al-Bayyina 98:6

Inna'lladhīna kafarū min ahli'l-kitābi wa'l-mushrikīna fī nāri jahannama khālidīna fīhā; ulāʾika hum sharru'l-bariyya

"Those who deny, from the People of the Book and from the mushrikūn, are in the fire of Hell, abiding therein. Those are the worst of created beings."

The first half of the verse is a word-for-word repetition of the first half of verse 1: alladhīna kafarū min ahli'l-kitābi wa'l-mushrikīn. The one difference is the particle at its head: in verse 1 lam yakun, here inna.

This repetition is not a weakness of style but a frame. The sūra opens with the same subject phrase and gives its ruling with the same subject phrase. What has happened in between is this: the bayyina came to them (1-3), they divided (4), yet the command was plain (5). Now the ruling is given (6).

The verse, that is, takes the sentence of verse 1 and adds its conclusion. The three verses in between are the ground of that conclusion.

Because this verse carries the sūra's heaviest ruling, it is the place that must be read with the most care.

The subject of the sentence is not "the People of the Book and the mushrikūn". The subject is this: "those who deny, from the People of the Book and from the mushrikūn." Here too the particle min is partitive — a part of a whole.

My reason for repeating this: throughout history this verse has been torn from its context and used as a ruling directed at the whole of a community. The text does not give that.

What the text actually says: 1. The ruling is attached to the attribute of denying — not to membership. 2. In the sentence the attribute comes before the identity: alladhīna kafarū first, min ahli'l-kitāb after. 3. The same Qurʾān says of the same community "they are not all one" (Āl ʿImrān 3/113), and declares that those among them who believe have their reward with their Lord (al-Baqara 2/62; al-Māʾida 5/69; Āl ʿImrān 3/199).

To read one verse while disregarding other verses of the same Book is not exegesis.

And this must be added: verse 7 of the sūra, in describing the good side, uses no group name at all. We shall see this shortly; but it needs saying already, because it determines how verse 6 is to be read. In describing the bad side the sūra gives a group name, but gives it with a narrowing; in describing the good side it gives no group name whatever. This asymmetry is deliberate.

نَار (nār) — root ن و ر (n-w-r): light, brightness. An interesting root: from the same root come both nūr (light) and nār (fire). The common point is that both are things that make visible, things that shine. The difference is this: nūr gives light without burning, nār burns while it gives light.

جَهَنَّم (jahannam) — the origin of this word is disputed. Some of the lexicographers hold that it derives from an Arabic root (jahm — a sullen, forbidding face; or jihinnām — a deep well). Others tie it to an origin outside Arabic; it is connected with the name Ge-Hinnom (the Valley of Hinnom) near Jerusalem. I cannot speak with certainty as to which view is correct; both have their defenders. The word's use and sense in the Qurʾān, however, are not disputed: it is the name of the abode of punishment.

In the verse جَهَنَّمَ comes as a diptote (it takes no tanwīn) — this is explained by the lexicographers either on the ground of proper-name status plus foreignness, or of proper-name status plus feminine gender. The first ground supports the view that the word is counted foreign in origin.

Root خ ل د (kh-l-d): to remain for a long time, to go on, to continue unchanged. Khuld is continuance; mukhallad is one made to abide.

In Arabic khulūd does not have to mean absolute eternity; it can also convey a stay of very long duration. This is why mountains are called khālid — a mountain is not everlasting, but on a human scale it abides.

Now let us look at the asymmetry. In this sūra khālidīn occurs twice:

For the Garden abadā (for ever) has been added; for Hell it has not. This is a real difference standing inside the sūra, and it has been noticed.

But it would not be right to draw a general conclusion from it. For elsewhere the Qurʾān uses the word abadā of Hell as well:

• "…[He guides them] only to the road of Hell; they will abide therein for ever" (al-Nisāʾ 4/169).
• "Whoever disobeys God and His Messenger, for him is the fire of Hell; they will abide therein for ever" (al-Jinn 72/23).

