove the real uncertainty; it merely stands in its place. When the uncertainty returns, the counting is repeated with it.

The verse's choice of the tafʿīl pattern sits exactly on this point. The repetition lies not in the nature of the act but in the act's not working. If an operation yields a result, there is no need for it to be repeated.

A limit has to be drawn here: this is not a clinical diagnosis and must not be read as one. The sūra is not speaking of an illness; it is speaking of an ordinary and widespread behaviour that everyone recognises. Nor is repetition in itself a fault. What the verse counts as the fault will be said in the third verse: what the number stands in the place of.

The same behaviour is described in other places in the Qurʾān too, and almost always with the same two verbs:

"He gathered and stored away." (al-Maʿārij 70/18)

A sentence of two words, and of the same structure as al-Humaza 104/2: a verb of gathering, and after it a verb of keeping. There too what is told is not what was done with the wealth but what was not done with it.

"I gave him extended wealth, and sons before his eyes… Then he hopes that I will give him more." (al-Muddaththir 74/12-13, 15)

Here too the same type of character is described: one who has been given, hoping for more. And there is a striking word: the wealth is mamdūd — extended. The last word of Sūrat al-Humaza is mumaddad — extended. The two sūras qualify two different things with the same root (م-د-د): the one the wealth, the other the columns of the fire. I record this as an observation, not as a claim.

"Wealth and sons are the adornment of the life of this world." (al-Kahf 18/46)

"Does he suppose that his wealth will profit him? No — he will surely be flung into the Crusher" — this is al-Humaza's own sentence; but the Qurʾān states the same judgement openly in other places as well: "His wealth will not profit him when he falls" (al-Layl 92/11); "His wealth and what he earned did not profit him" (al-Masad 111/2).

Yaḥsabu anna mālahu akhladah "He supposes that his wealth has made him immortal."

The diagnostic verse of the sūra. The two preceding verses described the behaviour; this verse states the belief that lies beneath the behaviour.

Root: ح-س-ب. In Arabic this root carries two verbs, and both are given under the same entry:

• حَسَبَ يَحْسُبُ — he counted, he reckoned. From here ḥisāb (reckoning) and muḥāsaba.
• حَسِبَ يَحْسَبُ — he supposed, he thought. From here the yaḥsabu of the verse.

So "to count" and "to suppose" are from the same root. This is not to be counted a coincidence; the lexicographers record that beneath the root lies the idea of "evaluating a thing according to a particular reckoning", and that from there both numerical calculation and settled opinion are derived.

The arrangement of the verse appears to make use of this kinship: in the preceding verse he counted (ʿaddada), in this verse he supposed (yaḥsabu). The man who counts is making a wrong reckoning. I write this as my own reading — I do not present it as a link established in the classical sources — but that the two words come from the same root is a fact standing in the text.

That the verb comes in the imperfect. The two verbs in the preceding verse were in the perfect: jamaʿa, ʿaddada. This verb is in the imperfect: yaḥsabu.

In Arabic this passage is meaningful. The perfect (māḍī) conveys what has been completed, the imperfect (muḍāriʿ) what is ongoing and renewed. That is: his gathering and his counting happened in the past; his supposing is still going on. The supposition is not a mistake left behind in the past; it is an assumption at work at this moment.

Root: خ-ل-د. Khuld — permanence, remaining continuously in one state, continuing without change. Khālid — the one who abides. From the same root, jannat al-khuld (the garden of permanence) and mukhalladūn.

The verb is of Form IV: akhlada — "he made him abide, he made him immortal."

There is another usage of the same verb in the Qurʾān, and it is very meaningful for this sūra:

"Had We willed, We would have raised him by those signs; but he clung to the earth and followed his own desire." (al-Aʿrāf 7/176)

The verb there is أخلد إلى الأرض: "he made himself abide towards the earth" — that is, he was pinned to the ground, he became unable to part from it. The same root here describes the failure to rise. That the search for permanence fixes a man to the ground is a silent link set up between the two verses.

That the verb comes in the perfect. The expected form would have been the future: "he supposes that his wealth will make him immortal." The verse uses the perfect: "it made him immortal."

This is a recognised usage in Arabic: a thing expected to happen in the future is told in the past form as though its occurrence were certain. Its function is to convey certainty.

But here the certainty is not the speaker's; it is the certainty in the mind of the man who supposes. That is, the verse says this: this man is not hoping for something that will happen; he supposes it a thing already done and finished. Permanence is for him not a hope but a result already obtained. The choice of this form shows how deep the supposition runs.

