Sūrah 101 · Āyāt 10–11

"And what will make you know what it is? — A blazing Fire" (101:10-11)

The surah ends as it began, with an unanswerable question that is then answered: {and what will make you know what it is? — a blazing Fire (nār ḥāmiya)}. The grammatically minded sources first settle the referent and the orthography. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) fixes the pronoun hiya on Hāwiya of the previous verse, reads the final hāʾ in {mā hiyah} as the hāʾ of pause, and calls the whole clause "an explanation that conveys the magnification of the affair of the Fire." al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī agree the verse is taʿẓīm and tafkhīm — a making-grand of the threat — and that the Prophet "knows it only in summary, not in the detail of its torments." On the dangling hāʾ they differ in technical label: al-Ṭabarsī calls it hāʾ al-waqf (of pausing), al-Ṭūsī hāʾ al-sakt (of silence) treated in continuous recitation as if pausing, noting that some readers (Ḥamza and Yaʿqūb, per his earlier note) drop it in waṣl. All three then gloss {nār ḥāmiya} identically and minimally: "a hot fire, intense in heat" (al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī), the very "answer to the interrogative in {mā hiyah} and the exposition of Hāwiya" (al-Mīzān). al-Qummī offers only the bare identification — {what is it?} "means al-Hāwiya" — the same gloss carried in al-Baḥrānī's opening ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm narration.

It is al-Baḥrānī's al-Burhān that gives this closing passage its memorable weight, with two parallel recensions of the haunting tradition of Jesus and the dead village. Passing a settlement whose people lie dead in the streets, Jesus is told to call out; a single voice answers — one who "was among them but not of them." Asked their condition, he replies: "We passed the evening in well-being and we passed the night in al-Hāwiya." Asked what Hāwiya is, the first recension answers "seas of fire in which are mountains of fire," the second "Sijjīn… mountains of live coals kindled over us until the Day of Resurrection" — a vivid narrative fulfilment of the Qurʾanic {nār ḥāmiya}. Their ruin is diagnosed as "love of this world and the worship of the false idols," their love of the world "like a child's love for its mother — rejoicing when it approaches, grieving when it turns away" (a pointed inversion of Hāwiya-as-mother in verse 9). Jesus' verdict closes the surah's moral: "Eating dry bread with coarse salt and sleeping upon dung-heaps is a great good — if with soundness of religion." The English Enlightening Commentary matches the lexical key, deriving ḥāmiya from ḥamy, "violent heat," for "the extraordinary burning fire of Hell," reading verses 10-11 as "an emphasis that the chastisement of the Hereafter is beyond all human comprehension," and ending, like the Arabic narration, in supplication for refuge from it.