Discover the meaning of the term Al-lms (لمس) in Islamic vocabulary.
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Updated on 11 April 2026 at 1:05 AM
📖 3 min readIt is a power spread throughout the whole body, by which one perceives heat, cold, moisture, dryness, and the like, upon touchings and contact.
A power in the nerve intermingled with most of the body; the majority held it to be a single power. Many of the verifiers, among them the shaykh, held it to be fourfold, arbitrating between heat and cold, between moisture and dryness, between roughness and smoothness, and between softness and hardness. Some added a fifth, arbitrating between heaviness and lightness. They upheld the fourfold division to better establish the multiplication of powers: a single power cannot produce more than one effect; yet here are tangible things of differing, contrary genres, requiring therefore differing perceptive powers arbitrating one another by contrast; so they established for each pair of opposites a single power. You know that their saying 'the one, inasmuch as it is one, cannot produce but the one', supposing its truth, entails nothing for the perception of contradictories and the judgment of contrast beyond the number of facets, whether those facets be multiple powers, so be it; and likewise, what is perceived by sense is the contradictories, like heat and cold, not the contrast itself, which is among the meanings grasped by reason and imagination. And if a single power may perceive two contradictories, then two have already proceeded from it; why should more than that not proceed from it?
A power fixed in the whole body, by which one perceives heat, cold, moisture, dryness, and the like upon contact.
'The thing, lamsan': to touch it with the hand; he is 'lamis'. 'The woman': to have with her the marital relation.
A power fixed in the whole body, by which one perceives heat, cold, moisture, dryness, and the like upon contact (this is al-Jurjani's wording in al-Ta'rifat p. 204). Al-Raghib's wording (al-Mufradat p. 454): 'lams is perception by the outer skin, and it is used for request, and by it, and by mubashara (direct contact), the marital relation is alluded to; the sale of mubashara is forbidden'; and in al-Misbah (al-Misbah al-munir, entry 'lams' p. 213): 'lamasa': he reached it with the hand, thus they explained it; 'lamasa his wife' alludes to the marital relation. Ibn Durayd said: the root of lams is the hand, to know the touching of the thing; then it multiplied until it denoted every seeker.