This is the heart of the sūra.

In saying what the man who accumulates wealth supposes, the verse does something unexpected. It could have said the following, and all of them would have been reasonable:

• He supposes that his wealth has made him strong.
• He supposes that his wealth has made him secure.
• He supposes that his wealth has made him superior.

The verse says none of these. It says "has made him immortal".

The diagnosis, that is, does not stay at the economic or the social layer; it descends to the lowest layer of all. Beneath the behaviour of accumulating lies a search for security, beneath the search for security a search for control, and at the very bottom helplessness in the face of death. The sūra goes straight down to the bottom.

The fine side of this diagnosis is that nobody thinks it openly. No one who accumulates wealth says "with this I shall become immortal"; if he were asked, he would deny it. But the verb in the verse is yaḥsabu — "he supposes" — and this describes not a declared belief but an assumption at work. The behaviour itself carries a belief, even if the man never defends that belief in words.

The verse looks not at what a man says but at what his behaviour assumes. This is the real property that carries the sūra into the present.

The link between the consciousness of death and accumulation is a link that has been made independently in the modern human sciences. We can transmit it without forcing anything, but it must be stated at the outset: this literature does not confirm the verse, and the verse does not announce this literature in advance. The two look at the same phenomenon out of two different languages.

The material record. One of the most widespread kinds of archaeological find is grave goods. Cultures independent of one another — in Egypt, on the steppe, in northern Europe, in China, in the Americas — have buried their dead together with their wealth: jewellery, weapons, vessels, animals, sometimes a boat, sometimes a building. A part of this is explained by belief in the hereafter, a part by the display of status after death as well. But the practice itself is beyond dispute: people have tried to carry wealth beyond death. The supposition the sūra describes has a tangible, non-metaphorical history.

Other forms of the same line: having a monument built, leaving behind a building that bears one's name, continuing the family name, founding an endowment. The structure common to all of them is binding oneself to an object that will remain after one is gone.

The theoretical frame. The anthropologist and thinker Ernest Becker put forward the following thesis in his book The Denial of Death, published in 1973: a great part of human culture is a defensive apparatus built in order to cope with the consciousness of death; people try to overcome annihilation symbolically by producing "immortality projects" that will remain after them.

Working from this thesis, from the 1980s onward a research programme was developed in psychology under the name of terror management theory. The experimental core of the programme is this: when people are given a stimulus that reminds them of their death, an increase has been measured in their attachment to their own cultural worldview, to markers of status and to material possessions. Some studies have reported that a reminder of death directly increases the tendency to consume and to accumulate.

Honesty is required about this literature. Some of the findings of the research programme in question have in recent years become the subject of debates about replicability, and the theory is not a body of knowledge accepted without question. For that reason I transmit it here not as a proof but as a line of thought and research that makes the same link independently.

Where the overlap lies. The single point at which the verse and this literature meet is this: that the behaviour of accumulating wealth can carry an anxiety about death which the man does not admit to himself. The verse says this in one sentence and emphasises it besides by the form of a verb. The modern literature tries to measure the same thing with experimental designs. The difference between the two should be recorded as well: the literature describes it as a mechanism and carries no value judgement; the verse qualifies it as a wrong — kallā, no.

Kallā la-yunbadhanna fi'l-ḥuṭama "No! By God, he will surely be flung into the Crusher."

The function of kallā was treated in detail in the preceding section (al-Takāthur 102/3): it conveys both rejection (radd, the erasing of a judgement) and restraint (zajr).

Here the target of the particle is very clear, and clearer than it was in al-Takāthur. There kallā was cutting off an assumption that had not been spoken. Here what is cut off is the last word of the preceding verse: akhladah — it made him immortal.

The sūra, that is, first set the supposition up as it stood, and then demolished it with a single word. Yaḥsabu anna mālahu akhladah — kallā. Between the two sentences there is no explanation, no proof, no argument. Only the rejection.

This is meaningful in point of rhetoric. If a claim is refuted with a proof, that means the claim has been counted worth discussing. A claim cut off with kallā has not been taken into the discussion at all.

The verb carries three layers, exactly as in al-Takāthur 102/6:

1. An oath that is not spoken 2. Lām al-qasam — the lām of the oath 3. Nūn al-taʾkīd al-thaqīla — the heavy nūn of emphasis

And the verb is in the passive: "he will be flung" — who does the flinging is not said. This is a choice that will run to the end of the sūra: in the eighth verse too it will say "it is closed", and who closes it will not be said.

