Hina Khalid
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
Hina Khalid completed her BA, MPhil, and PhD in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge.
More About this Author
An Argument from Opposite Premises, Ralph Hedley, 1913
In a charming essay titled “Telling Is Listening,” the acclaimed American novelist Ursula Le Guin (d. 2018) elaborates the elemental relational wonder of human speech: with the silken thread of speech we weave myriad, shared worlds of meaning, and co-construct rich possibilities of social communion. The forging and fortifying of relationship, Le Guin suggests, constitutes the heartbeat of human speech: we see this in the way that “children gather at the library to be read to”;1 their faces, “blazing” with rapt attention, bespeak not a passive reception of the reader’s recital but an immersive engagement with the literary universe unfolding before them. The absorbed listeners imbibe the reader’s ambient words not as staccato information but as storied plenitude; not as dry matter but as iridescent world. In this way, the gift of storytelling lies in its promise of unhurried, creative companionship—as the narrative steadily unspools, reciter and listener together animate the silent words on the page, and create a colorful, imaginative space for mutual meaning-making.
As they congregate around a shared story, reciter and listener(s) thus form a community of sorts, wherein the moods and movements of each are intimately entwined: the listener is transported to the narrative landscape by the reciter, and the reciter too is transformed by her audience. Indeed, the seasoned storyteller will be alert to the responses (e.g., gestures, sounds, and silences) of her listeners and will mold her storytelling accordingly. This vibrant mutuality is not, however, restricted to the curated context of storytelling—it is the metabolism of all human speech. When two people speak to each other, Le Guin writes, their communication cannot be reduced to an arid transaction—something at once more subtle and alive unfolds between them. As they converse, speakers inhabit a delicate and mobile relational sphere, wherein their every choice of expression, every offering of thought, “is shaped as it is spoken by actual or anticipated response.”2 What we say and how we say it is constantly, often undiscernibly, being informed and inflected by our interlocutor(s), so that true conversation is more a reciprocal attunement than a mechanistic transmission; more a dynamic giving of our self than a static transfer of data. In the words of Le Guin, speech “is a continuous intersubjectivity that goes both ways all the time.”3
It follows, then, that speech ineluctably impresses itself upon us; the words we hear and share inscribe themselves on our subjectivities, moving, orienting, and altering us in both transient and lasting ways. Speech gets, as it were, under our skin. Even a benign instruction, if given to us haughtily or harshly, can leave a sour taste in our mouths for the entire day, and can cause us to inflict a similar verbal injury upon someone else. Conversely, a generous remark or greeting can buoy up our spirits and infuse tenderness into our idiolect—the gifting of kind speech becomes decidedly easier when one has first been its recipient. We are constitutively, inescapably susceptible to the effects of our own words, and those of others, yet we seldom reflect on what makes good speech; indeed, the very idea that speech should be a locus of goodness seems largely absent from our modern zeitgeist. As children, we are instructed by our parents and teachers to shun misdeeds such as name-calling and swearing, but this salutary tutelage of our tongues ceases as we move into adulthood.
In fact, in our capitalist milieus of relentless haste, speech gets reduced to a mechanism for expediency and efficiency; thus, our employers train us in the art of speaking confidently to win over prospective clients, rendering language a mere charismatic conduit for profit and self-interest. In the political arena, this instrumentalization of speech takes on an acutely hideous form—one whose insidious contours have been especially laid bare over the last two years. As Gaza has bled and burned under the bombs of Israel and its Euro-American allies, our elected representatives and media outlets have doggedly served us up a feast of falsehoods, fabrications, distortion, and doublespeak to either deny or sanitize the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.4 Such brazen deceit can take root and flourish only when speech becomes a hollow, manipulable tool in the service of the ego—no longer need our words align themselves with anything beyond the whims and wiles of the individual will. In today’s theater of human discourse, truth itself is an expendable extra.
