COLOURS

See also: ( Isa; John of Damascus; tawhid

Oliver Leaman

Six basic or primary colours are present

in the Qur ) an: white, black, red, green,

yellow and blue. Except for blue, all

colours refer to natural phenomena and

are explicitly used to call attention to the multi-coloured world created by

God. In addition to their descriptive

sense, some colour words, such as black,

white and blue, are also used meta-

phorically to suggest a psychological or

emotional state of being. It is perhaps

interesting to note that these six words

are psychological primary colours, and

indeed they are used as such in the text;

white denotes happiness or bliss (3.107), black denotes both gloom (39.60) and

anger (16.58), and blue denotes a spec-

trum of sensations ranging from emo-

tional terror and fear, to physical

sensations of cold and suffocation

(20.102). In terms of distribution, the

most frequently used colour is white

(eleven times), followed by green (eight

times), black (seven times), yellow (five

times), red (once) and blue (once). In

addition to these basic colour terms, there are also eight references to the

word ‘colour’ (lawn), most often collo-

cated with the adjective ‘diverse’, i.e.