The effect of the passive form here is this: the man is dropped entirely into a passive position. Two verses earlier he was the subject — he was gathering, he was counting, he was supposing. Now he is handled like an object.

Root: ن-ب-ذ. Its sense in the lexicon: to throw a thing away because one counts it worthless, to fling it aside as of no account, to be rid of it.

The distinguishing property of the word is that it places a value judgement inside the act of throwing. Not every throwing is nabdh; nabdh is the counting of the thing thrown as useless.

From the same root, نبيذ (nabīdh): the drink made by throwing dates or grapes into water. The word comes from "that which has been thrown".

Its usages in the Qurʾān show this value judgement very clearly:

• "A group of those who were given the Book threw the Book of God behind their backs." (al-Baqara 2/101)
• "They threw it behind their backs and took a small price for it." (Āl ʿImrān 3/187)
• "Whenever they made a covenant, a group among them broke it and threw it away." (al-Baqara 2/100)
• "We seized him and his armies and flung them into the sea." (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/40; also al-Dhāriyāt 51/40)
• "We cast him onto the bare open ground." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/145)

This list sets up the irony of the sūra. Nabdh is the verb used in the Qurʾān especially for throwing the Book and the covenant behind one's back — that is, for counting an obligation worthless and being rid of it.

In the sūra the same verb is applied, this time, to the man himself. He who counted worthless and threw away is counted worthless and thrown away.

And there is a tighter opposition: جمع (he gathered) and نبذ (he was flung) are exact contraries. To gather is to bring together what is scattered; nabdh is to be rid of what is together. For a whole lifetime the man was the party that gathered; at the end he becomes the thing that is thrown away. This opposition set up between the two verses is the sūra's clearest literary move.

Root: ح-ط-م. To break, to shatter, to crumble, to grind to powder. To break a thing that is hard and whole and reduce it to debris.

From the same root, حُطام (ḥuṭām): crumbs, debris, a dry and crumbled remnant. The Qurʾān uses this in two places, and in both of them for crops:

• "Then it dries, and you see it turned yellow, and then it becomes broken straw." (al-Zumar 39/21)
• "Had We willed, We would have made it broken straw." (al-Wāqiʿa 56/65)

These two verses are directly meaningful for the sūra. Ḥuṭām is the state at the end of the harvest: what has grown, ripened, yellowed and crumbled away. It is, that is, the final state of a thing that has accumulated. The name of the place at which the man who accumulates wealth will arrive comes from the same root as the state at which the accumulated crop will arrive.

There is one further usage of the root, and it is important for its concreteness:

"O ants! Enter your dwellings, lest Solomon (Sulaymān) and his armies crush you without being aware of it." (al-Naml 27/18)

The verb here is from the same root and describes exactly being crushed underfoot and ground to powder.

Now we come to the sūra's most striking rhetorical move.

حُطَمَة is of the same pattern as همزة and لمزة: فُعَلَة.

The name of the fire, that is, has been given in the same intensive measure as the name of the man. The man is "one who breaks much, who has made breaking his habit" — the making small of people. And the fire too is "one that breaks much" — but in the literal sense, by grinding to pieces.

That the pattern should be repeated in this way cannot be counted a coincidence; the sūra uses the same measure in three words, and all three within four verses of the sūra. The punishment is described in the grammar of the offence.

According to what the lexicographers record, this pattern was used for people as well: it is transmitted that a man who eats much and consumes greedily, or a shepherd harsh with his flock, was called ḥuṭama. That the word can be applied to a human being too makes the pairing in the sūra still more visible.

Al-Ḥuṭama among the names of Hell. The Qurʾān uses several names for Hell: jahannam, nār, jaḥīm, saqar, laẓā, saʿīr, hāwiya and ḥuṭama. Each name brings one aspect of the fire forward. Ḥuṭama occurs in the Qurʾān in this sūra alone — in verses 4 and 5, twice.

And the choice is apt: two sūras earlier, in al-Takāthur, the same place had been named jaḥīm — by the fierceness of the flame. Here the same place is named by the function of grinding to pieces. Why? Because the fault of the man here was gathering and making whole. The name of punishment that fits him is the one that scatters and crumbles.

Wa mā adrāka ma'l-ḥuṭama "And what made you know what the Crusher is?"

Root: د-ر-ي. Dirāya — to know, to be aware. Adrā (Form IV) — he made known, he informed.

