al-Muʾminūn 23:108

qāla'khsaʾū fīhā wa lā tukallimūn

"He said: 'Slink away into it, and do not speak to Me!'"

The concrete sense of the root is given by the lexicographers as follows: khasaʾa'l-kalba — to drive off a dog, to send it away. And from this comes the sense of being driven off in humiliation. Khāsiʾ — driven off, cowering.

The root is worked out here for the first time in this series. The word occurs in two places in the Qurʾān: al-Baqara 2/65 (kūnū qiradatan khāsiʾīn) and this verse. And at al-Mulk 67/4 the same root occurs in another pattern (yanqalib ilayka'l-baṣaru khāsiʾan wa huwa ḥasīr) — where it was used for the eye returning weary and without hope.

The word's three occurrences can be compared:

The same root: in two of them it reports a state, here a command.

And the harshness of the word must be recorded, and I give this as an entry about the language: the word is one used in Arabic for driving off an animal. The lexicographers record this, and I pass it on as it is transmitted.

The root ك-ل-م: to wound; and to speak. The lexicographers record both senses together: kalm — a wound; kalām — speech. The link is drawn by way of speech too leaving a mark; I pass the explanation on as it is transmitted.

And the nūn at the end of the verb arises, as recorded at the ninety-eighth verse, from the dropping of the first-person yāʾ: its original is tukallimūnī.

And this completes a weave in the sūra's last block, and it must be recorded:

All three verses can be verified from the text. And I record this as my own reading: the block carries through a speech that begins at the moment of death and closes it with a prohibition of speech. What is refused, that is, is not only the request but the voicing of the request.

And the finding recorded at the seventy-seventh verse goes one step further here: there, at the core of the word mublisūn, was finding nothing to say. Here there are words to be found, but no one left to address.