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Death Du’a Dissected
November 25, 2006 on 8:10 am | In Arabic, Islam| By Ilm Seeker
When someone dies, we say "inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon." It means, roughly translated, "We belong to Allah and to Him we return."
Inshallah here, we'll do a brief (grammatical) dissection of the phrase, so you can understand the words better (and not mix them up / mispronounce them). If you hover your mouse over underlined words, you'll see the Arabic inshallah.
Inna: Inna is really inna-na. The first part is "very", the last part is "we"--but Arabs like to simplify, so they just write it as inna (with only two noons). It means "Indeed, we" or "verily, we".
Li-llahi: Li is a harfu jarr (preposition) meaning "to" or "is for." We use it as a kind of possessive case. "a laka akhun" (the la is really the same as li) means "is for you a brother?" or "do you have a brother?" So here, "lillahi" means "belong to Allah" or "are for Allah". (It's also because of the li that Allah takes kasra.)
Wa: Wa means "and".
Ilay-hi: This is two parts, it means "to him". Ilay is actually a form of ila (a preposition), which means "to". We say things like, "thahabtu ila masjidin" -- I went to a masjid. "Hi" is actually "hu", the third-person possessive pronoun ("his"). (It takes kasra because of ila.) So the overall translation is "to him".
Rajioon: This is some form of the verb "to return", not sure on the details--people usually translate it as "we will return." It is plural (so refers to 3+ people).
So taken together, we get a translation of "indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to him we return."
Wallahu 'alim.
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Excellent, this really has helped during my time of hard ship.
JazakhAllahukheyr brother…
Wa-salaamu alaikum wa rahmatulAllah
Comment by Khalil — September 2, 2007 #