This debasement of language into an accessory for the realpolitik of the self is not only, of course, utterly odious; it is also fundamentally impoverished. Starved of any commitment to truth, goodness, and beauty, our words devolve into unmeaning, reduced to base fodder for our self-seeking appetites. Where might we turn to fortify and enrich our relationship to speech? How might we renew our responsibility to words, and come to see language not as an apparatus for our autocratic self-fashioning but as a gift, of which we must, with each utterance, prove ourselves fitting and worthy recipients?
The impulse to grant language its due existential and ethical weight, to seriously attend to what it means for human beings to be speaking creatures, runs especially deeply through our religious and spiritual traditions. Indeed, one constituent of the Buddhist Eightfold Path toward liberation is “right speech,” which the Buddha defined as speech “spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. It is spoken with a mind of good-will” (An.guttara Nikāya 5:198). In the central Hindu scripture of the Bhagavad Gita, we are told that “austerity of speech consists in speaking words that are truthful, pleasing, beneficial, and not agitating to others, and also in regularly reciting Vedic literature” (17:15). Likewise, coursing through the Bible are recurrent exhortations to speak only considered, gentle, and loving words—words whose redemptive qualities are distilled in an evocative metaphor: “Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body” (Proverbs 16:24). In recognition of this transfiguring power of human speech, the psalmist supplicates thus: “Set a guard, O Lord, over my mouth; keep watch over the door of my lips!” (Psalm 141:3).
Within this chorus of scriptural calls toward restraint, reflection, and compassion in speech resounds also the voice of the Qur’an, penetrating and profound in its deliberations on human language, and in its elaborations of good and virtuous speech. If it be true, as the Aristotelian axiom goes, that “we are what we repeatedly do,” it must also be true, from the Islamic perspective, that “we are what we repeatedly say”: the styles and the substance of speech that we habitually repeat make up the fibers of our moral being, by orienting us to God and God’s creation in distinctive, spiritually formative ways. The Islamic theological tapestry furnishes us with a metaphysically “full” conception of language, wherein words are not a contrivance for pursuing the fancies and fables of the ego but constitute a holy entrustment, a sacrament even, enjoining upon us the Godward vocations of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Indeed, the Qur’an explicitly presents human speech as a divine gift. Sura 55, that superlative summation of God’s manifold bounties unto His creation, opens with a resounding attestation of language’s sublime origins: “The Most Merciful; [it is He] who taught the Qur’an. He created the human being [and] taught him speech” (55:1–4). Commentators have pointed out the significance of the Arabic term bayān used here for “speech,” which denotes not merely the physical ability to voice words into being but the communicative capacity of language, the fact that we can combine syllables and sounds into syntactic symbolisms of coherence, and thus build and sustain verbal ecosystems of meaning.5 To understand how this God-given faculty of sense-making, this ethereal endowment of expressivity, is to be properly exercised, we may turn to the elegant Qur’anic description of the “good word”:
Do you not see how God sets forth a parable? A good word is like a good tree, whose root is firmly fixed, and its branches [reach] to the heavens—yielding its fruit at all times, by the will of its Lord. Thus God sets forth parables for human beings, so that they may take heed. (14:24–25)
This arboreal motif paints for us a colorful template of excellence in speech: the “good word” is, like the “good tree,” a dependable source of nourishment, a stable shelter, a fertile bridge between the soil and the sky. In short, the “good word” is fundamentally, abundantly creative—it is a word rooted in, and giving rise to, life itself. Its “fruits” are not constrained by earthly exigencies but are ceaselessly renewed by its Lord. Moreover, just as the “good tree” is planted in the ground and yet its branches caress the skies, the “good word” is forged within the terrestriality of human language and yet its compass point is heavenward.
