Arabiq Online - Arabic of the Qur'an

Sūra al-Furqān 25:27-28

Our Qur’anic Arabic word today is the word خَلِيْل khalīl, which you may already know means friend, as Allah took Prophet Ibrahim (pbuh) as a khalīl: a friend. 

But the Qur’an mentions 8-10 different types of friends in the Qur’an, so what kind of friend is a khalīl? It comes from the root خَلّ which has lots of meanings, including ‘to be free of defects’, so a friendship of khulla, is a true and sincere friendship in which there are no holes. 

Classically it was also used to describe a garment that was well-pinned together so it wouldn’t come apart. Basically, a close, intimate friendship with a strong bond.

In this juz’ in Sūra al-Furqān, Allah describes a graphic scene of the Day of Judgment, when the wrongdoer will be biting his hands in regret at the kind of company he had kept:

يَا وَيْلَتَىٰ لَيْتَنِي لَمْ أَتَّخِذْ فُلَانًا خَلِيلًا

Oh how doomed I am! How I wish I hadn’t taken so and so as an intimate friend.

He’ll regret the close company that he had kept, because the consequence of that friendship was now Hell. In the world, he knew everything about his friend, followed him, interacted with him, liked all his posts, but now he can’t even remember his name and calls him fulān ‘so and so’. He continues, exclaiming: I wish I had adopted a path with the Messenger instead!

May we have the wisdom to choose good khalīls so we have no regrets on that day.