وَيْلٌ لِّكُلِّ هُمَزَةٍ لُّمَزَةٍ
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.
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".
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:
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.
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.
- "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:
| View | Hamz | Lamz |
|---|---|---|
| Distinction by organ | Done with the hand and with a gesture | Done with the tongue |
| Distinction by organ (reversed) | Done with the tongue | Done with the eyebrow, the eye and a gesture |
| Distinction by direction | From behind, in his absence | To his face |
| Distinction by direction (reversed) | To his face | From behind |
| No difference | The two words are close in meaning; the repetition is for emphasis |
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.