100. Sūrat al-ʿĀdiyāt

Eleven verses. It takes its name from the word ٱلْعَٰدِيَٰت in the first verse.

The sūra has three parts, and the transition between the parts is abrupt, almost without warning:

1. The oath (1-5): across five verses, the scene of a raid. Something that runs, that strikes out sparks, that falls upon them towards dawn, that raises dust, that plunges into the middle of a host — what it is is not said. 2. The judgement (6-8): the answer to the oath. Man is ungrateful to his Lord; he knows this himself; and his attachment to wealth is fierce. 3. The proof and the close (9-11): a question — does he not know? When what is in the grave is brought out, when what is in the breast is sifted.

At first sight no connection appears between these three parts. What have war horses to do with ingratitude? This is the most fruitful question in the sūra, and at the end of this section I shall give it a heading of its own.

For now let me leave a marker: the four key words of the sūra come from farming. The name of ingratitude (kanūd), the raising of the dust (atharna), the turning up of the graves (buʿthira) and the sifting of the breasts (ḥuṣṣila) — all four are words to do with soil, with crops, with the threshing floor. The sūra opens with a scene of war and closes with a scene of harvest.

I shall present this not as something transmitted but as a reading I have drawn from the roots of the words; but the roots of the words are uncontested, and I shall show each one in its place.

The majority say Meccan. There are also those who say Medinan, and this view is connected with the interpretation of the oath as referring to the camels of the pilgrimage, or with reports transmitted about a sariyya (a small military detachment). The style fits the general character of the Meccan sūras: short verse-endings, an opening with an oath, address to the species (al-insān), a close with a scene of the hereafter.

I state no firm preference.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without it.

Wa'l-ʿādiyāti ḍabḥā "By those that run panting."

The و at the head of the verse is the wāw al-qasam: the wāw of the oath. God's swearing by created things is a device often seen in the Qurʾān — by time (al-ʿAṣr), by the star (al-Najm), by the morning (al-Ḍuḥā, al-Falaq), by the fig and the olive (al-Tīn), by the sky and by the day (al-Shams).

The common core of what is said in the classical sources about the function of these oaths is this: the thing sworn by is set forth as evidence. That is, to say "by such and such" is at the same time to say "look at such and such". An oath is a way of drawing attention.

This will matter particularly for the sūra before us, because the link between the content of the oath and the content of the judgement is the whole question.

Root: ع-د-و. The core sense beneath the root is to cross a limit, to pass from one point to another. From this single core there derive words that look very far apart from one another:

• عَدَا — he ran, he passed by swiftly. To run is to pass swiftly over the ground.
• عَدُوّ — an enemy. An enemy is the one who crosses the limit that lies between you.
• عُدْوَان — aggression, overstepping the bound. "Do not help one another in sin and aggression" (al-Māʾida 5/2).
• اِعْتِدَاء / تَعَدِّي — transgression, trampling on a limit.
• عُدْوَة — the slope of a valley, its edge. "You were on the near slope of the valley and they on the far slope" (al-Anfāl 8/42).

So Arabic puts the same root between running and enmity. Both are a "passing over": the one over the ground, the other over what is right.

Which sense is at work in this verse? The word is on the active participle pattern and is a feminine plural: al-ʿādiyāt — "the (feminine) ones that run". The English word "horses" carries no grammatical gender; in Arabic خَيْل (a troop of horses) is feminine, and so the adjective comes in the feminine too.

But the "enmity" wing of the root does not leave the scene altogether. The thing that runs is running towards someone; and in the third verse it will be said that this is a raid. The word carries both the movement and the direction of the movement.

The first thing the sūra gives is not a sight but a sound.

Root: ض-ب-ح. The definition the lexicographers give is this: ḍabḥ is the sound of breathing that a horse makes as it runs at speed. It is not neighing (ṣahīl); it is the muffled, rasping sound the breath makes as it comes up out of the chest. Some of the lexicographers record that this sound belongs to the horse and to a few other animals alone — a detail that will be decisive in the disagreement we shall take up below.

A second use of the root is recorded as well: fire changing the colour of a thing, scorching it lightly (ḍabaḥat-hu'l-nār). There is a reading that joins the two senses, and it is plausible: the breath of a fast-running animal is hot; sound and heat are two faces of the same event. I pass this on as a connection made by the lexicographers, not as a settled etymology.

Its place in the grammar. Ḍabḥan is in the accusative, and the grammarians differ over its parsing:

• A circumstantial qualifier — "by those that run panting". The verbal noun used in place of a circumstantial qualifier.
• The absolute object of an elided verb — yaḍbaḥna ḍabḥā (the verb "they pant hard" having been dropped).
• An accusative of purpose — this view is in the minority.

