Glossary: I

ʿibʾ

Al-Rāghib (al-Mufradāt): mā ʿabaʾtu bihi means "I do not care about it," derived from ʿibʾ, meaning weight, as if one sees no weight or worth in the thing. → Read at 25:77

ʿibādah

() Worship (al-ʿibādah), derived from ʿabd (slave, an owned human being), means that the servant stands before his Lord as a slave stands before his master; hence it is diametrically opposed to arrogance and pride. → Read
() The essence of worship is that the servant places himself in a position of abasement and servitude and turns his countenance toward the station of his Lord; this is what is meant by saying worship is knowledge: the knowledge that comes from worship. Actual worship (not merely the capacity for it) is the goal of creating the jinn and humans, and outward acts of worship serve the further goal of approaching God in the humility of servitude. → Read

ʿibra

Al-Rāghib: ʿabar is crossing from one state to another; iʿtibār and ʿibra mean passing from witnessing an event to understanding an unseen implication of it. → Read at 12:111

ibtilāʾ

() Ibtilāʾ here means “transforming and modifying something from one state to another,” as when gold is refined in a crucible, referring to God’s transforming of semen through the stages of creation; the view that it means testing through religious obligations is rejected by the following letter fāʾ. → Read
() Both granting and withholding bounties are components of God’s ibtilāʾ (examining, trying); honor lies in nearness to God through faith and righteous deeds, while wealth or poverty is only a test. → Read

ʿiddah

A woman's prescribed time is the period in which she refrains from remarriage until the waiting time has elapsed; divorcing "for their prescribed time" means the divorce begins at a time of her cycle when she is not menstruating and without intercourse in that cycle. → Read at 65:1

iddāraka

Iddāraka is originally tadāraka, used when the parts of something follow one another in sequence until the end, so that no part remains; their knowledge of the hereafter has failed because they exhausted it on other matters. → Read at 27:66

īdhān

() It is said that īdhān is from idhn, which originally means knowing the permissibility and possibility of something and is used metaphorically for any knowledge; its transitive form īdhān means to inform, often with a sense of warning. → Read
() To treat something as unimportant; originally to soften something with oil (dahn), used figuratively for taking lightly. → Read

idhn

() Permission is removing an impediment to something, while approval (riḍā) is finding it pleasing and not preventing it; one may permit what one does not approve, but not approve without permitting. → Read
() Notification of permission and absence of prohibition; knowledge of permission always accompanies what is permitted, but permission is not the same as knowledge. Muṣībah has become widespread for harmful events. → Read

ifāʾah

The act of returning from the spoils of war; here the pronoun "from them" points to the Banū al-Naḍīr, referring to their wealth. → Read at 59:6

ifk

Al-Rāghib: ifk means lie in its absolute sense; its root meaning is anything turned away from its original form, such as a belief averted from right to wrong, an act diverted from virtue to vice, or speech turned from truth to lie. → Read at 24:11

ighwāʾ

To cast someone into ghayy, which means error, loss, failure and destruction; in Satan's words () the meaning intended is error, as the similar verse () shows. → Read at 7:16

īḥāʾ

Al-īḥāʾ means a secret address; in the Qur'an it is used for God's communication with some of His creatures by inspiration and casting an instruction into the heart, as with the earth, the bee, and Moses' mother. → Read at 28:7

iḥkām

Definitiveness, juxtaposed with tafṣīl (elaboration, separating connected parts): to connect the parts of a thing to one another so that the whole becomes a single entity without divisions or fragments. → Read at 11:1

iḥṣāʾ

Complete, encompassing knowledge of the number of things with nothing lost. Al-Rāghib: attaining the number, derived from ḥaṣā (pebbles), since the Arabs counted with pebbles as we count on fingers. → Read at 58:6

iḥṣān

() Chastity is one of the meanings of al-iḥṣān, and in () al-muḥṣanāt can only mean chaste women: it cannot mean Islam, since women of the People of the Book are included, nor free women, since that would leave the divine favor incomplete. → Read
() From the context, doing good to others, not merely doing an act well: delivering benefit or kindness to another, not as reciprocation, but voluntarily initiating goodness. → Read