Islamic miniature, 1595
This notion of good, virtuous speech transcending its generative context recurs throughout the Qur’an; many verses invite us to elevate our social interactions beyond the mundane logic of reprisal, and to embody, with each word and deed, a more luminous ethical bearing than the one we were met with. Like those of the “good tree,” the branches of good actions and good words strive ever upward toward the supernal light and beauty of the Divine. In a poignant verse, which limns the archetypal posture of piety, we are told:
The servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk the earth humbly, and when the ignorant address them, they simply respond with [words of] peace (salām). (25:63)
There is a synergy expressed here between three elements: how one submits to God, how one inhabits the earth, and how one interacts with human beings. To be the true servant of the Divine is to body forth a gentleness, a softness, a peace, such that the measure of one’s devotion to the Most Merciful is one’s own emanation of mercy and kindness in turn. Those who “walk the earth humbly” are those whose every step enacts the truth that all things come from and return to God; they thus approach all creatures not as beings to exploit for their own ends but as fellow partners in God’s creative symphony. And, most crucially for our purposes, those who utter words of peace (salām) when challenged with its opposite are those who steadfastly shine the light of serenity and forbearance over the darkness of bitterness and hate; they respond to all manner of ugliness with a spontaneous unfolding of beauty.
The fulfillment of human speech is thus to go beyond what we are brutely given; to “lift up” a thorny encounter to a more fruitful, noble end. Where an interaction begins in disdain, the believer carries it to a denouement of dignity. This enactment of peace is not, then, a passive concession but rather the active, conscious decision to meet ignorance with clarity, impatience with steadiness, and harshness with generosity. It is, in short, an affirmation of a larger possibility—one that refuses to reproduce the combative dynamic that occasioned it. Ordinarily, the reaction of the ego toward harsh words is the proffering of harshness in return—to inflict a verbal wound after one has first received it is the natural reflex, the unoriginal default. The attestation of salām thus irrupts with moral surprise; by subverting the crude economy of exchange, the salām has the quality of being unexpected, creative, of acting anew. Like the “good tree,” whose branches stretch skyward, the “good word” of salām rises above its seedbed, reorienting both speakers toward a more generous, and generative, horizon of relationship.
We may further understand the ethic of speech embodied in the salām by considering the connotative depth of the term salām itself: besides “peace,” the word carries meanings such as “soundness,” “well-being,” “safety,” and “security.” These distinct, though interrelated, qualities are enfolded in the Qur’an’s description of those who come to their Lord with a qalb salīm (salīm shares the triliteral root of salām), which we might translate as a “sound” or “intact” heart (26:89). Such a heart is free of moral defects and blemishes, remains lovingly surrendered to its Lord, and extends unwavering compassion to creation. The Prophet ﷺ famously noted that if the heart is “in good health,” so too is the body, but if the heart becomes infirm, so too the body. This statement is not merely announcing the biological axiom of the body’s material dependence upon the organ of the heart. Rather, it is gesturing more deeply to the vital interconnection between the outer deeds that our bodies enact and the subtle workings of our inner hearts—that heart that is the locus of true knowledge and intimacy with the Divine. The soundness of our inner heart is made visible in the soundness of our outer conduct. Our words and actions translate, and testify to, the spiritual and moral health of our hearts.
To return to the Qur’anic verse above, then: if, in response to ill-natured ignorance, “peace” is to arise on one’s tongue, it must first be the reigning quality of one’s heart. Indeed, the Prophet ﷺ explicitly paired the state of the heart with that of the tongue in one of his frequent supplications: “I ask You [God] for a sound heart (qalb salīm) and a truthful tongue (lisān śādiq).” From the sound heart flows forth sound or “good” words: like the “good tree,” which stands as a fertile testament to life and vitality (“yielding its fruit at all times”), these “good words” are born of, and manifest, the heart-rooted splendor of health and purity. Incidentally, the word that is used for “good” in the Qur’an’s tree/word analogy is ţayyib, which carries the semantic range of “wholesome,” “in good health,” “pure,” and even “pleasing/delightful.” Like the term salām, the word ţayyib denotes a rounded, robust state of healthfulness, virtue, and fruitfulness.6 The more closely we thus examine the Qur’an’s terminology surrounding human speech, the clearer and richer becomes the comparison of the “good word” with the “good tree”: What could be a more resplendent dialogic ideal than to pattern our words upon trees, those paradigmatic pillars of uprightness, integrity, and beauty?