Mā adrāka — literally: "what made you know?" Its meaning: "your knowledge cannot grasp what this is; had you known it, you would have known it from one who made it known."

This pattern is a structure repeated in the Qurʾān, and it shows an interesting regularity. The finding recorded in the classical sources is this:

Examples: "And what made you know what the Night of Qadr is?" (al-Qadr 97/2) — and after it comes an explanation of three verses. "And what made you know what the steep ascent is?" (al-Balad 90/12) — and the explanation comes. Against these: "What will make you know? Perhaps the Hour is near" (al-Shūrā 42/17); "And what will make you know? Perhaps he will purify himself" (ʿAbasa 80/3) — in these no knowledge is given.

In al-Humaza the pattern is the perfect (adrāka), and the rule holds: from the sixth verse on there comes an explanation of four verses.

There is a change of direction in the verse, and it needs to be noticed.

• Verses 1-4: the third person. Humaza, alladhī, jamaʿa, yaḥsabu, la-yunbadhanna. Someone is being spoken about.
• Verse 5: the second person singular. Adrā-ka — "you". The telling breaks off and turns to the listener.
• Verses 6-9: the telling returns again to depiction in the third person.

This is the manner of speech called iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address) in Arabic, and it is frequently used in the Qurʾān.

Its function here: the telling stops for a moment, the reader or listener is drawn into the scene, and then the telling begins again. The sentence ceases to be a conveying of information and becomes an event.

It has a further function. Up to this point the sūra had been telling of someone else; the reader was watching from a safe distance. The fifth verse removes that distance: what made you know? The man described is still in the third person, but the one addressed is now the reader.

The verse asks a question, but the answer to the question is "you do not know". That is, before giving any knowledge the verse proclaims that knowledge will not be enough.

The four verses of depiction that come after it have to be read together with this proclamation: the depiction is not a definition but a pointing. The sūra describes the thing after having said that the thing cannot be described. The knowledge given is knowledge whose insufficiency has been admitted in advance.

This is another form of the distinction Sūrat al-Takāthur set up between ʿilm al-yaqīn and ʿayn al-yaqīn: knowledge given by report has a limit.

Nāru'llāhi'l-mūqada "It is the kindled fire of God."

The answer to the question of the fifth verse begins here. The sentence is a nominal one; its subject is an implied hiya, or else it is directly a predicate clause: "[It is] the kindled fire of God."

The fire has been annexed to the name of God. This choice is worth dwelling on, because the Qurʾān does not use this construct everywhere it speaks of the fire of Hell.

The explanations the classical exegetes give:

One — magnification and intensification. In Arabic, the annexing of a thing to God conveys its greatness. The expression "the fire of God" says that this fire is of a different order from the fires that are known.

Two — to set it apart from the fire of this world. When "fire" is said, the one addressed will think of the thing he knows. The construct cuts that thought off.

There is a third explanation, and I add it as my own reading: all through the sūra the question of ownership was being treated. The man gathered the wealth, counted it, counted it his own, expected permanence from it. That the fire is named by the name of its owner is a sentence placed at the end of this series of ownership. To whom the wealth belonged was in dispute; to whom the fire belongs is not.

Root: و-ق-د. To catch fire, to burn. Waqūd — fuel. Awqada (Form IV) — he kindled, he set alight.

Al-mūqada is the passive participle of Form IV: kindled, set alight. That is, not a fire that burns of itself but a fire that is lit. The fire has one who lights it.

Kindred usages in the Qurʾān:

• "the Fire whose fuel is men and stones" (al-Baqara 2/24; also al-Taḥrīm 66/6). Waqūduhā — the same root. What the fuel is is stated.
• "Whenever they kindle a fire for war, God puts it out" (al-Māʾida 5/64). The same verb, for a fire kindled by human hands.

It is instructive to set the two verses side by side: the fire man kindles is put out; of the fire God kindles no such thing is said.

And the connection with al-Baqara 2/24 says one thing more: that the fuel is man himself. The man was gathering wealth; in the end he becomes fuel.

Allatī taṭṭaliʿu ʿala'l-afʾida "That fire which climbs over the hearts / which works into the hearts."

The finest verse of the sūra. Both of its words have to be opened up separately.

Root: ط-ل-ع. Its primary sense in the lexicon is to rise, to climb, to dawn, to appear. The rising of the sun is this verb: ṭalaʿa. Maṭlaʿ — the place of rising; in the Qurʾān: "until the rising of the dawn" (al-Qadr 97/5).

