Three Words for Forgiveness
An Interfaith Conversation on Family, Faith, and Estrangement
English has one word for forgiveness, and that single word is asked to do far too much work. It must cover the unilateral release of a grievance, the bilateral repair of a broken relationship, the merciful concealment of a shameful act, the legal pardon of a debt, and the divine erasure of sin. When the same word names all of these, the moral textures collapse into a single demand — forgive — and the person who cannot perform that demand on cue is left feeling as if they have failed God, neighbor, and self at once.
This is not a small problem. As I sat on a panel at the Mishkan Miami Spiritual Care Conference last week, listening to Karl Pilemer of Cornell describe the findings of his five-year Estrangement and Reconciliation Project as published in Fault Lines Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, I kept thinking about the toll exacted by this linguistic poverty. Pilemer’s national survey work has shown that roughly 27% of Americans report being estranged from a family member, with about 10% estranged from a parent or child — figures that, extrapolated to the U.S. population, place this experience well above twenty-five million people (Pillemer & Suitor, 2002, anchored the broader research program). Many of those people carry an additional burden on top of the rupture itself: the shame of feeling that their inability to “forgive and reconcile” marks them as spiritually deficient.
It does not. The traditions know better. They have always known better. We just have to recover the vocabulary.
A Panel, A Question, A Disagreement Worth Having
The panel — convened by Rabbi Frederick Klein, who directs Mishkan Miami, and moderated by Dr. Pilemer — brought together a rabbi, a Christian minister (Rev. Renwick Bell), and me, speaking from the Islamic tradition. The framing question was deceptively simple: what does forgiveness mean in your tradition, and how is it practiced between human beings?
What emerged was not the comfortable convergence that interfaith panels too often produce — the kind where everyone agrees that love is good and hatred is bad and we should all be kinder to one another. We agreed on a great deal, but we also disagreed in instructive ways, and the disagreements were where the real teaching happened.
The deepest convergence was on a distinction that the English word forgiveness obscures: the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation. Rev. Bell put it in pastoral terms drawn from his Christian work with families: forgiveness is “an individual unconditional act of letting go of resentment for personal healing,” while reconciliation is “a mutual conditional process requiring accountability and repentance.” Rabbi Klein anchored the same distinction in the Hebrew vocabulary of teshuvah — return — and in Maimonides’s Hilkhot Teshuvah, which insists that the wrongdoer must seek the injured party directly. I offered the Arabic terms that make this distinction native to Islamic ethics, and it is to those terms I want to turn, because they map the territory with unusual precision.
The Arabic Vocabulary
The Qur’an deploys at least three distinct terms where English uses “forgive”:
ʿAfw (عفو) — to pardon, to release a claim. The root carries the sense of effacing a trace. This is the unilateral act: I can release what you owe me without your participation, your knowledge, or even your continued existence. ʿAfw lives entirely in the heart of the wronged.
Ṣafḥ (صفح) — to turn the page, to overlook. Literally, “to turn the surface away.” This is the discipline of not mentioning the wrong, not reproaching, not keeping the offense alive in speech and memory.
Maghfira (مغفرة) — from the root gh-f-r, “to cover, to shield.” This is what God does: He covers the sin from its consequences.
Alongside these sits tawba — the repentant turning back of the wrongdoer toward God — and ṣulḥ or iṣlāḥ — the active, bilateral work of reconciliation, of making the relationship whole again.
Three of God’s most invoked Names belong to this semantic field: al-Ghafūr (the Ever-Forgiving), al-ʿAfuww (the Pardoner), and al-Tawwāb (the One who turns repeatedly toward His servants). The Prophet ﷺ taught a single supplication that names al-ʿAfuww specifically: Allāhumma innaka ʿAfuwwun tuḥibbu al-ʿafwa fa-ʿfu ʿannī — “O Allah, You are the Pardoner; You love to pardon; so pardon me” (al-Tirmidhī, no. 3513).
Notice what the vocabulary makes possible. A daughter estranged from a father who abused her decades ago can offer ʿafw — she can release the claim in her own heart, for her own freedom, and for the sake of her relationship to God — without offering ṣulḥ. She does not have to invite him back into her life. She does not have to perform a reconciliation that her body and her judgment tell her is unsafe or unwise. The unilateral gift of pardon and the bilateral work of reconciliation are different acts, governed by different conditions, accomplishing different things. To collapse them is either to make forgiveness impossible (because reconciliation is sometimes impossible) or to make it cheap (because reconciliation can be performed without any underlying release).