There is no practical difference in meaning.

This should be recorded: the sūra opens not with a sight but with a noise.

For the person who is the target of a raid this is exactly the order of events. First the sound comes — still in the dark, while nothing at all is yet visible. Then the sparks struck out of the stones. Then the first light of morning. Then the cloud of dust. And last of all, the horses in the middle of the host.

The five verses follow the order of perception of the one who is raided. The narrator stands in the place not of those who make the raid but of those who are raided.

I record this not as something transmitted but as a reading that comes out of the ordering of the five verses. But the ordering itself is plain in the text, and it is hard to count it as chance.

Fa'l-mūriyāti qadḥā "And by those that strike out sparks as they strike."

The sūra uses فَ at the head of verses 2, 3, 4 and 5. This is the fāʾ al-taʿqīb: it gives the sense immediately after. ثُمَّ (then) puts time in between; وَ conveys no order; فَ builds an unbroken continuity.

Four fāʾs in four verses. The scene flows without a break. This is exactly the rhythm one expects in the telling of a raid: no halt.

Note this — the oath itself began with a wāw, but all the transitions inside it are made with a fāʾ. That is, the thing sworn by is a single thing; the five verses are five moments of that one thing, not five separate objects. For this reason the grammarians count the five verses as a single oath.

Root: و-ر-ي. Warā'l-zandu — fire came out of the fire-stick. أَوْرَى (Form IV) — he brought fire out, he kindled the fire.

The zand is the two-piece fire-making set the Arabs used to light a fire: a spark is obtained by rubbing or striking the one against the other. The Qurʾān mentions this operation directly:

"Have you considered the fire that you kindle? Was it you who brought its tree into being, or are We the bringer?" (al-Wāqiʿa 56/71-72)

The verb there is this verb. That is, in the Qurʾān's own usage the word describes the operation of bringing fire out of stone or out of wood.

Root: ق-د-ح. Qadaḥa'l-zanda — he struck the fire-stick, he rubbed it. مِقْدَحَة — the fire-striking implement. At the centre of the root there is a hard blow.

The verse sets these two words side by side: al-mūriyāti qadḥā — those that bring out fire by striking. The hoof striking the stone, and a spark born of the strike.

A natural inference is drawn from this, and most of the exegetes draw it: a spark is seen in the dark. By day the spark of a hoof goes unnoticed. That is, the second verse says that the scene passes at night — and the third verse will bring the morning. Between the two verses there is a line of time: travelling through the night, arrival towards dawn.

This is the real logistics of a raid.

The spark comes out of stone. Out of the place where the finding of fire is least expected.

The Qurʾān uses this reversal elsewhere too: "It is He who brings you fire out of the green tree" (Yā Sīn 36/80) — fire out of what is moist, that is, out of the opposite of fire. Here it is out of stone: out of what is cold and dead.

This stands not as a point of exegesis but as an observation; but since in the later verses of the sūra it will be asked what dry soil (kanūd) and dead graves yield, it is worth keeping in mind.

Fa'l-mughīrāti ṣubḥā "And by those that raid at morning."

Root: غ-و-ر. إِغَارَة — to come down upon a body of people in a sudden and swift assault. غَارَة — a raid, an incursion.

The word describes not a regular war but a sudden and short-lived assault. We are speaking of the basic unit of the economic and military life of pre-Islamic Arabia: two armies do not meet face to face; one group comes down without warning on another group's flock or camp, takes, and withdraws.

Root: ص-ب-ح. Ṣubḥ — morning, the first light of day. From the same root miṣbāḥ (a lamp, a source of light), ṣabāḥ, iṣbāḥ (in the Qurʾān, fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ, al-Anʿām 6/96).

In grammar ṣubḥan is an adverb of time: it states the hour of the raid.

Why the morning? There is a concrete military logic to this, and it is historically sound:

• The cover of night is needed for the approach, the light of morning for the blow. One travels by night and comes up on the target silently; but if the assault is made in the dark the target cannot be made out and you do harm to your own men.
• Morning is the moment at which a camp is least defended. The watch ends, people are asleep or newly woken, the animals have not yet been gathered.

In reports found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim it is transmitted that when the Prophet mounted an expedition against a people he did not attack before morning came, that he waited until morning and listened for whether the call to prayer could be heard, and that if he heard the call he desisted. This report shows two things at once: that the morning raid was the standard practice of the period, and that a limit was set to that practice.