The تَطَّلِعُ of the verse is the imperfect of Form VIII (iṭṭalaʿa → taṭṭaliʿu), and this form adds a new layer to the sense of the root: to become apprised — to climb up over a thing and see it, to learn its inner face, to come to know it.

The usages in the Qurʾān show both layers:

• "He looked, and saw him in the midst of Hell." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/55). Fa'ṭṭalaʿa — he looked and became apprised.
• "Perhaps I may become apprised of — may climb up to — the god of Moses (Mūsā)." (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/38, the word of Pharaoh). Here the word carries both the sense "to climb" and the sense "to learn"; and for that reason the verse is rendered in two ways.

Both senses are at work in the verse, and both are to be read together:

One. To rise and climb over. The fire wraps the hearts, climbs over them, covers them. A physical encircling.

Two. To work into, to become apprised of the inner face. The fire reaches into the hearts — not from without but from within.

The second sense agrees with the whole of the sūra, because the fault the sūra describes belonged to the inside. And the sense of becoming apprised adds one thing more: the fire does not only burn, it also sees. What was hidden in the heart is brought out into the open.

The plural of the word فُؤَاد (fuʾād). Root: ف-أ-د.

The concrete sense of the root is worth dwelling on. According to what the lexicographers record, the verb faʾada means to roast on a fire, to burn; mifʾad or muftaʾad is the place or the instrument of roasting. In the root of the word fuʾād, that is, there is burning.

This brings out the most striking side of the verse: the name of the organ the fire reaches means, by its root, "the thing that burns". Between the choice of word and the verb there is a concord that comes from the root.

I transmit this lexical information as the lexicographers record it; it is not my own inference, but in the places in the exegetical literature where this link is treated it too is offered as an interpretation, not as a definite ruling.

In the classical sources a distinction is drawn between these two words. The distinctions commonly voiced are these:

That the root of the word qalb is "to turn" is worth recording separately: the heart has taken this name because it passes from state to state. The word carries its own unsteadiness in its name.

But honesty is required here. These distinctions are drawn in the classical sources, but the scholars do not agree in the detail of the distinction; and the Qurʾān's usage does not sharply confirm it everywhere. Part of what has been written about the differences between the words qalb, fuʾād, ṣadr and lubb consists of interpretations drawn out of the contexts in which the words occur. I transmit this not as a fact of the lexicon but as a distinction the tradition has dwelt upon.

Why does the verse say hearts, and not "bodies", not "skins"?

Because the whole of the fault the sūra describes had taken place in the heart:

• يحسب (he supposes) — this is a verb of the mind, of the heart. What is wrong is not a work done by the hand but a reckoning set up inside.
• Belittling — the acts of humaza-lumaza are done with the tongue and with the hand, but their source is an evaluation: to count the man in front of you lower than yourself. That evaluation is made in the heart.
• The expectation of permanence — it is a hope and a fear; and both are the work of the heart.

The punishment, that is, goes to the place where the fault is. The man gathered the wealth with his hands but took possession of it with his heart; he made his mockery with his tongue but decided it in his heart.

This has one further consequence: the sūra takes as its basis the difference between the life that shows from outside and what is going on inside. The man described is successful from outside — he has wealth, he has position, his word carries. The verse does not touch the outside at all; it goes straight inside.

Innahā ʿalayhim muʾṣada "It is closed over upon them."

The first thing that strikes one in the verse is the pronoun: عليهم — "over them". Plural.

Yet from the beginning the sūra had been speaking in the singular: alladhī jamaʿa, ʿaddadahu, yaḥsabu, mālahu, la-yunbadhanna. Now it passes to the plural.

This is not an inconsistency. The word كل (every) in the first verse is singular in wording and plural in sense; in Arabic, in structures built with kull, both a singular and a plural pronoun may be used. The sūra first used the singular according to the wording, and at the end passed to the plural according to the sense.

In respect of meaning, what follows is this: the portrait was of one man, the outcome is plural. The sūra began by describing a single person, but at the end it discloses that what it described was a type.

إنّ is the strongest particle of emphasis in Arabic. And the sentence is a nominal sentence — there is no verb. In Arabic a nominal sentence conveys fixity and continuity.

The verse, that is, does not say "it will be closed" or "it closes"; it says "it is closed over" — as a state, continuously.

The word order is: innahā — ʿalayhim — muʾṣada.

The expected order would have been innahā muʾṣadatun ʿalayhim. ʿAlayhim has been brought in front of the predicate. In Arabic an element drawn forward out of its normal place gains emphasis and restriction.

