Conclusion

In his Name, be He glorified!

And there is nothing but it glorifies Him with praise.(17:44)

Concerning  Backbiting

In the Fifth Point of the First Ray of the First Light of the Twenty-Fifth Word, a single Qur’anic verse having the effect of discouraging and restraining was shown to induce repugnance at backbiting in six miraculous ways. It was shown too how abominable a thing is backbiting in the view of the Qur’an, and that there is therefore no need for any further explanation of the subject. Indeed, after the Qur’an has made its declaration, there is neither the possibility nor the need for anything further.

The Qur’an reproaches the backbiter with six reproaches in the verse:

Would any among you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother?(49:12)

and forbids him to commit this sin with six degrees of severity. When the verse is directed to those persons actually engaged in backbiting, its meaning is the following.

As is well-known, the “hamza” at the beginning of the verse has an interrogative sense. This interrogative sense penetrates all the words of the verse like water, so that each word acquires an additional meaning. Thus the first word asks, with its “hamza:” “Is  it that  you  have  no  intelligence  capable  of discrimination,  so  that  you  fail to perceive the ugliness of this thing?”

The second  word  “like”  asks: “Is your  heart,  the seat  of love and  hatred,  so corrupted that it loves the most repugnant of things?”

The third word “any among you” asks: “What befell your sense of social and civilized  responsibility  that  you  are able  to  accept  something  poisonous  to  social life?”

The  fourth  word  “to  eat  the  flesh”  asks:  “What  has  befallen  your  sense  of humanity that you are tearing your friend apart with your fangs like a wild animal?” The fifth word “of his brother” asks: “Do you have no fellow-feeling, no sense of kinship, that you are able to sink your teeth into some wretch who is tied to you by numerous links of brotherhood? Do you have no intelligence that you are able to bite into your own limbs with your own teeth, in such lunatic fashion?”

The sixth word “dead” asks: “Where is your conscience? Is your nature so corrupt that you abandon all respect and act so repugnantly as to consume your brother’s flesh?”