سَيَصْلَىٰ نَارًا ذَاتَ لَهَبٍ
Arabic has two particles that turn the imperfect verb into a future: سَ (sa-) and سَوْفَ (sawfa). In the classical books of the language the first is indicated for the nearer future, the second for the more distant.
Here the short one has been chosen. And this single letter establishes the most disputed feature of the sūra: the text issues a definite ruling regarding the future. We shall take this up below under a separate heading.
Root ṣ-l-y. Its concrete sense: to enter a fire, to burn in a fire, to be cast into a fire. But another derivative of the root goes somewhere entirely different: iṣṭilāʾ (اصطلاء) — to draw near a fire in order to warm oneself.
The Qurʾān uses this second sense. Moses (Mūsā), seeing a fire from afar in the desert, says to his family: "…that I may bring you a brand from it, so that you may warm yourselves" (al-Naml 27/7; similarly al-Qaṣaṣ 28/29). The verb there is taṣṭalūn — from the same root as yaṣlā in this verse.
The contrast emerges of itself: the same root describes both drawing near a fire to be warmed and entering into a fire and burning. Fire is for man both the continuance of life and a cause of destruction; the root carries this duality. What is meant here is not the fire approached but the fire entered.
نَارًا — indefinite: "a fire". In Arabic indefiniteness sometimes conveys not indeterminacy but magnification and terror (tahwīl): a fire that cannot be described, that cannot be compared with the fires that are known.
In the first verse the man was named Abū Lahab: "father of the flame". In the third verse the place he will enter is nāran dhāta lahab: "a fire possessed of flame".
The same word occurs two verses apart, in two different constructs. But the direction of the construct has been reversed:
| Construct | To whom the flame belongs | |
|---|---|---|
| Verse 1 | Abū Lahab — father of the flame | The flame is attributed to him; he is in the position of owning the flame |
| Verse 3 | nāran dhāta lahab — a fire possessed of flame | The flame is attributed to the fire; he is in the position of being inside that flame |
That is, the kunya presented him as though he were the owner of the flame; the verse places him inside something that has a flame. Ownership changes hands.
Beyond this there is also a simple but effective repetition: a name a man bore throughout his life comes back, word for word, in the description of his punishment. His name becomes the herald of his end.
I do not present an overlap of this kind as a "sign" or an "advance notice" — there is no such claim in the text. What can be said is this: the sūra uses its addressee's own name as material, and it does so in a way entirely intelligible within the Arabic culture of the kunya.