So the centre of gravity of the sentence becomes not "it is closed" but "over them". The closing is announced not as a general condition but as a condition belonging to them in particular.

Root: أ-ص-د / و-ص-د. Awṣada'l-bāb — he shut the door and locked it. Al-waṣīd — the door, the threshold, the entrance of a courtyard.

The usage in the Qurʾān: "And their dog lay at the entrance with its two forelegs outstretched." (al-Kahf 18/18). The al-waṣīd here is the entrance of the cave.

The additional sense the word carries is locking. Not merely to shut; to shut and draw the bolt across it, to make it impossible to open.

A difference of variant reading. The word has been read in two ways: مُؤْصَدَة (with hamza) and مُوصَدَة (without hamza, with wāw). This arises from the assumption of two separate roots (أصد / وصد) and does not change the meaning; on both readings the word means "shut, locked". I do not give the names of the imāms of the readings, because I cannot say with certainty which reading belongs to whom.

The same expression occurs in one other place in the Qurʾān: "Over them is a fire closed in." (al-Balad 90/20). The two verses are almost the same. And Sūrat al-Balad touches on the subject of wealth as well — there a man is reported as saying "I have spent heaps of wealth" (al-Balad 90/6). This closeness between the two sūras shows that the same words are used around the same subject.

The irony the sūra has been building from the start deepens here by one degree more.

To accumulate wealth is an effort to build an enclosure. With wealth a man draws a boundary: so that the dangers outside cannot come in, so that the security inside does not leak out. Wealth is by definition a wall. The words themselves say it: treasury, strongbox, store, granary — all of them names of closed spaces.

The verse gives the same enclosure back, but turning it inside out. There are two kinds of enclosure: the enclosure that protects and the enclosure that imprisons. The only difference between them is which side of the door you are on.

The man supposed he was building a fortress; the place he is shut into is a cell.

Fī ʿamadin mumaddada "In columns outstretched."

The last verse of the sūra, and the verse over whose meaning there is the most disagreement.

The word has been read in two ways, and both readings are transmitted among the imāms of the readings:

• عَمَدٍ (ʿamad) — fatḥa-fatḥa
• عُمُدٍ (ʿumud) — ḍamma-ḍamma

Both are plurals of the word عمود (ʿamūd — pole, column). Among the lexicographers it is disputed which of them is a plural and which a collective noun, but in point of meaning there is no difference: both mean "poles, columns".

I do not give the names of the imāms of the readings; the existence of the difference of reading is certain, its distribution I cannot give with certainty.

Root: م-د-د. To stretch, to draw, to extend, to grant a span of time. Madd — extension. Midād — ink (that which runs on and on). Imdād — to send support, to keep a thing going.

Mumaddada is the passive participle of the tafʿīl form: outstretched. And here too the tafʿīl pattern conveys takthīr — not an ordinary stretching, but stretched right out.

A comparison is instructive: mamdūd, from the same root, also means "extended", and it is used in al-Muddaththir 74/12 to qualify wealth. The mumaddada here, though, is in the doubled pattern — that is, more intense.

The exegetes differ over what the verse describes. The principal views:

The first view appears to be the one that sits best with the flow of the sūra, because the eighth verse had already described the closing, and the ninth verse is joined to it without a connective. I state this as a preference; it is not binding, and we have no proof for counting the other views weak.

The sūra closes with the word "outstretched". And this makes the sūra's tightest link.

The name of the thing the man wanted was خلود — permanence, continuance. In the third verse, akhladah: he supposed that "it made him immortal".

The last word of the sūra is ممددة: outstretched.

A span has been granted — but not to the thing he wanted. The demand for permanence is met, but with its object changed. He will find the continuance he sought; the thing that continues will not be the wealth.

I must state that this reading is my own inference. That the choice of word carries such an echo stands in the text; but I do not ascribe it to any classical exegete.

The verse-endings of the nine verses run as follows: lumazah — ʿaddadah — akhladah — ḥuṭamah — ḥuṭamah — mūqadah — afʾidah — muʾṣadah — mumaddadah.

All nine of the nine verses close with the same sound: a letter with fatḥa, and after it the hāʾ of pause. In pausing they all end with the sound "-ah". In a text this short, a complete unity of sound.

More than that: in five of the nine verse-endings there is the letter د immediately before the close (ʿaddadah, akhladah, mūqadah, muʾṣadah, mumaddadah), and two of these are doubled (ʿaddadah, mumaddadah). The sound of the sūra is percussive and repetitive — like the sound of a hammer.