ihtidāʾ

Guidance here is the opposite of going astray: submitting to what a healthy human nature guides one to and following the truth; Godwariness is the opposite of following one's desires, observing God's prohibitions and avoiding sins. → Read at 47:17

ijtibāʾ

() Al-Rāghib: to gather by selection; God's ijtibāʾ is His favoring a servant with exclusive grace. The ʿAllāmah: this is consistent with Qur'anic usage but is a consequence, not the original meaning; here the root meaning, 'to gather things from various dispersed places,' is intended, as if God gathered them and then guided them all to the straight path. → Read
() From jabāya, to gather: bringing together the parts of something and keeping them from being scattered. When God chooses a servant He directs His mercy to him, distinguishes him with grace, consolidates his affairs, protects him from Satan's paths and makes him exclusively devoted to Him. → Read
() Ijtibāʾ means collecting by way of selection, part of which is God's collecting His servant for Himself, not sharing him with anyone, and making him one of the mukhlaṣīn. → Read
() The real meaning of God's selection of a servant (ijtibāʾ) is making that servant mukhlaṣ, entirely and exclusively for God with no one else having any share in him, an attribute of only a few people. → Read
() To choose (ijtibāʾ) means to gather and bring close; God gathers and brings to the religion of divine unity whomever of His servants He wills. → Read

ikhtiyār

Ikhtiyār (choosing) is derived from al-khayr (good): a doer hesitating between actions singles out the best and builds and acts on the basis that it is better than the others; so choice is always for a purpose, the doer's aim in the action. → Read at 20:13

ikmāl

Al-Rāghib: a thing is perfect when it serves the purpose for which it is intended. The ʿAllāmah adds that 'perfect' describes things whose effects appear part by part, without waiting for all the parts, as with the number of days of fasting (); so 'I have perfected your religion' means something was added to the religion that day, making it perfect. → Read at 5:3

ilāh

An implication of being an ilāh (god, object of worship), especially a sole deity, is the exclusive dedication of its worshipers, who call on no other and want only what it wills. → Read at 114:3

īlāf

Al-Rāghib: ilf means "gathering with harmony," from which comes ulfah (affinity); in the verse God is the one who created peace and security (īlāf) among the Quraysh. → Read at 106:1

ilhāʾ

To preoccupy, engross; wealth and children diverting from God's remembrance is their preoccupying the heart so that it clings to them and turns from God, leading to forgetting Him and His forgetting the servant. → Read at 63:9

ilhām

Ilhām means “casting an idea in one’s heart”; God has inspired the soul not with the physical form of acts but with which category, virtue or vice, an act falls under, which means equipping it with practical reason. → Read at 91:8

ʿilliyyūn

ʿIlliyyūn means “elevation above elevation,” matching the lofty stations of proximity to God, in direct contrast with Sijjīn; it is a written and ordained reality containing what is decreed for the virtuous. → Read at 83:18

imām

() The imam is a leader who guides by a Divine Command closely associated with him; imamate, in its esoteric sense, is wilāyah (authority) over people in their deeds, and its guidance conveys them to the final destination by God's command, unlike guidance that only shows the way. → Read
() Imam is a Qur'anic term with its own usage, so general lexical interpretations do not apply; in the Qur'an Imam refers to one who guides by God's command or one who is a leader of misguidance. → Read

imām mubīn

The clear registry is the tablet protected from change (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ), on which are the details of the divine decree for creation; it is distinct from the scrolls of deeds and is named elsewhere the protected tablet, the mother book, and the clear book. → Read at 36:12