This must be recorded, because it prepares the later direction of the sūra:

In Arabic the verb صَبَّحَ means "to come upon someone in the morning", and it mostly describes a hostile coming. And the Qurʾān uses this verb in the accounts of destruction:

• "And in the morning an abiding punishment came upon them." (al-Qamar 54/38)
• "The blast seized them as they entered upon the morning." (al-Ḥijr 15/83; similarly 15/66)
• "You pass by them in the morning, and by night." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/137-138)

That is, in the Qurʾān's own telling the morning is the hour of the punishment. The hour of the raid and the hour of destruction are one and the same hour.

This lays a silent layer beneath the third verse: the scene sworn by stands like a small rehearsal of the day that is to be told of after the oath. I record this as a reading, not as something transmitted.

Fa-atharna bihī naqʿā "And therewith they raised up dust."

There is a break of grammar here, and it needs to be noticed.

• Verses 1-3: al-ʿādiyāt, al-mūriyāt, al-mughīrāt — all three are active participles. A noun conveys a fixed quality.
• Verses 4-5: atharna, wasaṭna — both are verbs. A verb conveys an event that takes place.

In Arabic the nominal sentence conveys thubūt (fixity), the verbal sentence ḥudūth (coming to be, taking place); this distinction has been treated in several places earlier in this commentary.

Its function here is this: the first three verses define — these are things that run, that strike out sparks, that raid. The last two verses narrate — and they did this, and then they did that. The scene stops being a description and becomes an event.

نُون النِّسْوَة. The نَ at the end of the verbs (athar-na, wasaṭ-na) is Arabic's feminine plural verb ending. Since the plural of non-rational beings is treated as feminine in Arabic, this ending is used here. This is the grammatical reason why the word has come in the feminine ever since the first verse.

Root: ث-و-ر. The concrete sense of the root is to lift a thing from its place, to make it swell up, to turn it upside down. From the same root:

• ثَوْر — a bull. The animal that lifts, that churns up, that charges.
• إِثَارَة — a raising, a stirring up.
• ثَوَرَان — a swelling, a surging.

And now the real point: the Qurʾān uses this verb of farming.

• "A cow not broken to the yoke, that ploughs the earth and turns it over…" (al-Baqara 2/71). The tuthīru'l-arḍ here — to plough the soil, to till.
• "They were stronger than these in the earth; they ploughed the soil and turned it over and built it up." (al-Rūm 30/9). The same verb, the same sense: athārū'l-arḍa wa ʿamarūhā.

That is, in the Qurʾān's own usage athāra is the verb of ploughing.

And in this verse the same verb describes the horses raising dust.

The difference between the two uses is this: the soil the plough lifts turns into a bed that will take the seed — the lifting is for the sake of production. The soil the hoof lifts is flung into the air and scatters — the lifting is without result. The same verb, the same soil, two different outcomes.

I record this as my own reading. But both of the verb's uses in the Qurʾān were given above with their verse numbers; the root of the word is not in dispute.

Root: ن-ق-ع. Naqʿ is dust that has been raised and hangs in the air. This sense of the word is widely accepted.

The same root has another use as well: naqīʿ — water that gathers and stands in a place, a steeped liquid; anqaʿa — to steep in water. Some lexicographers set up between the two senses the core "staying put in a place, not settling". I pass this connection on not as a settled etymology but as a relation drawn by the lexicographers.

Dust hanging in the air — this is an image that will come before us again in Sūrat al-Qāriʿa. In Sūrat al-Qāriʿa the mountains will be "carded wool" and people will be "moths blown about". A thing that has lost its weight and hangs in the air is one of the shared images of these three sūras.

A small pronoun, but one that has been dwelt on: bihī — "with it", "there". With what? Where?

All three have been defended in the classical sources. It makes no great difference to the meaning; the first and the second are the more widespread. That a pronoun should refer back to something not expressly stated is ordinary in Arabic, and similar instances have been seen earlier in this commentary.

Fa-wasaṭna bihī jamʿā "And therewith they plunged into the very middle of a host."

Root: و-س-ط. Middle, centre. From the same root:

• وَسَط — middle. "We have made you a middle community" (al-Baqara 2/143) — here "middle" carries the sense both of position and of balance.
• ٱلصَّلَاةُ ٱلْوُسْطَىٰ — the middle prayer (al-Baqara 2/238).
• أَوْسَط — the most middling, the most balanced. "The most balanced of them said…" (al-Qalam 68/28).

The verb here is transitive: wasaṭna jamʿan — "they took a host by the middle", that is, they plunged into its very centre.

This is the last and most dangerous moment of the raid. To strike the edge of a host is one thing; to plunge into its middle is another. The one who plunges into the middle has left his way out behind him.