I record this not as a claim of a miracle but as the agreement of the form of the text with its content: that a sūra whose subject is breaking and grinding to pieces should have a hammering sound too is a consistent choice. In the short Meccan sūras it is often seen that sound and content move together.

We return to the question I noted at the head of the sūra: why are these two habits in the same portrait?

The answer stands in the sūra's own structure. What joins the two habits is the supposition stated in the third verse. But the connection has to be built step by step.

First step: the feeling of superiority is relational.

For a man to be "superior" is not a quality in himself. Superiority always requires a comparison: superior to someone. A man left alone on an island cannot feel superiority from the abundance of his wealth — because there is nobody to be compared with.

Second step: there are two ways of enlarging the distance between.

To pull yourself up, or to push the man opposite you down. The result is the same: the distance grows.

• Accumulating wealth is the first move. It is laborious, it takes time, it requires something from outside.
• Belittling is the second move. It is free and instantaneous; it requires producing nothing, a word or a look is enough.

Third step: the two moves need one another.

Wealth by itself produces no superiority. A number carries no meaning by itself; for its meaning it needs a table of comparison. That is, the man who accumulates needs someone to be below him in order to be able to see the value of what he has accumulated.

For this reason humaza and lumaza are not two habits that have come together in the same person by chance. Belittling is the mechanism that turns accumulation into worth. The operation that converts wealth into superiority is mockery itself.

Fourth step: the source common to both is in the third verse.

The supposition that wealth will make one immortal is in truth an effort to hold a place: not to be annihilated, not to be erased, to remain. Belittling too is another form of the same effort — to make one's own place firm by setting oneself above another.

Both come out of the same anxiety: the anxiety of finding no place. The one tries to solve it with objects, the other with people.

This is why the sūra does not separate the two. It joins them in a single portrait because they are two faces of the same appetite.

And from here the symmetry the sūra sets up with the punishment is understood as well:

In all five of the five rows the punishment is described in the act's own language. This is the sūra's tightest property of structure.

In the arrangement of the codex sūras 102, 103 and 104 stand side by side and take hold of three faces of the same matter. This link was set up in the section on al-ʿAṣr and was cast into a table in the section on al-Takāthur; here I confine myself to stating the place of al-Humaza.

A note is required: this is an observation about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf, not about the order of revelation. The relation of the sūras to one another is a recognised subject in exegesis, but some scholars have approached the forcing of such links with caution.

Within the trio the distinguishing place of al-Humaza is this:

• Al-Takāthur sets the matter up on the horizontal plane: competing with the man beside you. The address is plural ("it distracted you"), the scene is social.
• Al-ʿAṣr sets the matter up on the plane of time: the melting away of capital. The address is to the name of the species ("man"), and it shows the one door out.
• Al-Humaza sets the matter up on the vertical plane: crushing the man below. The address is to an attribute ("every humaza"), the scene is individual.

In all three the same three elements are found — number, wealth, death — and Sūrat al-ʿAṣr stands in the middle of the trio by changing the unit of measure.

The particular contribution of al-Humaza is that it gives the deepest diagnosis of the three. Al-Takāthur states the behaviour and its duration: the race, until death. Al-ʿAṣr states the result: a negative balance. Al-Humaza states the cause: he supposes that his wealth has made him immortal. The answer to why the race does not end is here.

And the endings of the three sūras are of different kinds: al-Takāthur ends with a question ("you will be asked about the bounty"), al-ʿAṣr with an answer (the four conditions), al-Humaza with a closed door ("it is closed over upon them"). The door out is only in the middle one.

First: the sūra describes not an income group but a relationship.

This has to be stated at the very beginning, because this is the side of the sūra most easily abused.

The verse neither says "the rich" nor gives an amount. What it describes is a chain of behaviour: gathering, counting, hoping for permanence, belittling. Every link of this chain can be forged at any level of income. A man with little wealth can also count it over and over, expect permanence from it and belittle others; and a man with much wealth may do none of these.

The sūra is not the identification of a class. The principle recorded by the method (Method) holds here exactly: the verse describes an attribute; whoever carries that attribute is included in it.

Second: the growing ease of counting.

The tafʿīl pattern of the verb ʿaddada described the repetitiveness of counting. In the period when the sūra came down, that repetition ran up against a physical limit: to count the wealth one had to go to the storehouse, open the chest, drive the animals past. Counting was laborious, and that labour set a natural limit to its frequency.