īmān

() Al-īmān (faith) is the consolidation of belief in the heart; it is derived from al-amn (safety), because the believer, by his faith, gains safety from doubts. → Read
() Here, to believe someone to be truthful. Having faith "towards the faithful" means treating the person who brings a report as sincere, without necessarily trusting the report itself. → Read
() Īmān is to admit and confirm a statement and abide by its implications; in Qur'anic terminology it means accepting God's Oneness, His messengers and their teachings, and the Last Day, accompanied by obedience in general, which is why the Qur'an couples belief with righteous deeds. → Read
() Faith means for the soul to settle upon something that it knows, the logical corollary of which is acting upon it; transgression (fisq) is the opposite, its original meaning coming from a date splitting out of its skin, as the sinner comes out from obedience to God. → Read
() Faith in something is knowledge of it together with adherence to its practical implications; since both can strengthen or weaken, faith increases and decreases. → Read

imdād

() Madd and imdād are synonymous, meaning perfecting the deficiency of something and preserving it from loss and discontinuation; according to al-Rāghib, imdād is usually used for pleasant things and madd for unpleasant ones. → Read
() To bring something to someone time and again, used only for good things, as madd is used only for evil ones (). → Read

imtiḥān

To try is to put to the test, used to ascertain the status of something unknown; since this is impossible for God, it means, according to some, to train the heart or subject it to difficulties so it grows accustomed to Godwariness. → Read at 49:3

inābah

Al-Rāghib: anāb means returning to God in repentance and with sincerity of deeds, from the root n-w-b, a thing returning again and again. → Read at 38:24

infiḍāḍ

Al-Rāghib: the breaking of something and the scattering of its pieces from one another, used figuratively here. → Read at 62:11

infikāk

Infikāk means “separation after being strongly attached”: the disbelievers were held by the divine custom of guidance until the clear evidence came, after which they were released to act as they will. → Read at 98:1

inshāʾ

Originating a thing from its very inception and raising it; God's originating the human being is creation without any prior model, advancing from state to state (). → Read at 67:23

inzāl

God's "sending down" composure means creating it in hearts where it was not; the Qur'an often uses sending down for creation or origination, to allude to the loftiness of its source. → Read at 48:4

ʿiqāb

Retribution means to seize someone as a consequence of their sins; so severe in retribution (shadīd al-ʿiqāb) is equivalent to the divine name Endowed with Vengeance (dhū al-intiqām), relating to God's aspect as punisher. → Read at 40:3

iqrāʾ

God’s iqrāʾ of the Prophet does not mean correcting his slips, but fortifying him to recite the Qur’an as it was revealed, retaining it without addition, subtraction or forgetting. → Read at 87:6

iqsāṭ

To do justice is to give each person the share to which they are entitled and to act fairly. → Read at 49:9

irtidād

Literally, to turn back; in Muslim terminology, turning back from religion, that is, apostasy: forsaking belief for disbelief, whether or not that belief was preceded by disbelief (murtadd millī and murtadd fiṭrī). → Read at 5:54

ʿiṣam

Plural of ʿiṣmah (protection and fortification); here the bond of permanent marriage, which protects the woman, so a man who embraces Islam must let go of his disbelieving wife. → Read at 60:10

ishfāq

() Al-Rāghib: ishfāq means concern mixed with fear, because the mushfiq loves the object of his concern and fears what will befall him; made transitive with min, the sense of concern is more pronounced. → Read
() Al-Rāghib: anxiety signifies concern mixed with fear, because the anxious one loves the one he is anxious about but fears what might become of him; with min the aspect of fear is more apparent, with fī that of concern. → Read
() Al-Rāghib: concern mixed with fear, for the apprehensive one loves the thing he is apprehensive about and fears harm may come to it. → Read

ishtikāʾ

Majmaʿ al-Bayān: ishtikāʾ is revealing a misfortune or a hateful thing that one suffers, while shikāyah is revealing a hateful thing that someone has done to one; taḥāwur is the back and forth of speech, as in a dialogue or dispute. → Read at 58:1

islām

() The familiar islām (professing the faith and doing necessary deeds) is only the elementary grade of servitude; the sublime grade of islām that Abraham and Ishmael asked for means total servitude, the unconditional surrender of all a servant has to his Master. → Read
() Faith abides in the heart as conviction, while Islam abides on the tongue and limbs: submission by verbally testifying to Divine Unity and prophethood and acting outwardly accordingly, whether or not one has conviction. → Read
() The religion to which the Messenger calls, entailing submission to God in the beliefs and acts He wants; since His divinity requires absolute submission, it is His true religion. → Read
() Submission is to submit to God's command and follow only His will, in doing deeds and in refraining from crimes against the divine command. → Read
() Islām in this verse means taslīm (submission, surrender) to the divine command; the muslimūn are those who have surrendered their affairs to God and obey what He has willed and ordered, while the qāsiṭūn are those who incline toward falsehood. → Read

