al-Wāqiʿa 56:19

Lā yuṣaddaʿūna ʿanhā wa lā yunzifūn "They get no headache from it, nor do their wits leave them."

The preceding verse gave the cup; this verse removes the cup's two side-effects. Two negations.

Root: ص-د-ع. And the concrete sense of the root is to split, to crack.

• صَدْع — a crack, a fissure.
• تَصَدَّعَ — it cracked, split, broke apart.
• ٱنصَدَعَ — it was split.
• صُدَاع (ṣudāʿ) — a headache.

And the last derivative is the most instructive side of the root: Arabic names a headache "the splitting of the head".

This is a way of naming found in most languages — the sensation of pain described by a movement. English does the same: we say "my head is splitting". The word is not a medical term, that is, but a description of a sensation.

The Qurʾān uses this root elsewhere in a very different task:

"So proclaim openly what you are commanded." (al-Ḥijr 15/94) — fa'ṣdaʿ bimā tuʾmar.

There the verb means "to split open and bring forth", that is, to stop concealing the word and say it openly. The same root: in one place the splitting of a head, in another the coming out into the open of a word. The shared idea: the splitting of what is closed.

I record this as a linguistic datum; I make no link of meaning between the two verses.

The verb is passive: yuṣaddaʿūn — "they are not given headaches". The drink, that is, does nothing to them. Had it been framed in the active ("their heads do not ache") the ache would have been a state of theirs; framed in the passive, the source of the ache is put out of action.

عَنْهَا — "from it". The pronoun refers to the kaʾs. The cup is thus named explicitly as the cause of the ache, and that cause is annulled.

Root: ن-ز-ف. And its concrete sense is again the movement of a liquid: to draw a well's water out until it is finished.

• نَزَفَ ٱلْبِئْرَ — he drew the well dry.
• نَزِيف (nazīf) — one whose water has been drawn off; and drunk — one whose wits have been drawn out of him.
• نَزْف — loss of blood. (The Turkish medical term nezif, used for haemorrhage, is from this root.)

Arabic names drunkenness "the emptying of the mind", that is — just as it names a headache "the splitting of the head".

When the two words are set side by side a symmetry emerges, and this symmetry is a datum of the text:

Two separate harms, two separate organs, and both named by a movement of liquid or matter.

There is a variant reading in this word, and it changes the sense:

I do not give which reading belongs to which authority, because I do not know it with certainty. But the difference itself is worth recording, because it conveys two separate favours: the one the absence of drunkenness, the other the inexhaustibility of the drink.

And it is striking that the second reading accords with the maʿīn (a flowing spring) of the preceding verse: the source flows, and therefore does not run out.

I express no preference. Both readings are present in the classical sources and both fit the movement of the sūra. That variant readings in the Qurʾān often give both senses at once has been recorded earlier in this commentary.

This verse was already mentioned in the section on al-Nabaʾ. There, while the difference between the drink of the Garden and that of this world was being treated, these two verses were given:

"In it there is no ill effect, nor are they made drunk by it" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/47) "They get no headache from it, nor do their wits leave them" (al-Wāqiʿa 56/19)

And the finding added in the section on al-Nabaʾ was this: immediately after naming the drink, that sūra spoke of the absence of idle talk — that is, it put out of action the drink's worldly consequence (a loosened tongue, foolish speech).

Al-Wāqiʿa does exactly this too, and does it more plainly:

• 18: the cup
• 19: the bodily and mental side-effects are removed
• 25: the verbal side-effect is removed (lā yasmaʿūna fīhā laghwan wa lā taʾthīmā)

The sūra names the drink, that is, and then annuls three separate consequences of it: the head, the mind, the tongue.

I record this as my own reading; the order of the three verses is, for its part, a datum of the text.

This verse is one of the clearest examples of how the descriptions of the Garden are built, and the measure recorded at al-Baqara 2/25 is exactly at work here:

"The telling must be done by way of what the hearer knows — because language can find no material other than human experience. That the descriptions are sensory follows not from what is described being sensory but from there being no other way to tell it."

And this verse is that measure applied within the text.

See how it works: the verse does not say what the drink of the Garden is. It says what the drink of this world is not. The description is not positive but negative.

In the section on al-Insān the same technique was recorded for qawārīra min fiḍḍa ("crystal of silver"): "the text describes something not found in this world by laying the names of two things found in this world one upon the other", and it was stated there that this is one of the internal indications that the descriptions are not to be read literally.

Al-Wāqiʿa 56/19 does the same work from the opposite direction: instead of combining two known things, it subtracts two properties from a known thing.

Both techniques arrive at the same conclusion: what is described is not equal to the material used to describe it.