al-Balad 90:6

Yaqūlu ahlaktu mālan lubadā "He says, 'I have spent wealth in heaps.'"

Root: ه-ل-ك. Its original sense is to perish, to be ruined. Halāk, hālik (one who perishes), tahluka are from the same root.

The pattern is ifʿāl (causative): ahlaka — he destroyed, he ruined.

This is the sharpest point of the verse. The man does not say "I spent", does not say "I gave", does not say "I disbursed". He says "I destroyed".

The words the Qurʾān uses for spending are known: anfaqa (he disbursed — from the root of maintenance, of providing for), ātā (he gave), taṣaddaqa (he gave alms). All of these are positive or neutral verbs; they state that the thing given went somewhere.

Ahlaka does not state this. It is a verb of annihilation. The man is relating not where his wealth went, but that it left his hand.

This choice of word says two things, and both are against the man:

The first: boasting. The man is relating how much he spent, "what money he got through". This is the tone carried by English expressions like "I burned through a fortune", "I blew a pile of money" — boasting of the size of the spending. The word brings forward not the amount of what was given but the power of the one spending.

The second: that what was given really did perish. Some of the classical exegetes read the verb here in this further way: the man is telling the truth — his wealth really has perished, because it was not spent where it should have been. The Qurʾān establishes this principle openly elsewhere: alms given for show are likened to a rock whose covering of soil a downpour sweeps away (al-Baqara 2/264). The wealth given has gone, but it has reached no one.

On this second reading the verse carries an irony: with the sentence he utters in order to boast, the man describes his own condition correctly.

It comes indefinite. In al-Humaza 104/2 it was indefinite in the same way: jamaʿa mālan — "he gathered a wealth". The measure recorded there holds here too: the kind, the amount and the source of the wealth are not stated. The criticism is directed not at where the wealth came from but at the relation set up with it.

Root: ل-ب-د. The concrete sense of the root is to pile one on another, to stick together, to become felted.

The derivatives bear this out:

• libd / libda — felt. The cloth got by wetting and beating wool fibres so that they interlock. It is not woven, it is pressed. It is one of the basic materials of Arabian and steppe cultures: the tent, the felt rug, the saddle pad.
• labada — it stuck to the ground, it crouched, it stayed motionless.
• lubda — the mane on a lion's neck; a mass of hair interlocked and felted.

Lubad, that is, does not simply mean "much". It means heaped one on another, stuck together, become a single mass.

The pattern of the word bears this out too: lubad is a form carrying a plural sense (the lexicographers count it either the plural of lubda or an adjective conveying multitude directly). Not "a heap", then, but "heaps".

The Qurʾān's own testimony. The same root occurs in one other place in the Qurʾān, and there the sense is extraordinarily plain:

"And when the servant of God stood up calling upon Him, they were all but piling up on him like felt (kādū yakūnūna ʿalayhi libadā)" (al-Jinn 72/19)

Here the word describes a crowd of people sticking together and becoming a single mass. People swarm to one point so closely that no space is left between them.

This occurrence gives exactly the image of the word in al-Balad 90/6: wealth like felt. Not coins that can be counted one by one; an interlocked, unseparable mass.

The person described in Sūrat al-Humaza and the person here are two states of the same type. But their relation is finer than is supposed:

This table yields a surprising result: the two men do opposite things but stand in the same place. One accumulates, the other spends. One counts his wealth, the other counts what he has flung away.

The common point is this: both use wealth as a mark of power. For the man of al-Humaza wealth is a shield; for the man of al-Balad it is a record. Both use wealth to set up a claim about themselves.

Where the Qurʾān's criticism of wealth is directed becomes clear here: not at the amount, but at the function. To spend little and to spend much can carry the same fault; what is decisive is for whom the spending is done. The later verses of the sūra (13-16) will describe exactly this: to whom, when, in what condition.

And there is this too: the last verse of al-Humaza said "a fire closed over them" (104/8). The last verse of al-Balad repeats the same expression (90/20). The two sūras end with the same word.