Jahannam, Laza, al-Hutama, Saqar, al-Jahim, al-Sa'ir, al-Hawiya. Seven Arabic roots that English flattens into one word, and what each one says.
Hutam is the word an Arab used for a crop that has gone yellow, dried out and broken up in the hand. The Quran uses it in exactly that sense for the harvest of this world, then He makes them scattered debris (39:21). Then it takes the same three letters, builds them into a pattern Arabic keeps for a thing that performs an act over and over, and makes a name of the result. No, he will surely be thrown into the Crusher. And what can make you know what is the Crusher (104:4-5).
Most English translations hand you the word Hellfire, and they hand it to you for seven different Arabic words. Jahannam, al-Jahim, al-Sa'ir, Laza, Saqar, al-Hutama, al-Hawiya. Each grows from a different root, and a root in Arabic is the small set of consonants under a word carrying a core sense that everything built on it inherits. Seven roots is seven angles on one warning, delivered once each. Six do not survive the crossing into English.
Ibn Manzur files Jahannam in Lisan al-Arab and opens with a well. Jihnam, he writes, is a bottom that is far away. A well called jihnam is one whose floor is a long way down, and by that Jahannam was named, for the farness of its bottom. He gives the alternative in the same entry: al-Lihyani held the word is not Arabic at all.
This is the standing name, the one the Quran uses when no particular aspect is being pressed, and the one in the verse that says it has seven gates (15:44).
Ibn Manzur again. Al-Jahim is a name among the names of the Fire, and every great fire in a mahwat is a jahim. A mahwat is a hollow, a drop you fall down.
Notice where the Quran spends it on earth. They said, construct for him a structure and throw him into al-jahim (37:97). That is the furnace built for Ibrahim (AS). The English translation used here calls it the burning fire there and calls the identical Arabic word Hellfire a few chapters later (83:16). One word in the original, two in English, and the line between that furnace and the thing described is cut.
Al-Zabidi's entry on this one is grammar. Al-Sa'ir is the Fire, he writes, and al-Akhfash pointed out what the form is doing. The word looks active and behaves passively, because you say I kindled it, and so it is kindled. A fire called sa'ir is a fire that has been set going by someone.
So the word does not describe a fire that burns. It describes a fire that is being burned, deliberately, by a hand, and the Quran puts that in the passive itself: and when the Jahim is set ablaze (81:12). It is also the name attached to one specific theft, the eating of an orphan's property, and they will be burned in a Blaze (4:10).
Laza is fire, Ibn Manzur writes, and it is also said to be the pure flame, flame with nothing mixed into it. He gives the verb underneath, the flaring of a fire, its leaping up, and the Quran uses that verb of a Fire which is blazing (92:14). Here it uses the noun as a name. No, indeed, it is Laza (70:15).
The word after it is the one to slow down on. A remover of exteriors (70:16). The Arabic is shawa, and al-Farra' is quoted in Lisan al-Arab on what shawa covers: the hands and the feet, the tips of the fingers, the crown of the skull and the skin of the head. Then the rule underneath: whatever is not a killing spot is shawa. It is an archer's word. To say a man shot and ashwa is to say he hit, and hit nothing that would end it.
Ibn Manzur: saqarat-hu al-shams means the sun discoloured a man and left his head aching from the heat. Saqar, he says, is a name among the names of Jahannam taken from that.
Al-Zabidi keeps the disagreement open. Abu Bakr ibn al-Anbari gave two positions: Saqar is either a foreign proper name with no known derivation, or Arabic, given because it melts bodies and souls.
The description the Quran gives Saqar reaches for the sun's own vocabulary. It lets nothing remain and leaves nothing, altering the skins (74:28-29). The verb behind altering is lawwaha, the word Ibn Manzur used for what a hard noon does to a man's face.
Back to the word we started with. Al-hatm is breaking, and al-Azhari narrows it: hutam is what has been broken off something dry and brittle. Al-hutama, Ibn Manzur says, is an intensive pattern, used for a thing from which a great deal of breaking comes, and from that the Fire was named al-Hutama, because it crushes everything.
Now the verses. Woe to every scorner and mocker who collects wealth and continuously counts it. He thinks that his wealth will make him immortal (104:1-3). The Crusher is the answer to a man sure he had built something that would hold.
Then the next line. Which mounts directed at the hearts (104:7). Al-Tabari reads the verb as reaching: its pain and its glow reach the hearts. Al-Qurtubi says why the heart and nothing else. The hearts are singled out, he writes, because when the pain arrives at the heart its owner dies. So he is in the condition of a man dying, and they do not die.
Set that against Laza. One name is for a fire that takes what was never going to finish you. The other arrives at the one place that would.
The last of the seven is not a fire word at all. Its root means to fall. But as for one whose scales are light, his refuge will be an abyss (101:9). The Arabic rendered there as refuge is umm, the ordinary word for mother, and the word rendered as abyss is Hawiya.
Ibn Manzur gives both readings of that sentence. Al-Farra' reports that some took it as the old Arab curse, hawat ummuhu, may his mother be bereaved. Others took it as it stands, that al-Hawiya becomes his mother because she is the one who takes him in, the way a woman takes in her son, and he has no other shelter. Under the entry for mother, Ibn Manzur adds the flat gloss: whoever is put into it falls.
Readers usually meet these words as a list of seven matched to the seven gates of Surah al-Hijr, and that pairing has a source. Ibn Abi al-Dunya records Ibn Jurayj on the verse: Jahannam, then Laza, then al-Hutama, then al-Sa'ir, then Saqar, then al-Jahim, then al-Hawiya. Ibn Rajab carries the same report in al-Takhwif min al-Nar.
He also carries what it costs. On those pages he gives a second version and marks its narrator as not strong in the same sentence. He gives a third, raised to the Prophet ﷺ through al-Bayhaqi, listing the seven in a different order again, with al-Bayhaqi's own note that the chain does not connect and the narrator was criticised. Three lists, three orders, and the man collecting them says so.
What the language books do not disagree about is simpler. Ibn Manzur calls Laza, Saqar and al-Hawiya names of Jahannam, calls al-Jahim a name of the Fire, and says the Fire was named al-Hutama. Al-Zabidi does the same for al-Sa'ir. Seven names for one thing, each from a different act.
So the words are not decoration, and not spares a translator can swap. One says the bottom is far down. One says a fire in a pit. One says somebody lit it. One says pure flame with nothing else in it. One says what the sun does to skin. One says the breaking of dry things. One says falling. Read the translation and you get one English noun seven times over. Read the words and you are being told seven separate things, once each, by a book that does not repeat itself.
Silsila Research Desk
Grade: Sourced · 7 min read