Root: ج-م-ع. To gather, to bring together. Jamʿ — a gathered body of people, a crowd.

The word comes indefinite: "a host". Which host is not said — in keeping with the sūra's choice of defining nothing in the oath.

But this word has a proper name attached to it as well, and this is the heart of the disagreement that follows: in Arabic جَمْع is one of the names of Muzdalifa. The place where those returning from ʿArafāt during the pilgrimage gather is called by this name. This datum is the strongest ground of the view that reads the oath as referring to camels.

Let us read the first five verses of the sūra together:

The sound of breathing → the spark → the morning → the dust → the centre.

In this sequence there are three things at once:

One — a line of time. Night (the spark is visible) → dawn (the raid) → day (the cloud of dust, the clash).

Two — a line of distance. A sound heard from far off → a light seen from far off → the approach → the dust → contact. The five verses come from far towards near.

Three — an order of the senses. Hearing → sight → sight → sight → touch. The scene begins at the ear and ends on the body.

These three lines lie one over another and produce, across five verses, the sensation of something drawing nearer without a break. What is most spoken of about this part of the sūra is its rhythm, and the source of the rhythm is not sound alone but this structure of approach.

The verse-endings of the five verses: ḍabḥā — qadḥā — ṣubḥā — naqʿā — jamʿā.

The first three end in the same sound: -ḥā, preceded in each case by a closed syllable. In Arabic these three words rhyme with one another, and in all three the hard letters that come from the throat are dense: ض، ح، ق، د، ص، ب.

In the fourth and fifth verses the sound softens a little (naqʿā, jamʿā) but the metre is kept: all of them from a monosyllabic root, accusative with nunation, of two syllables.

What is traditionally said about this part of the sūra is this: the sound of the words imitates the thing they tell of. Five words, short, stressed, hard in their close, produce the rhythm of hoofbeats.

I record this observation, but a limit must be set: the fit between sound and meaning (taqlīd al-ṣawt) is a phenomenon found in all the languages of the world, and it is known to be especially productive in Arabic. The fit here is real and striking; but I do not present it as a proof of miracle. I record it as one of the clearest instances of the dense sound-weave of the short Meccan sūras.

This is the most debated question of the sūra since the classical period, because the text never gives the name of the thing sworn by. Across five verses only qualifiers are listed; the bearer of the qualifiers is not said.

This looks like a deliberate choice, and it has its parallels in the Qurʾān (al-Mursalāt 77/1-5, al-Nāziʿāt 79/1-5, al-Ṣāffāt 37/1-3 — in all of them the thing sworn by is named by a qualifier, not by its own name). The same disagreement has arisen over all of these sūras.

It is widely transmitted in the tradition that these two views are ascribed to two Companions, and a discussion said to have passed between them is related. Since I cannot give the detail and the chain of this ascription with certainty, I give no names; but that both views existed from the earliest period is uncontested.

The majority hold the view of the horses, and their ground is in the first place linguistic: the overwhelming majority of the lexicographers count the word ḍabḥ as proper to the horse, and qadḥ (the spark) requires a shod animal. In addition, ighāra (raiding) is a military term.

I too prefer this view, but two records must be entered:

One. That the word jamʿ is a name of Muzdalifa is a real datum that requires the second view to be taken seriously. It cannot be brushed aside.

Two. The preference is not binding. And there is this possibility besides: by giving no name the text may have left an openness wide enough to take in both scenes. This openness is regularly seen in the Qurʾān's similar oaths.

A small number of exegetes have said that the oath may be read as referring not to a particular animal but to everything that runs. This view is in the minority and remains weak against concrete words such as ḍabḥ, qadḥ and ighāra; but it is worth recording.

Inna'l-insāna li-Rabbihī la-kanūd "Truly man is deeply ungrateful to his Lord."

The answer to the oath (al-muqsam ʿalayh). The single sentence that comes after five verses of preparation.

Three emphases are laid one upon another in the sentence:

1. إِنَّ — the particle of emphasis: "truly, without doubt". 2. لَ — the lām al-ibtidāʾ; because it has slid to the far side of inna it is called the displaced lām (lām al-muzaḥlaqa). A second emphasis. 3. A five-verse oath — set before the sentence, the heaviest emphasis of all.

As was recorded earlier in this commentary (the sections on al-ʿAṣr and al-Takāthur), by the measure of rhetoric this density shows a single thing: the addressee is in a position to object to what is said. No one swears three times over for something that is going to be accepted.

And here the source of the objection is plain: no one counts himself ungrateful. Ingratitude is an attribute nobody takes upon himself.

