al-Wāqiʿa 56:20-21

Wa fākihatin mimmā yatakhayyarūn · Wa laḥmi ṭayrin mimmā yashtahūn "And fruit of what they choose, and the flesh of birds of what they desire."

These two verses resemble one another exactly and part at a single point. Let us set them side by side:

The two verbs do not say the same thing, and the difference lies in the pattern of the words.

يَتَخَيَّرُون — root: خ-ي-ر. Khayr — what is good, what is superior. Ikhtiyār — to choose; and note: in Arabic the root of the verb "to choose" is directly "good". To choose is to pick out what is good.

The pattern is تَفَعُّل (Form V): this form mostly conveys takalluf (doing with effort) or tadrīj (doing step by step). Takhayyur — to take by picking and picking, to sift, to approve after looking over.

The verb describes a work of the mind, that is: one looks, compares, chooses.

يَشْتَهُون — root: ش-ه-و. Shahwa — strong wanting, appetite. The usual English rendering, lust, has narrowed to a single field; in Arabic the word is used of every kind of intense desire: the wanting of food, the wanting of wealth, an attraction felt towards anything at all.

The pattern is ٱفْتِعَال (Form VIII): here it conveys the act's taking place in the person. Ishtihāʾ — to have an appetite for.

This verb describes a work of the body, that is: nothing is chosen, something is wanted.

This is the difference between the two verses and it is no accident:

Why this distinction? I propose a reading and state that it is my own: fruit stands before you in its varieties and you choose among them — the nature of fruit suits choosing. Meat requires preparing; you ask for it on desire, without seeing it.

But there is something more basic too. The two verbs together cover two separate kinds of human wanting: what a person wants after thinking and what he wants without thinking. The sūra answers both.

Root: ف-ك-ه. Fākiha — fruit. And the root's second branch: فُكَاهَة (fukāha) — pleasant conversation, jest, banter. Fākih — jesting, in good spirits.

The link the lexicographers make is this: fruit is eaten not to fill the belly but for enjoyment; and so it is with the sweetness of conversation. The shared idea: what is not necessary but gives pleasure.

I relay this explanation as the lexicographers record it; I do not present it as a settled etymological judgement.

And this distinction matters: in Arabic ṭaʿām (food) conveys necessity, fākiha superfluity. Fruit is not eaten to stay alive.

The root occurs three times in this sūra, and the third is in an entirely different place:

The sixty-fifth verse uses the root in an exactly contrary scene: the words that come out of the mouths of people whose crop has been ruined. That verse will be taken up in detail when it comes.

What is to be recorded for now is this: the sūra uses the root of "fruit" twice in a table of the Garden and once where the field has been ruined. I record this as a verifiable textual datum.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here, and in the descriptions of the Garden meat is named only in this sūra. This is an observation.

طَيْر — root: ط-ي-ر. To fly. Ṭāʾir — flying; ṭayr is a collective noun.

Why birds in particular? The text gives no reason. A historical note may be entered, and I give it as background information, not as a claim of the verse: in that region and in that period the flesh of birds was not everyday food but something whose obtaining took labour and means. It is hard to hunt and it is small in quantity.

The three things enumerated, then — interwoven couches, chosen fruit, the flesh of birds — are what was hard to come by in the hearer's world. The description is built from things known but rarely had.

The measure recorded at al-Baqara 2/25 holds here as well: the material is taken from the hearer's experience; that the description is sensory does not show that what is described is sensory.