Surah 56. Al-Waqia, Ayah 9

Lit., "those [or "the people"] of the left side". Similarly to the use of the expression maymanah as a metonym for "attaining to what is right", the term mash'amah is used to denote "losing oneself in evil" (e.g., in 90:19 ). The origin of both these metonyms is based on the belief of the pre-Islamic Arabs that future events could be predicted by observing the direction of the flight of birds at certain times: if they flew to the right, the event in question promised to be auspicious; if to the left, the contrary. This ancient belief was gradually absorbed by linguistic usage, so that "right" and "left" became more or less synonymous with "auspicious" and "inauspicious". In the idiom of the Qur'an, these two concepts have been deepened into "righteousness" and unrighteousness", respectively.