—of pure, indigenous Arabic stock, not an Arabized loan-word, nor is it taken from the language of the Romans, as they have claimed.

Some linguists trace it to their verb saratu ash-shay’a asrutu-hu sartan—“I swallowed a thing whole”—and istarattu-hu, meaning “I gulped it down,” for one who swallows something moves swiftly through a confined channel.

The Arabs even coined a proverb from this root: “Do not be so sweet that you are swallowed, nor so bitter that you are spat out.” They say a‘fayta ash-shay’a—“you spat it out of your mouth because of its bitterness”; and they say, “So-and-so yastaritu (swallows) whatever he borrows,” meaning he consumes the loan at once.

Ya‘qūb ibn as-Sikkīt recorded: “Taking is surrayṭ, and repayment is ḍurrayṭ.”

They also used as-sirṭāṭ for fālūdhaj (a sweet confection) because it is swallowed quickly, and they described a sword as sirāṭī—that is, cutting—because it slices swiftly along its line of strike.

Hence, the ṣirāṭ is the well-defined, level road that brings the traveller quickly to his goal. Allah mentions the word ṣirāṭ many times in His Book, yet He never calls Satan’s way a ṣirāṭ; rather, He names them “subul” (byways), reserving the term ṣirāṭ exclusively for His own path, as in His saying: