In one line
The classical list
Key words in the Arabic
Understand it
Two clusters to hold: the pure negators-and-commanders (لَمْ، لَمَّا، لام الأمر، لا الناهية) which each clip one verb, and the conditionals (إِنْ، مَنْ، مَا…) which clip two — condition and answer. Whenever a mudari' ends in sukun, or has lost its nun or weak letter, one of these eighteen stands somewhere before it.
The five that put the mudari' into jazm
| # | Meaning | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | لَمْ | lam | did not — it turns the mudari' into a past negative |
| 2 | لَمَّا | lamma | not yet — and the expectation that it still might |
| 3 | لَام الْأَمْر | lam al-amr | let him — a command in the third person |
| 4 | لَا النَّاهِيَة | la al-nahiya | do not — a prohibition |
| 5 | إِنْ | in | if — and this one jazms two verbs, not one |
Jazm shows as a sukun on the last letter, or as a dropped nun where the verb is one of the five. إِنْ is the odd one: it governs the verb of the condition and the verb of the answer together.
How to spot it
In the Qur'an
Related terms
Common questions
Does a jazm-causer always give past meaning?
Not always, but often. The commonest of them takes a present-tense form and negates it in the past — the shape stays present while the sense moves back. Others attach to conditions, where the meaning is neither past nor present but hypothetical.
Next in the guideحَرْف عَطْفConjunction (harf 'atf) →Updated