Notably, in its descriptions of righteous habits of speech, the Qur’an also deploys various words drawn from the Arabic root ĥasuna, meaning “to be beautiful,” “to be good,” and even “to be suitable/fitting.” For example, in an oft-cited verse, the Qur’an enjoins Muslims to approach (even) debate in a spirit of goodness and beauty:
Call unto the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful counsel (wa-l-maw‘iżah al-ĥasanah), and only debate with them in the best/most beautiful (aĥsan) manner. Surely your Lord alone knows best who has strayed from His way and who is rightly guided. (16:125)
While this guidance is given in the context of debating others about religion, the principles can surely be extended to any conversational context. To display wisdom in our everyday speech is, in modern parlance, to meet someone where they are, to be attuned to their outlook and experiences, and to engage with them on the stable footing of mutuality. Wisdom is a kind of virtuous agility, which demands, first and foremost, an attentiveness to the other in the fullness of their particular personhood. If our speech is to be anything other than a self-regarding (and self-reinforcing) spectacle, it must thus be lodged, above all, in good listening. And what greater salve is there for the self-absorbed heart and the self-glorifying tongue than the ways of earnest, patient listening? In the verse’s closing reminder that only God knows the inner moral states of people, we may hear this exhortation: let not your speech descend into arrogant finality or triumphalist self-certainty, for God alone has the final word on the soundness of all human hearts.
In its command to debate only “in the most beautiful manner,” this verse returns us to the principle of “upraising” or ennobling our interactions beyond the expected rhythms of ego-centered exchange.7 Indeed, a debate typically follows the mercenary logic of zero-sum; we seek to overcome the other, for their defeat is our gain. Within such a customarily combative space, the believer is instructed to inject beauty. The superlative structure of the term aĥsan (the best/most beautiful) invites us to tread to the summit of gracious speech, to be foremost in the utterance of goodness. Here, then, is another instance of moral surprise—what generally gets arrayed as a scene of discursive contestation becomes an opening for virtue. This ideal of radical goodness in speech recurs in more general terms when the Qur’an urges: “Tell My servants to say only what is best/most beautiful (aĥsan)” (17:53). It is present, also, in the Qur’anic etiquette of greeting: “When you are offered a greeting, respond with one better/more beautiful than it (bi-aĥsana minhā), or [at least] return the same. Surely, God takes account of all things” (4:86). We find it further articulated in a profound verse regarding the disparity between good and evil: “Good and evil cannot be equal. Respond [to evil] with what is best/more beautiful (aĥsan); then will the one between whom and you there is enmity become a close friend” (41:34). To repel evil with goodness, to counteract ugliness with beauty, is thus to lay fertile ground for transformed human bonds: the one who was once distant may become close; the one who was once an enemy may become an intimate. Note the magnanimity of moral vision in this exhortation to excellence: we respond to evil with what is best not simply for salvific gains in the hereafter but also for the promise of more enriching, generous, and loving relations here below.
Detail of Wrath, from The Seven Deadly Sins, Hieronymus Bosch, ca. 1500
And so, the uttering of “what is best/more beautiful” partakes of the ascensional qualities of the “good tree,” lifting up the possibilities of speech toward the sunlit canopy of moral beauty. With this tree-shaped ideal in mind, we may arrive at a deeper understanding of why the Qur’an so vividly condemns certain forms of speech, including the uttering and circulating of slander/gossip,8 backbiting, ridicule and mockery,9 and lying and distortion.10 Such modes of speech are the antithesis of the “good word”—an antithesis the Qur’an describes thus: “The parable of a bad word is that of a bad tree: it is uprooted from the surface of the earth, and [thus] has no stability” (14:26). If the “good word” is that which transcends the artful schemes of the self, the “vicious word” remains sorely imprisoned in those very schemes. To busy the tongue with slander, falsehoods, defamation, and the belittlement of others is to “go nowhere” other than the ego: unlike the “good word,” which expansively gives life to more beautiful and truthful realities, the “bad word” remains enclosed in its stifling confines of conceit and self-importance.11 In this way, the “bad word” is, like the “bad tree,” fundamentally dead; it cannot create or cultivate anything in the deepest sense. Indeed, the “bad tree” lies untethered to the earth, and being thus deracinated from any stable ground, its branches can never point upward to (and catch) the light of heaven. The “bad word” too, lying “flat” on itself, bears no vertical dimension. Devoid of any tending toward transcendence, the “bad word” cannot, then, gift shade or sustenance to anything or anyone.