When I named these distinctions on the panel, Rabbi Klein said immediately, “This is the same as kapparah“ — the covering of sin. The shared Semitic root k-p-r / gh-f-r is not coincidental. The two traditions are reading the same metaphysical reality with overlapping lexicons.
Mercy Is Prior
The second deep convergence was theological. In all three traditions, divine mercy is not a counterweight to divine wrath; it is prior to it.
The ḥadīth qudsī records: “When God decreed creation, He wrote with Him above the Throne: My mercy prevails over My wrath“ (sabaqat raḥmatī ghaḍabī; al-Bukhārī, no. 7404; Muslim, no. 2751). The Qur’an names mercy as the only divine attribute God describes as a self-imposed obligation: “Your Lord has prescribed mercy upon Himself” (6:54). Joseph Lumbard (2015) has argued that this self-binding makes mercy the structuring principle of the entire moral economy of revelation — not a feature of the divine alongside other features, but the substrate on which everything else stands.
Rabbi Klein offered the same theological architecture from the Jewish side, citing Maimonides’s vision in Hilkhot Teshuvah that history itself moves toward reconciliation — that even exile is not rejection but the long working-out of a relationship that cannot finally be broken. He told a midrashic story I had not heard: God, in the rabbinic imagination, goes into exile with the people. The king does not send the prince away and forget him; the king sends emissaries.
Rev. Bell brought the Christian register — Matthew 6, the Lord’s Prayer, the structural insistence that the receipt of divine forgiveness obligates the extension of forgiveness to others — and emphasized that forgiveness is fundamentally “a release in one’s own body,” a freedom granted to the forgiver before it is anything granted to the offender.
What I want to note here is that none of these are interchangeable claims. Maimonides’s teshuvah — the return — is not the same as the Pauline language of grace, and neither is the same as Qur’anic tawba with its threefold structure of cessation, regret, and resolve, codified by al-Ghazālī in the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Khalil, 2018). The three theologies converge on the priority of mercy; they diverge on its mechanism, its conditions, and its anthropology. Honoring both the convergence and the divergence is the work of serious interfaith conversation. Pretending they are the same flattens the very resources we have come together to share.
Takhalluq bi-Akhlāq Allāh
The third theological convergence came around the question of imitatio Dei — the idea that human ethics participate in divine character. In Islamic ethics this is named takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh, “characterizing oneself by the character traits of God,” articulated systematically by al-Ghazālī and developed by Ibn ʿArabī in Sufi metaphysics (Moosa, 2005). The doctrine holds that the divine Names are not only objects of worship but templates of human becoming. The believer cultivates ghufrān in measure because God is al-Ghafūr; cultivates ʿafw because God is al-ʿAfuww.
The Qur’anic anchor for this is Sūrat al-Nūr 24:22, revealed about Abū Bakr after he had vowed to cut off financial support to Misṭaḥ, a poor relative who had participated in slandering Abū Bakr’s daughter ʿĀʾisha. The verse asks: “Let them pardon and overlook. Would you not love that God should forgive you?” Upon hearing it, Abū Bakr reportedly said, “By Allah, I love that Allah should forgive me,” and restored the aid.
Rabbi Klein named the parallel: halichah b’darchei ha-Shem, walking in God’s ways. The logic is the same. The human capacity to forgive is not a moral demand imposed from outside; it is participation in the deepest grain of reality. We forgive because we are forgiven, and the forgiveness we extend is the only mode in which the forgiveness we receive becomes intelligible.
Where We Disagreed
The most generative moment of the panel came when an audience member asked: Are we obligated to forgive an abuser?
Rabbi Klein answered with a clarity that I think the room needed to hear: in Jewish law, there is no obligation to forgive someone who has not asked for forgiveness. Forgiveness, in the Maimonidean framework, is overwhelmingly understood as the acceptance of a sincere apology, not the unilateral release of a grievance. The wronged party is not commanded to perform what the wrongdoer has not earned.