The absence in this sūra, then, is not a rule across the Qurʾān. The reason for the choice in this sūra is, in my judgement, a matter of style: verse 8 is a description of reward, and every element of the description is given with magnification (jannātu ʿadn, tajrī min taḥtihā'l-anhār, abadā, riḍwān). Verse 6, by contrast, is short and decisive; it conveys not a description but a ruling.

This is a preference; it is not binding. In the tradition of kalām long debates have been held over the everlastingness of Hell; that exceeds the frame of this text, and it cannot be rested on the absence of one word in a single verse.

شَرّ (sharr) — in Arabic it means both "evil" and, as an elative, "worse / worst". Its original form was asharr; because it was so much used the hamza dropped away (the same holds for khayr: originally akhyar). So the sharr here is not "bad" but "the worst", and the construct that follows makes this certain.

ٱلْبَرِيَّة (al-bariyya) — the sūra's most striking choice of word. In the Qurʾān it occurs only in these two verses (98/6 and 98/7). Nowhere else at all.

There are two paths as to its root, and both are defended in the classical sources:

1. ب ر أ (b-r-ʾ) — to create. From this root comes al-Bāriʾ, one of the names of God (al-Ḥashr 59/24: al-Khāliqu'l-Bāriʾu'l-Muṣawwir). On this reading the word's original form was barīʾa, the hamza softened into a yāʾ, and bariyya = "created beings".

The second sense of the same root gives one pause: bariʾa mina'sh-shayʾ — to be far from and clear of a thing, to be quit of it. From this comes barāʾa (being clear, acquittal; the other name of Sūrat al-Tawba). The connection between creating and "being quit of" may be explained by an idea of separating at the centre of the root: to create is to separate a thing out of nothingness and bring it forth. I record this connection not as a settled etymology but as a reasonable relation between the two wings of the root.

2. ب ر ي (b-r-y) — to whittle, to pare. Barā'l-qalam — to whittle the pen, to cut the point of a reed pen. Burāya is the shaving that comes off in the whittling. On this reading bariyya = "the whittled ones, the shaped ones".

An explanation is also transmitted in which some lexicographers tie it to the word al-barā (earth): bariyya = those created from earth. I transmit this with caution.

The variant reading. Some of the imams of the readings have read this word with the hamza: ٱلْبَرِيئَة (al-barīʾa). This reading ties the word directly to the root b-r-ʾ (to create) and settles the first derivation. I do not go into the detail of which imam holds which reading; but the difference of reading is itself recorded in the sources, and it does not change the sense — it only removes the hesitation about the root.

The verse could have said "the worst of people" (sharru'n-nās). It does not.

Bariyya covers all created beings: human beings, animals, jinn, every creature known and unknown. The scale of the comparison has been drawn out to its maximum.

This changes the weight of the ruling. To say "the worst of people" is to make a ranking within humanity. To say "the worst of created beings" is to make a ranking within being — and in that ranking a human being who was given a Book falls below every being that received no Book at all.

The Qurʾān uses this scale elsewhere too, and there the comparison is made openly: "They are like cattle; indeed, they are further astray" (al-Aʿrāf 7/179; a similar expression at al-Furqān 25/44). And the ground given in that verse is exactly this sūra's subject: "They have hearts with which they do not understand; they have eyes with which they do not see; they have ears with which they do not hear." The instrument is there; the use is not.

The verse does not state its ground, but the context does. And this is the sūra's most important moral conclusion:

The weight of the ruling is proportional to the quantity of light received.

These people are not persons who heard nothing. The bayyina came to them (1-3). To a part of them a Book was given (4). What was commanded was exceedingly clear (5). And in spite of this they denied.

What makes them "the worst", that is, is not the raw weight of the acts they committed; it is the position of those acts over against knowledge. What is done without knowing and what is done knowingly are not the same thing.

And this principle has an unnerving corollary — one that looks directly at this sūra's present-day reader:

This criterion threatens most the one who has the most knowledge.

The sūra recounts this as though it were a story about "them", but its mechanism is universal. Whoever has a Book in his hand, whoever is addressed by the bayyina, whoever knows what he ought to do, stands under this criterion. To use the verse in order to rank other people is to settle into exactly the position the verse warns against.