نفيto strip a thing away from another and distance it, per Ibn Fāris (root nfy)

The lexicographers in chronological order, from al-Khalīl to Lane.

al-Khalīl glosses nafā as 'to expel, banish' (ṭaradahu), the object being manfī; he notes Q5:33's aw yunfaw min al-arḍ and records the alternative gloss that its meaning there is imprisonment (al-sijn), alongside al-intifāʾ min al-walad (disowning a child) and al-nufāya, the discarded residue of coins or the like, plus nafy al-rīḥ/al-maṭar/al-qidr, what wind, rain, or a boiling pot casts off. The al-Ṣiḥāḥ excerpt available here treats only the adjacent form nufāʾa, scattered patches of pasture, not the core banishing sense, so al-Jawharī's own gloss of nafā is not represented in the sources given. Ibn Fāris states the single underlying sense, taʿriyat shayʾ min shayʾ wa-ibʿāduhu minhu, stripping a thing bare from another and setting it at a distance, and gathers nafaytu al-shayʾ anfīh, al-intifāʾ, and al-nufāya under it, along with the idiom-series 'what wind/rain/a well-rope casts off' as specifications of one act of separating-and-distancing. Ibn Manẓūr glosses nafā yanfī as tanaḥḥā, to move off, and preserves al-Azharī's extension to hair that 'nafā' — became disheveled and fell out — illustrated by Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb al-Quraẓī's remark to the newly-appointed caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz on the wildness now visible in his hair; Lane's entry is not given for this root.

What the theorists of sound symbolism would say of these letters. Speculative by nature.

On the correspondences given, fāʾ is itself glossed by al-Dabbāgh as a letter of negation — marking the removal of foulness from something whose genus is otherwise known for foulness, leaving the thing pure within an impure class — which sits suggestively close to nafy's own sense of stripping-away. Nūn is tied to the fourth heaven and, by al-Dabbāgh, to a good that dwells and kindles within the self; yāʾ is tied to the first heaven and to the vocative or emphatic function. Read together, nafy could be heard as an emphatic (y) act of purifying-negation (f) applied outward from an inward good (n) — separating what belongs to the self from what is foreign to it. This is Ibn ʿArabī's and al-Dabbāgh's mode of letter-symbolism, with Ibn Jinnī's imsās as background theory, and is explicitly speculative rather than a claim historical linguistics would support.

The two-letter nucleus (Ibn Fāris's own chapters) and the permutations of the letters (Ibn Jinnī).

Among Ibn Fāris's ن-ف chapters, several neighbors of نفي share a sense of outward emission or expulsion: نفث (expelling breath or spittle from the mouth with a slight sound), نفح (a scent wafting outward, then by extension bestowing wealth), نفخ (swelling by being blown into), and نفذ (passing decisively through and out). نفي specifies this family's expulsive movement as removal-by-distancing rather than emission-by-force. More strikingly, among نفي's own permutations Ibn Fāris records فني under the same three letters, glossed only as a chapter whose word 'does not follow a regular analogical pattern' (bāb lā tanqāsu kalimatuhu) — and fanāʾ is of course the term for annihilation, passing-away, later central to Sufi vocabulary. Ibn Fāris himself does not connect the two roots, and Ibn Jinnī's greater derivation is not applied to this pair in the sources at hand; the kinship between nafy, negating-and-removing, and fanāʾ, ceasing-to-be, is a resonance worth noting to a reader of Ibn ʿArabī, not a demonstrated etymology. نيف, a small surplus above a round number (miʾa wa-nayyif), and يفن, an old man, share the same three consonants without apparent bearing on نفي's sense.

Cognates in the sister languages, and whether the word was borrowed.

No confident Semitic cognate for نفي has been identified. The sense-family it covers — exile, disownment, discarded residue — does not obviously align with a known Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Geʿez, or South Arabian root of the same three consonants; Hebrew's exile-vocabulary (e.g. gālāh, nādaḥ) and Aramaic's negation-vocabulary (lā, lēt) run on different roots entirely. The root should be treated as a native Arabic development within the weak-final ن-ف-و/ي family that Ibn Fāris's own chapter shows, rather than as a loanword from any neighboring Semitic language.

How the classical exegetes read the word in the Quran.

The root's single Qur'anic occurrence is Q5:33, among the punishments prescribed for those who wage war against God and His Messenger: execution, crucifixion, cross-amputation of hand and foot, or an yunfaw min al-arḍ, 'that they be banished from the land.' al-Khalīl already records the alternative gloss that nafy here means imprisonment (al-sijn) rather than physical exile, and al-Ṭabarī surveys the same disagreement among early exegetes and jurists — some reading it as expulsion from one's home region, others as detention removing the offender's freedom of movement within it — a dispute tracking differences among the early legal schools on how this ḥadd penalty is carried out. al-Zamakhsharī and al-Rāzī register the same range of opinion, both readings preserving the verb's core sense of forcible removal from place, whether outward to another land or inward into confinement.

The word as a technical term in falsafa and theology.

In kalām and Avicennian logic, nafy is the standard term for negation, paired with ithbāt, affirmation, as the two basic operations of any proposition (qaḍiyya): a statement either affirms (yuthbit) or negates (yanfī) a predicate of a subject. Theologically, nafy is central to tanzīh, negative predication of God — stripping away body, place, and change from the divine essence — used by al-Ghazālī and the mutakallimūn alongside ithbāt of the positive attributes, so as to avoid both taʿṭīl (empty negation) and tashbīh (anthropomorphic affirmation). Avicenna's logic similarly distinguishes salb/nafy as the negative counterpart to ījāb/ithbāt in the categorical proposition.

The word in Ibn ʿArabī's text and terminology.

In Faṣṣ Ādam, Ibn ʿArabī uses intafat (form VIII of nafy) to secure God's azal and qidam: because God is self-sufficient (ghinā) and does not need what creatures need, 'the awwaliyya entailing the inception of existence out of non-existence is negated (intafat) from Him.' The move is apophatic: nafy here does not merely deny a predicate but establishes, by removing temporal origination (ḥudūth) from the Divine, the distinction between the Real's qidam and every originated thing's beginning-in-time. This belongs to the wider Akbarian practice of clearing away (nafy) what does not properly apply to God as the approach to what does (ithbāt), continuous with kalām usage but folded into Ibn ʿArabī's ontology of wujūd.