Lesson 12 of 16 · Full sentences
Four ways to say no
أَدَوَات النَّفْي
After this lesson: Tell lā, mā, lam and lan apart and know what each one denies.
Lā denies in general, and in the Qur'an it often denies something absolutely: lā rayba fīhi, 'there is no doubt in it at all'. With a command it means 'do not': lā takhaf.
Mā denies a past fact or a present one: mā kāna, 'he was not'. Lam also denies the past, but it does so by putting a present-tense verb into past meaning: lam yalid, 'He did not beget'. Lan denies the future, and denies it emphatically: lan taʿbudū.
Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ uses lam twice in one āyah to close off both directions at once — He did not father, and He was not fathered.
In the Qur'an
لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ
lam yalid wa-lam yūlad
He neither begets nor is begotten.
Notice. Present-tense verbs after lam, yet the meaning is a flat denial of the past — that is lam's whole job.
ذَٰلِكَ ٱلْكِتَـٰبُ لَا رَيْبَ ۛ فِيهِ
dhālika l-kitābu lā rayba fīh
That is the Book about which there is no doubt.
Notice. Lā with a bare noun in -a denies the whole category: not a trace of doubt.
Check yourself
Nothing is scored or saved here — answering is how the rule sticks. When you want a score, the same checks are drilled to mastery below.
What does lam do to the verb after it?
Which particle denies the future?
Word morphology, grammar and syntax trees are shown by the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com), the annotated linguistic resource developed at the University of Leeds.