Discover the meaning of the term Al-ishmam (إشمام) in Islamic vocabulary.
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Updated on 11 April 2026 at 1:05 AM
📖 3 min readTo shape the lips for the pronunciation of damma without actually uttering it, as an indication of a preceding damma or the damma of the letter upon which a pause is made, which is imperceptible to the blind person.
It is permissible in qila and biya. Najm al-A'immah Fadil al-Umah al-Radi al-Astarabadi, may Allah have mercy on him, said: the reality of this ishmam is that you incline the kasra of the first root letter toward the damma, leaning the quiescent ya that follows it slightly toward the waw, since it follows the vowel of what precedes it. This is what grammarians and Quranic reciters intend by ishmam in these instances. Some have said: ishmam here is like ishmam in the state of pausing, meaning merely rounding the lips while keeping a pure kasra, and this goes against the well-known view among reciters and grammarians. Others have said: it is to produce a pure damma followed by a quiescent ya, and this is also not well known among them. The purpose of ishmam is to indicate that the original state at the beginning of these letters is damma, and thus it is in al-Fawaid al-Ziya'iyyah. If you wish to know the reality of pausing ishmam, listen to what I mention: pausing ishmam occurs only with damma, and it is that you round your lips after rendering them quiescent, leaving some opening between them for the breath to exit so that the observer sees them rounded and knows you intended the vowel by rounding them. It is something perceived by the eye rather than the ear because it is not a sound, but rather the movement of an organ, which a blind person cannot perceive. As for rawm, it is perceived by both the blind and the sighted because it entails, along with lip movement, a sound by which the letter is almost vocalized. Its derivation comes from smelling, as if you made the letter sense the fragrance of the vowel by preparing the organ to articulate it. Its purpose is to distinguish between what is vocalized in connection and made quiescent for a pause, and what is quiescent in every circumstance. It is specific to the damma because if you rounded the lips in other cases, it would suggest the opposite, so they rejected it lest it lead to the negation of what it was established for.
To round the lips after rendering them quiescent.