So decayed (and decaying) is the “bad word” that even an act of charity, the Qur’an affirms, is voided if the giver utters one—by, for instance, flaunting their largesse or disparaging the recipient. In elaborating this point, the Qur’an treats us to yet another nature-based analogy:
O you who believe! Do not annul your acts of charity by reminders [of your generosity] or by hurtful words—like the one who spends his wealth [only] to be seen by others and believes not in God and the Last Day. Their parable is that of a smooth rock with dust upon it; on it falls heavy rain, which leaves it barren. (2:264)
Like the unrooted and unbranched tree, an act of charity accompanied by reproach or verbal wounds is decayed, corroded at the core, and starved of life. By itself, then, the bestowal of material benefit upon another does not constitute charity. Contained in this verse is thus, yet again, a wider moral purview than we might routinely resign ourselves to. Within this purview, the words that one utters to a recipient of one’s charity are not mere marginalia to the seemingly more important action of giving. Rather, these words are decisively part of that action and render it either a bedrock of beauty (and thus charity in the truest sense) or a decrepit, barren nullity.
This close coupling of speech and charity is crystallized in the Prophet’s assertion that a “good word” is itself a “charity” (śadaqah). We are called to enact this charity in every mode of speech: from family conversations to public addresses, from affable discussions to fractious interactions. The “charity” of the “good word” is meant, in other words, to be a settled disposition and not a sporadic donation: as the Qur’an avers, the “good word” is incumbent upon us even (or perhaps especially) in our response to ignorance, our conduct in disagreement, and our encounter with hostility. These are the moments when patient, compassionate discernment is most readily forsaken, and when equilibrium in word and deed swiftly succumbs to the reactive proclivities of the self. Only through the force of virtuous habit can we resist the allure of retaliatory transgression: goodness will naturally and invariably flow from the heart and tongue habituated to it, much as the fruits of the “good tree” abound in all seasons. We are afforded a glimpse into this holy habit, this acclimation to beauty, in a remarkable anecdote from the life of Prophet ‘Īsā (Jesus). It is said that ‘Īsā once encountered a pig walking on the road, and addressed it with the words “May you go through in peace (salām).” A passerby, taken aback by this, asked, “Do you say this [even] to a pig?” ‘Īsā responded, “I fear lest I accustom my tongue to evil speech.”
This prophetic tenderness is an example of the consistent, undramatic practices of speech by which we steadily nourish a fruitful tree of “good words.” We cannot spontaneously will this goodness into being; it is formed, sculpted, and shaped through daily, devoted iterations of beauty and virtue—including, as ‘Īsā showed, through a disciplined cultivation of kindness toward other creatures. How do we arrive at this everyday effusion of excellence? One way is surely through taqwā, that splendor of God-consciousness to which the Qur’an so insistently invites us. How would our patterns of speech change if, before every word we utter, we consciously direct our minds and hearts to the very Source of our speaking? How would we address others if, before making each remark, we reacquaint ourselves with the sheer God-giftedness of language? How would we use words if we related to them not as proprietors (who can wield their words as possessions at will) but as custodians (whose words are to witness, at every turn, to God’s beauty and light)? Perhaps it is when we fully and faithfully realize that our speech is never entirely our own, but has been divinely entrusted to us, that our words become a truly hospitable habitat for goodness.
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