Chapter

One whose illness is not life-threatening, such as a toothache, eye pain, or a mild headache, …

After discussing gifts and many rulings connected with them in the state of health, the author—may Allah have mercy on him—now discusses gifts during illness. Is a gift made during illness like a gift made in the state of health? This requires further detail, which will come in the author’s discussion.

Know that illnesses fall into three categories: non-life-threatening illness, life-threatening illness, and prolonged illness. A life-threatening illness is one from which, if a person dies, his death would not be regarded as unusual; that is, it would not be surprising for him to die from it. It has also been said that it is an illness from which death is considered more likely than not. A non-life-threatening illness is one from which, if a person died, that would be unusual. Prolonged illnesses are those that last for a long time, such as tuberculosis and leprosy.

His statement, “One whose illness is not life-threatening,” refers to the first category of illness. “One whose” is a relative pronoun functioning as the subject; “his illness” is a subject—not, as we say, a second subject—because the relative clause is an independent sentence. “Not life-threatening” is the predicate of the subject, and the sentence is a relative clause with no syntactic position in the grammatical analysis.

His statement, “such as a toothache”: there is no doubt that a toothache is painful, and it may even keep a person awake at night, but it is not life-threatening. That is, if someone died from a toothache, people would say, “He died while in good health,” because death is not attributed to an illness of this kind. Nevertheless, a toothache is certainly painful.

His statement, “and eye pain”: eye pain is likewise not life-threatening. However, there is a type of illness that occurs at the root of the tooth, and also in the