What does "al-Kawthar" mean?

Surah Al-Kawthar is the shortest surah in the Quran — three verses, ten words — and it turns on a word that occurs nowhere else in the text. Most translations leave al-Kawthar untranslated, which is honest, and leaves the reader with a question.

Indeed, We have granted you, [O Muhammad], al-Kawthar.

So pray to your Lord and sacrifice [to Him alone].

Indeed, your enemy is the one cut off.

(Al-Kawthar 108:1-3)

This site serves three commentaries. The Sunni reading below is al-Tafsir al-Muyassar, from the King Fahd Complex. The Shia reading is Tafsir as-Safi by al-Fayd al-Kashani and Tafsir al-Mizan by al-Tabataba'i. All three are Arabic; the renderings into English are mine.

The word itself

Kawthar is built on the pattern faw'al from kathrah, abundance — a pattern Arabic uses for intensity. Al-Mizan quotes the lexical definition plainly: kawthar is a thing whose nature is abundance; al-kawthar is abundant good. Before it is the name of anything in particular, it is a description of amount. All three commentaries start there.

Why the readings differ so widely

They diverge immediately afterwards, and al-Mizan says so in as many words: the commentators' statements on al-Kawthar differ astonishingly. He then lists them — abundant good; a river in the Garden; the Prophet's basin, in the Garden or at the gathering; his children; his companions and followers to the Day of Resurrection; the scholars of his community; the Quran; prophethood; the easing of the Quran and the lightening of the laws; Islam; divine oneness; knowledge and wisdom; his merits; the praised station; the light of his heart — and notes that someone counted the views up to twenty-six. Of all of them, he says, only the first two rest on narrations; the rest are assertions.

A single-occurrence word has no second passage to be read against, which is how most Quranic terms get settled. That is the whole difficulty, and it is why the three commentaries take three different routes to the same verse.

The Sunni reading: al-Muyassar

Al-Muyassar puts it in one sentence: We have given you abundant good in this world and the next — and among that is the river of Kawthar in the Garden, its banks tents of hollowed pearl, its bed of musk.

The order of that sentence is the point. The general sense comes first, and the river is named as one instance of it, not as a replacement for it. On al-Muyassar's account the two readings are not rivals: the wider sense is primary and the river sits inside it.

The Shia reading: as-Safi and al-Mizan

As-Safi opens with the same lexical sense — excessive, abundant good — and then does something al-Muyassar does not: it lists the further interpretations rather than choosing. Al-Kawthar has been explained as knowledge and practice, prophethood, the Book, honour in both worlds, and the good progeny. It then reports from Imam as-Sadiq a reading that appears in none of the lists above: it is the intercession. And from him also that it is a river in the Garden which God gave His Prophet in compensation for his son.

Al-Kashani then gives the river in detail, from al-Amali: Ali asked what al-Kawthar was, and was told a river God honoured him with; asked to describe it, the Prophet said it is a river running beneath the Throne, its water whiter than milk, sweeter than honey, softer than cream, its pebbles chrysolite and ruby and coral, its grass saffron, its soil the sharpest musk, its foundations beneath the Throne. And further reports identify it with the basin his community comes to on the Day of Resurrection, with two channels pouring into it from the Garden.

Al-Mizan refuses to settle it by narration at all and settles it from the surah's own structure — and this is the best argument in the whole discussion.

Look at the last verse: indeed, your enemy is the one cut off. The plain sense of abtar is one whose line is severed, and the sentence is built as a reversal — it takes a charge and turns it back. So the thing being given in the first verse has to be what the charge denied: the abundance of his progeny — either as the whole meaning of al-Kawthar, or as the part of abundant good that is specifically meant here. Otherwise, al-Tabataba'i says, closing the surah with your enemy is the one cut off would carry no point at all.

The occasion reports support it, and he collects them from Sunni compilations as well as Shia ones: after the Prophet's sons al-Qasim and Abdullah died, al-As ibn Wail said his line is cut off, so he is abtar — Quraysh used the word of a man whose male children had died — and the surah came down. On that reading the counter-suggestion that abtar meant cut off from his people, or from good, does not fit what the reports describe.

He adds one more observation, and calls it what it is: the verse implies that Fatima's children are his progeny, and this is among the Quran's predictions — God multiplied his line after him to a degree no other line equals, and did so through calamities that destroyed whole branches of it.

