Al Muhiy

Life is the root here, and so is ḥayāʾ, the shyness that is really a kind of aliveness to other people. The same letters give ḥayawān, which the Qur’an uses once, and startlingly, of the home that comes after this one: that, it says, is the life, if only they knew.

Al-Muḥyī is the one who gives life; this form is not written in the Qur’an, though the verb it comes from runs everywhere through the text, most often in a single sentence with its opposite. Everything alive today was given the whole of it, not a portion.