Let’s start with the beginning. And it’s the most beautiful start. It has lessons about how to start anything, whether it’s our project, task, or journey. ANY ACTION at all. And the wisdom behind the structure of this beautiful phrase is what makes you appreciate that the Quran definitely is full of wisdom, and nobody other than Allah can do something like this. We’ll discuss this at the end, InshaAllah.
So, Bismillah.
My goal is to get into how the words of the Quran are structured, what they mean, and why Allah chose these words and not the alternative words with the same meaning. It’s true that the Quran is full of wisdom. There are lessons in it, like the concept of Allah, Akhirah, Deen, Halal, Haram, our matters, and how important it is to follow what the Prophet (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) has taught us. At the same time, the structure and words and linguistics of the Quran have their own importance as well, and we can learn a great deal by just diving deep into them. That’s my goal. As I am just a student, it’s easy to dive deep into these words without being a scholar or an expert in Tafseer.
However, I try to derive all the lessons from Ahadith, Tafseer, and some books of Arabic etymology like Ibn Faris’s. So may Allah forgive me for my shortcomings. My intentions are pure.
Let’s start with the word بِسْمِ.
It looks like one word, but there are actually two words in there.
- بِ, which loosely translates as “with”.
- اسْم, and this is what we’re going to study by its roots.
Both of them give us the meaning of “With the name…”
Normally we’d write the Arabic word for “name” as ٱسْم. We can see this and mistake the roots of this word for أ س م, and that’s completely wrong. That alif is not part of this word. It’s just there to help us pronounce the jazm on س. So the main letters we’re left with are س م. Let’s talk about its meaning.
Where it comes from
Ibn Fāris says its roots are س م و. He tells us what these three letters mean.
S, M and W: an origin indicating elevation.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root سمو, vol 3 p 98
His examples are all physical. سموت, “I rose”. سما بصره, a gaze lifting. سما الفحل, a stallion mounting.
Then he says this:
A figure rose for me, until I could make it out.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root سمو, vol 3 p 98
Picture a man watching the horizon, and there is something out there, but it’s nothing significant, just a part of the horizon, the landscape. Then it starts lifting. And at some point it stops being the landscape scenery and becomes something significant, with its own identity. And if you know a little bit of Quran, سَمَاء also means “sky”.
Picturing this got me thinking about the time when Allah put up the mountain over the heads of Bani Israel. What a time!
Lane, another person who worked a lot on Arabic to English root by root, reached the same conclusion with سما.
was, or became, high, lofty, raised, exalted; it rose, or rose high.
Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, entry سما
Ibn Fāris then stretches the roots as far as they go. And that’s the fun part of studying the roots of Arabic words: they are all something we can picture. Nothing abstract in their meaning.
He says the Arabs called the clouds سَمَاء. Then the rain سَمَاء. Then, he says, they stretched it to the plants the rain brought up:
When the samāʾ falls on a people's land, we graze it.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root سمو, vol 3 p 98
You cannot graze the sky. By the end of that line the word means pasture.
And here is why a name would come from height. Ibn Fāris writes the best line in the entry:
It is said that the origin of ism is س م و, from elevation, because it is a raising up and a pointing to the meaning.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root سمو, vol 3 p 98
Think about it. Naming something lifts it out of the crowd of things and holds it where it can be seen. Before a thing has a name, it is scenery.
An interesting and unsettled debate
The Kufan grammarians threw that derivation out. They traced اسْم to a different root, و س م. Ibn Fāris gives its sense too:
W, S and M: one origin indicating a trace and a mark.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root وسم
That is the root of branding. A mark burnt into an animal so you can tell it from the rest of the herd.
So the two schools are really arguing about what a name is for.
The Basrans say a name lifts something up so you notice it at all. Give the boy a name and he stops being one more child in the street.
The Kufans say a name marks something so you can tell it apart. Give the sheep a mark and you know which one is yours.
Both are true. That is the trouble. Names do both jobs, and a thousand years later nobody has decided which job came first.
Let’s talk about the second MOST IMPORTANT WORD EVER EVER EVER!
This is the word that opened more parts of my brain when I was studying it. InshaAllah you will realise it too.
This word, keep that in mind, we are just talking about the WORD, not Allah Himself. So never think about Allah, our Master, when studying the WORD ٱللَّهِ.
Its roots are undisputed: ا ل ه. And it’s easy to assume that if it’s part of that word, ٱللَّهِ, it might have something to do with divinity. Something heavenly, graceful, like the identity itself. Because of this divinity, people worship it.
According to Ibn Fāris it’s the other way round:
Hamza, lām and hā: one origin, and it is worship.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root أله, vol 1 p 126
So it means worship. It’s the act straight away, nothing about divinity. Even if a rock is worshipped, which is not divine at all, that rock becomes the one worshipped. In clear words, by this root, that rock becomes إِلٰه.
Ibn Fāris says the same about the Name:
The ilāh is Allah, exalted, and He is named so because He is worshipped.
Maqāyīs al-Lugha, root أله, vol 1 p 126
I should say that other scholars disagreed. Some held that ٱللَّه is a proper name and comes from nothing at all. That argument is old and it is still open. What you have above is one side of it.
My point of view
Like all the names of Allah have “Al-” at the beginning of the word, that gives the status of that name and that quality to ONLY ALLAH.
Anybody can be عَالِم, but only Allah is الْعَلِيم. Anybody can be حَكِيم, but the ultimate and the only true one is Allah, الْحَكِيم.
So about إِلٰه. Allah calls the desires of a man his إِلٰه, and He calls the idols of the disbelievers their إِلٰه. Look at this ayah:
Have you seen the one who takes as his god his own desire? Then would you be responsible for him?
Surah al-Furqān, ayah 43 · Saheeh International
Allah says it again in al-Jāthiyah 45:23, with the same words: مَنِ ٱتَّخَذَ إِلَٰهَهُۥ هَوَىٰهُ.
Look at what that does to the word. A man’s own desire, his هَوَى, becomes his إِلٰه. Not because desire is divine. Only because he obeys it the way you would obey a god. That is exactly what Ibn Fāris said the root means. The word attaches to whatever is being worshipped, and it does not check whether the thing deserves it.
But the true إِلٰه, THE إِلٰه, is Allah. There is literally the “Al-” at the beginning of إِلٰه.
Cool detail
Say I come up to you and say “With the book…”, or “Above the skies…”. With your understanding of languages, do you think these are complete sentences on their own, or are you expecting something before or after them?
A complete sentence in Arabic has a subject, the doer of the action (فَاعِل, Fa’il), the action (فِعْل, Fi’l), and the detail (مَفْعُول, Maf’ool).
But this بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ, “With the name of Allah…”, by all means, is not a sentence. If anything, it looks like a detail. Something waiting to be attached. Even if we complete it with بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ, it’s still not a complete sentence.
There is wisdom in it. This needs a doer, and an action, to make it complete. And if you are starting any action, you are the doer and that action is the Fi’l, in every practical sense, for the phrase بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ. So for me, no action is complete without Bismillah, and Bismillah is there only to support us, and it is a HUGE gift, properly wrapped for us by Allah.
I hope you see by now that just studying the words of the Quran, in terms of grammar too, is so wonderful.
Tomorrow
ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ and ٱلرَّحِيمِ. The same root, ر ح م, twice in a row. Arabic had other words for mercy and did not use them.
The difference between the two cannot come from the root. The root is identical. So it has to come from the shape.