islām al-wajh

To surrender one's countenance to God means for the human being to turn to God with the entirety of his being and to turn away from everyone except Him. → Read at 31:22

ism

Ism (name) is the word that points to the named thing or person, derived from al-simah (sign, identifying mark) or al-sumuww (height, eminence); it is the word by which an individual is spoken of or spoken to, and so is other than, and separate from, the named thing. → Read at 1:1

ʿiṣmah

() Al-Rāghib: al-ʿaṣm means to take hold, and the prophets' ʿiṣmah is God's protecting them through a pure nature, virtues, help, tranquility and tawfīq. The ʿAllāmah accepts this as an account of the prophets' ʿiṣmah, but says that in 'God will protect you from the people' () the verb means protection from the people's evil aimed at the Prophet, his religious objectives or the success of his call. → Read
() Infallibility, or divine protection: God wards off all evil and indecency from His devoted servants, through the signs He shows them, so that they do not commit sins or even contemplate them. → Read

iṣr

Al-Rāghib: to tie something and confine it through domination; in () it means the things that restrained them and held them back from doing good and earning reward. Some have taken it as weight or load, but the correct view is the former. → Read at 7:157

isrāf

() Infāq means spending money to fulfill the needs of oneself or others; isrāf is going beyond the limits on the side of excess, and in expenditure it means spending more than one should. → Read
() Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī: isrāf means to exceed the proper bounds in any action, most commonly in spending wealth; it can also suggest an offense, hence ʿalā. Based on the context, to commit excess against one's soul means to pollute it with sins, whether idolatry or other major or minor sins. → Read

istakānah

Majmaʿ al-bayān: istakānah means khuḍūʿ (humility); from the root kawn in the form istifʿāl (seeking), it means seeking to be in a state of humility. → Read at 23:76

istidrāj

Letting them descend step by step until they sink into wretchedness and destruction: God gives blessing after blessing, and they grow preoccupied and ungrateful, further from remembering Him. → Read at 68:44

iṣṭifāʾ

() Al-iṣṭifāʾ means to choose, to separate the best parts of a thing from other parts mixed with them; in the context of wilāyah, this selection fits sincerity of servitude, the chosen one behaving in all his affairs as a sincere slave totally surrendered to his Lord. → Read
() Iṣṭifāʾ is selecting the purest, choicest and best part of something. Al-Rāghib: it is taking the ṣafw (pure part) of something, just as ikhtiyār is taking its khayr (good part) and ijtibāʾ its jibāyah (accumulated part). → Read
() Choosing means selecting and is close to ikhtiyār; the difference is that ikhtiyār is selecting the best item from many, whereas iṣṭifāʾ is selecting the choicest and purest item. → Read

istighfār

Since the Prophet is already forgiven, pleading for forgiveness here means pleading for the continuation of God’s forgiveness and coverage, for one needs its continuation as one needs its initiation. → Read at 110:3

istighnāʾ

To seek self-sufficiency and freedom from need; for God, who is self-sufficient by essence, it means manifesting His self-sufficiency, against the disbelievers' belief that they were indispensable. → Read at 64:6

istijābah

Answering means responding to a supplication; since all worship is a kind of supplication to Him, accepting worship is called answering it. → Read at 42:26

istikhlāf

Being made successors may mean God made them His vicegerents over wealth, which belongs to Him and is entrusted to them, so spending it is easy; or successors inheriting from earlier generations. → Read at 57:7

iṣṭināʿ

Iṣṭināʿ, of the form iftiʿāl, means iḥsān (favor, beneficence), as the lexicologists say; iṣṭanaʿahu means his favor was realized upon him, to the point, as al-Qaffāl is reported to say, that the person is ascribed to his benefactor. → Read at 20:41