Where the two Shia works disagree with each other

Worth noting, because it shows the method. As-Safi reports that the river was given in compensation for his son. Al-Mizan carries a version of the same report naming the son as Ibrahim — and then says it outright: that report is transmitted without a chain and without naming its subject, and it conflicts with the other narrations. He adds that reading al-Kawthar as a river does not contradict reading it as abundant good anyway, and cites the Sunni chain for exactly that: asked whether it is a river in the Garden, Sa'id ibn Jubayr answered that the river in the Garden is part of the good God gave him.

The one real divergence: "and sacrifice"

The second verse is where the two schools part on something practical.

Al-Muyassar reads it as it is usually read: make your prayer entirely for your Lord, and slaughter your sacrifice for Him and in His name alone. Both halves are about exclusivity; the answer to the gift is worship, not thanks in words.

As-Safi reports a different referent for the word. From Imam as-Sadiq: it is raising your hands level with your face — at the opening of the prayer. And a narration in which the Prophet asked Gabriel what this nahirah was that his Lord had commanded, and was told: it is not a slaughtering — you are commanded, when you enter the sanctity of prayer, to raise your hands when you say the takbir, and when you bow, and when you raise your head from bowing, and when you prostrate; for that is our prayer and the prayer of the angels in the seven heavens, and everything has an adornment, and the adornment of prayer is raising the hands at every takbir. From Imam al-Baqir, as-Safi reports a third reading: nahr is straightening up in the standing, that a man hold his spine and his chest upright. Al-Kashani then names the other view explicitly, as the reading of the Sunni commentaries: that the prayer meant is the festival prayer and the nahr is the slaughter of the offering.

Al-Mizan goes further and claims the raise-the-hands reading is attested on both sides: reported, he says, by the two schools from the Prophet and from Ali, and by the Shia from as-Sadiq and other Imams. He then quotes the chains from Sunni compilations — the report through Ali in al-Durr al-Manthur, one from Abu Ja'far that it is raising the hands at the first takbir of the opening, one from Ibn Abbas that God revealed to His Messenger to raise his hands level with his chest when he says the takbir, and that is the nahr — and notes that al-Tha'labi and al-Wahidi carried the Ali report in their own commentaries. He lists the festival-prayer-and-offering reading as one of the alternatives rather than the default.

So this is not a case of one school reporting and the other being silent. It is a case of the same word carrying two live referents, with the weighting reversed between the commentaries.

Where the three agree

• The lexical meaning is abundance — abundant good — and every reading starts from it.
• The surah is consolation and a gift: a statement of what was given, and an answer to someone who taunted him.
• Reading al-Kawthar as the river does not exclude reading it as abundant good; the river is an instance, not a rival.
• The gift obliges a response, and the response is worship: so pray to your Lord.
• Abtar describes someone whose trace stops. The surah sets abundance that does not run out against a line that ends.

Where each goes its own way

• Al-Muyassar fixes the sense in one line — abundant good in both worlds, the river among it — and reads wa-nhar as the slaughter.
• As-Safi lists the interpretations without choosing, adds the intercession from as-Sadiq, gives the river and the basin in narrated detail, and carries three separate readings of wa-nhar while naming the slaughter reading as the other school's.
• Al-Mizan argues from the surah's own last verse that the progeny is what is meant, dates the revelation to the death of the Prophet's sons, calls the multiplying of his line a fulfilled prediction, and criticises one of the narrations as-Safi relays.

Counted on the site's own text

• The surah is ten words long, the shortest in the Quran. The next shortest, Al-Asr, is fourteen.
• Five of those ten words occur in no other verse of the Quran: the words rendered We have given you, al-Kawthar, and sacrifice, your enemy and the one cut off. Half the surah is unique to it — which is why so little of it can be settled by comparison with anywhere else.

What the surah claims, and what it does not

• It states that something abundant was given, and that the one who hates him is the one whose trace is cut.
• It does not define al-Kawthar. The word is given without a gloss, which is why the commentaries range from a river to a lineage to the intercession.
• It does not say the river and the wider sense are alternatives. Both al-Muyassar and al-Mizan say the opposite.
• Its second verse is a command, not a description — and what that command refers to is the one place in these three readings where the practical consequence actually differs.
• The above are commentators' positions, presented as they stand rather than adjudicated. Their full texts are on the surah's own page.

Read:

• Surah Al-Kawthar

Related:

• What does "as-Samad" mean in Surah Al-Ikhlas?
• What is the difference between ar-Rahman and ar-Rahim?