Today that limit is gone. A balance can be seen with a single movement; a portfolio is updated instantly; the number of followers, the number of views, the sales figure, the step count are permanently open. Counting has become something that can be repeated dozens of times a day.

The verse's diagnosis becomes still more visible with this change: the relief counting gives is short-lived, and that is why it is repeated. The frequency of the repetition is the measure of the operation's not working. How many times a day a man looks shows how little that figure relieves him.

Third: immortality projects.

The sūra takes aim at a supposition: yaḥsabu. It is important to preserve this distinction, because the sūra does not forbid acquiring wealth, or preparing for the future, or leaving something to one's children. What it forbids is expecting from these a solution against death.

The forms this takes today are recognisable: having a building put up in one's name, founding an institution and giving it one's name, the currency of the language of "legacy" and "leaving a mark", the search for permanence in the digital medium, the passion for biography and archive. None of these is bad in itself; some of them are plainly good.

The point of distinction is this: does this thing make up for my annihilation, or is it something that will be of use to someone else after I am gone? The first sentence is the supposition the sūra describes. The second is something else entirely.

Fourth: the cheapening of mockery.

The fuʿala pattern conveyed a behaviour taken up as a habit — not one committed once. This distinction takes on a particular importance today, because it has never been so easy for belittling to become a trait of personality.

Throughout its history mockery used to stay within the bounds of an assembly: those who heard what you said were the ones present, and generally either the man you belittled or one of his relations was there. This produced a natural cost.

Today that limit has gone. A sentence of belittlement can reach thousands of people instantly; it is possible never to meet the man it is aimed at; and the attention it earns in return feeds the behaviour. The return on belittling has risen and its cost has fallen.

What the pattern says sits exactly here: an incidental rudeness and a way of looking that has become a habit are different things. The measure lies not in a single act but in the frequency and the ease of it. The easier and the more frequent a man's belittling of others is, the more settled the pattern has become.

Fifth: on whom the sūra is to be read.

This is the sūra's most serious trap, and it needs to be said openly.

Al-Humaza describes the man who belittles. To take this text in hand and place others in the description — the rich, one's acquaintances, public figures — and to pass judgement upon them is to commit the very act the sūra describes. To use a text in order to place people below oneself is exactly lamz.

The first word of the sūra is wayl, and that word announces a judgement. The authority to pass judgement belongs to the owner of the text, not to the one who reads it. What falls to the reader is to try the description on himself: do I count what I have gathered, what do I expect from it, and is my way of looking at others shaped by that expectation?

The text is an instrument of diagnosis; and a diagnosis is made first upon oneself.

At several points through the text a definite language was deliberately not used; the reader needs to know them:

• The widespread saying that wayl is a valley in Hell was transmitted, but it was stated that the soundness of the report on which it rests is disputed, and no ascription to a source was made.
• Because the sources contain descriptions of the difference between hamz and lamz that contradict one another, none of them was preferred; the views were given in a table, together with their contradictions.
• In the reports transmitted as the occasion of revelation, the names of the persons were not given. Because the reports do not agree with one another and the same names are ascribed to other sūras as well, the writing of names was avoided. That the wording of the sūra has been left general was emphasised separately.
• The meaning of the verb ʿaddada (to count / to make ready / to diversify) is disputed; the views were given in a table, and while a preference was stated it was recorded that it is not binding.
• The sense "to burn" in the root of fuʾād was transmitted as the lexicographers record it; the link made with the verse was offered not as a ruling but as an interpretation.
• That the distinctions between qalb and fuʾād are not uniform in the classical sources, and that a part of them are interpretations drawn out of the contexts, was stated openly.
• The differences of variant reading in verses 8 and 9 (muʾṣada / mūṣada, ʿamad / ʿumud) were recorded, but since I cannot say with certainty which reading belongs to which imām, no name was written. That neither difference changes the meaning was stated.
• The three views about what the ninth verse describes were given in a table; a preference was stated and it was recorded that it is not binding.
• The echo set up between akhlada and mumaddada was offered as my own reading; it was not ascribed to any classical exegete. In the same way, the link drawn from the kinship of root between ʿaddada (he counted) and yaḥsabu (he supposed) was recorded as my own reading.
• In transmitting Ernest Becker's thesis and terror management theory, it was stated that some of the theory's findings have become the subject of debates about replicability. This literature was presented not as a proof of the verse but as a line of thought that makes the same link independently.
• The link between the three sūras (102-103-104) is an observation about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf; it is not a claim about the order of revelation.