istinbāṭ

To draw out a talk from ambiguity to distinctness and knowledge; it is derived from al-nabṭ (to gush out, to stream forth). → Read at 4:83

istinsākh

Al-Rāghib: naskh means to efface something with something that follows it, but naskh al-kitāb means transferring the form of a text to another book without effacing the first, and istinsākh means to set about transcribing. Hence the deeds must be a source that is copied: their record is transcribed from what concerns them in the Guarded Tablet. → Read at 45:29

istiqāmah

() The Form X of qāma: to seek the uprightness of something and the manifestation of all its effects and benefits. For a person, it is to reform and make upright the self so that no corruption or deficiency affects it. → Read
() Al-Rāghib: istiqāma refers to a path that follows a straight line, to which the way of truth is compared (); in a human being it means adhering to the straight path. → Read
() To "go aright" (istaqāmū) is to hold fast to what one bears witness to (that God alone is Lord) without deviating, and to observe its practical requirements. → Read

istiwāʾ

Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī: istawāʾ made transitive with ʿalā means to take possession of or gain mastery over (istīlāʾ), as in ; made transitive with ilā, as in the present verse, it means to turn towards. → Read at 41:11

istiwāʾ ʿalā al-ʿarsh

() His istiwāʾ ʿalā al-ʿarsh (lit. sitting on the throne) means that His ownership applies to everything and He regulates everything in the heavens and the earth; He is One in His Lordship, and by Lord is meant nothing but the owner of a thing and the regulator of its affair. → Read
() God's settling on the Throne is a metaphor for His exercising governance over His dominion, of which knowledge of all particulars is a corollary. → Read

iṭfāʾ nūr allāh

Putting out God's light means invalidating it and causing its radiance to go away; doing so "with their mouths" means blowing it out. → Read at 61:8

īthār

To prefer is to select and prioritize something over other options; "need" here is poverty and hardship, which al-Rāghib says is expressed metaphorically as the emptiness of a house, a lack that remains unfilled. → Read at 59:9

ithbāt

Keeping something in its place so that it does not move or slip, like a peg firmly fixed in the ground; its opposite is maḥw, removing the traces of something after it has been affirmed. → Read at 13:39

ithkhān

Majmaʿ al-Bayān: to "decimate" means to kill many enemies, overcome them, and vanquish them. → Read at 47:4

ithm

() Ithm means the evil trace and consequence that remains with a person after committing sin. → Read
() Signifies sin, but its original meaning, according to al-Rāghib, is an action that detains a person from reward and goodness; kabāʾir al-ithm, per a narration, is anything God has threatened with Hellfire. → Read
() Sin is a deed with an evil effect that does not extend beyond its doer (God's rights), ʿudwān is one whose harm extends to others (people's rights), and disobeying the Messenger is opposing his directives in matters permissible in themselves, given in light of his guardianship over the community. → Read

iʾtimār

For a group of people to consult each other about something and tell each other to follow through; here the man and woman agreeing, according to custom, about their child. → Read at 65:6

itmām

Al-Rāghib: a thing becomes complete when it reaches a stage where it needs nothing extra. The ʿAllāmah adds that 'complete' describes things whose effect appears only when all their parts and conditions are present, such as the fast, which is void if any condition is broken (). → Read at 5:3

ʿiwaj

Majmaʿ al-bayān: ʿawaj is used for crookedness in something visible, such as a spear or a wooden column, while ʿiwaj is crookedness in something without a visible outer form, such as religion or speech. → Read at 18:1

iẓhār

To make something overcome another is to help it and render it triumphant; "the religions, all of them" is every way followed other than God's way, the religion of Islam. → Read at 61:9

ʿizzah

() Al-Rāghib: a state that protects one from being overpowered, as in arḍ ʿazāz (firm ground); it is opposed to dhillah (weakness). Al-ʿazīz is one who is hard to overcome or approach. → Read
() Al-Rāghib: ʿizzah is what prevents a person from being dominated or overcome. Originally it meant hard or firm; since it means one who is dominant and never overcome, only God can truly be called ʿazīz, and others have it only as His gift. → Read

Glossary: I ​

Glossary: I