The Islamic answer differs at the margin. Classical jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi, and Hanbali) classifies ʿafw as mustaḥabb — recommended — not wājib — obligatory. A person who declines to forgive and pursues lawful redress is not sinful. But the Qur’anic and prophetic tradition extends overwhelming praise to those who forgive without a request: Sūrat al-Jāthiyah 45:14 commands believers to forgive “those who do not look forward to the Days of Allah” — people who do not even acknowledge divine accountability, let alone seek pardon. The Prophet ﷺ at the Conquest of Mecca pardoned former persecutors who had not asked, including Hind bint ʿUtbah, who had mutilated his uncle’s body. Unilateral pardon is the higher station, but it is supererogatory.
Rev. Bell, from the Christian side, leaned further toward the imperative: forgiveness is required by Christ even of the unrepentant, though reconciliation is conditional on their changed behavior.
Three frameworks, three answers, all anchored in serious textual tradition, none simply reducible to the others. A Muslim woman estranged from an abusive parent is not given the same counsel as her Jewish or Christian counterpart, even though all three traditions agree that her protection is non-negotiable and that ṣulḥ (full reconciliation, restored intimacy) is not religiously required of her. These are real differences. They matter. And they are exactly the kind of thing that gets lost when we paper over interfaith conversation with platitudes.
There is one place where I want to register a careful difference with Pilemer’s framing — though not, I think, with his findings. He spoke movingly of family relationships as biologically grounded attachments that we are evolutionarily incapable of simply discarding, and he is correct as a sociological matter. But I think the religious traditions add something his framework, by design, cannot: a horizon of mortality and impermanence that decenters the self. I made this point briefly on the panel and want to expand it here. The Prophet ﷺ taught that one should pass through this world as a traveler resting briefly under the shade of a tree (al-Bukhārī, no. 6416). One of the great Sufi disciplines is the constant dhikr al-mawt, remembrance of death. The Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda — many-sidedness — refuses the absolutism of any single narrative of grievance. Each of these is a discipline of releasing the self’s investment in being-the-wronged-one, which is often what holds an estrangement in place. The traditions, in other words, do not simply offer technique for repair. They offer a re-scaling of the self that makes repair imaginable.
What the Conversation Opens
I left Miami thinking about what this kind of conversation actually accomplishes, beyond the immediate pleasure of sitting between a thoughtful rabbi and a generous Christian pastor for an hour. Three things, I think.
First, vocabulary matters. The single English word forgiveness is a theological liability. Whether through Arabic, Hebrew, or Greek, the traditions distinguish unilateral release from bilateral repair, the heart’s discipline from the social act, the act of overlooking from the act of covering. Pastoral counselors, family therapists, and clergy of every tradition would do their congregants and clients a service by recovering these distinctions and refusing to ask of one word what only several can do.
Second, convergence is not the goal. The three Abrahamic traditions — and Eastern traditions, when we admit them into the conversation — read the same human predicaments with overlapping but irreducibly distinct grammars. Honoring the distinctions is not parochialism; it is the precondition of having anything worth sharing. The Islamic insistence on ḥuqūq al-ʿibād — the rights of human beings, which God Himself declines to override without the wronged party’s consent — is not the same as the Pauline ethic of grace or the Maimonidean structure of teshuvah, and pretending otherwise impoverishes all three.
Third, the family is the small theater of the cosmic drama. Pilemer’s research describes 25 million Americans in estranged relationships with their parents or children. The Qur’an pairs duty to parents with monotheism itself in at least six passages. The Fifth Commandment positions filial honor as the bridge between obligations to God and obligations to neighbor. The Christian gospels make the reconciled household the model of the Kingdom. When the traditions speak about how parents and children, siblings and spouses repair what has been broken between them, they are not speaking about a small or domestic matter. They are speaking about the shape of the world.
References
Abu-Nimer, M. (2003). Nonviolence and peace building in Islam: Theory and practice. University Press of Florida.
Khalil, A. (2018). Repentance and the return to God: Tawba in early Sufism. State University of New York Press.
Lumbard, J. E. B. (2015). Covenant and covenants in the Qur’an. Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 17(2), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2015.0182
Moosa, E. (2005). Ghazālī and the poetics of imagination. University of North Carolina Press.
Pillemer, K., & Suitor, J. J. (2002). Explaining mothers’ ambivalence toward their adult children. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64(3), 602–613. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2002.00602.x