The ordinary word order of the sentence would have been inna'l-insāna la-kanūdun li-Rabbihī. In the verse li-Rabbihī has been drawn in front of the predicate (kanūd).

In Arabic an element brought forward out of its normal place (taqdīm) gains emphasis and restriction. We saw the same technique in this commentary at the last verse of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: lahū kufuwan aḥad — "to Him there is no equal".

Its function here is this: it emphasises that the ingratitude is not general but is directed specifically at his Lord. A man may not be ungrateful to others; he knows what he owes, he gives his thanks, he shows his loyalty. What the verse states is exactly where the fault is directed.

And the name chosen is decisive too.

Rabb — as was treated in the section on al-Fātiḥa, is the name that carries ownership and nurture together: the one who feeds, who raises, who brings to ripeness by degrees. The verse does not say "he is ungrateful to Allāh"; it says "to his Lord".

This names the sharpest form of ingratitude. Ingratitude towards a stranger is a rudeness; ingratitude towards the one who raised you belongs to another category.

Note that the same name is chosen in the preceding sūra as well: "because your Lord has revealed to it" (al-Zalzala 99/5). Two neighbouring sūras name the agent of that scene by the same name.

The key word of the sūra, and a word that occurs only here in the Qurʾān — a hapax legomenon. The same situation we recorded for ṣamad and kufuw in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ: there is no second use inside the Qurʾān to explain the word. The meaning has to be drawn from the use of the root in Arabic.

Root: ك-ن-د. What the lexicographers record about this root:

The second sense calls for a pause, because it is what turns the word from an insult into a description.

Kanūd soil is not soil that lacks rain. The rain falls, the water comes down, the season comes — and nothing comes up out of the soil. There is an input; there is no output.

This is exactly the description of ingratitude: what is received turning into nothing. The ungrateful person is not the one who refuses the favour; he is the one who takes the favour, uses it, consumes it, and produces nothing in return.

This is a far wider description than the ingratitude that is understood as "not saying thank you". Thanksgiving is not a matter confined to words; it is what has been received turning into something.

The word the Qurʾān properly uses for ingratitude is كُفْر, and that root was treated in this commentary at al-Baqara 2/6. What was established there was this: the root k-f-r means to cover; a farmer is called kāfir because he covers the seed with soil; kufr is not a failure to know but a covering over of what one knows.

Now let us set the two words side by side:

Both come from farming, but from two different ends of the field. Kufr is a work the sower does — an act, a choice, a movement of covering. Kunūd, on the other hand, is the condition of the soil — not an act but a barrenness.

This distinction has a practical consequence: kufr is an action, and so it can be brought to an end at once — the cover is lifted. Kunūd is a fault of make-up; there is no cover to lift. The person who notices his own ingratitude finds no obstacle in his hand to be removed; because the problem does not lie in something done but in something not done.

This parallel, which ties both words to farming, is my own reading; but the dictionary senses of the two roots are as recorded above, and they are not in dispute.

There is a description of this word repeated very often in the exegetical tradition: the kanūd is the one who counts his misfortunes and forgets his favours.

I do not ascribe this description to any one person; since it is transmitted in different sources with ascriptions to different names, I cannot speak with certainty. But the description itself is instructive and agrees with the dictionary sense of the word.

Why does it agree? Because "counting" is a work of attention. The person who counts his misfortunes is not lying; he is counting things he really has lived through. The problem is not in the accuracy of the count but in what enters the count.

The point at which this overlaps with a modern observation. In the psychological literature there is a wide discussion of people's tendency to give more weight to negative stimuli than to positive ones; this tendency goes by various names (negativity bias, loss aversion). Findings to the effect that losses are felt more heavily than gains are widely discussed in economics and in psychology.

In recording this three things must be stated: the scope and the explanatory power of these concepts are disputed in the literature; the verse does not announce these concepts; and the agreement between the two descriptions does not mean that the one foretold the other. The same records I entered for Veblen in the section on al-Takāthur hold here as well.

The difference in the verse is this: the modern literature defines this as a bias of perception, that is, as an error. The verse places the same phenomenon inside a relation of debt. A bias, when it is not said towards whom it runs, is a neutral mechanism; the verse names the party it runs towards: li-Rabbihī.

Wa innahū ʿalā dhālika la-shahīd "And he himself is witness to that."

Root: ش-ه-د. The concrete sense of the root is to be present. Shahida'l-majlisa — he attended the gathering, he was there. From the same root:

• مَشْهَد — the place where an event passes, a scene.
• شَهَادَة — testimony. And the same word is used in the sense of "the visible world" as well: ʿālimu'l-ghaybi wa'l-shahāda (al-Ḥashr 59/22) — the one who knows the unseen and the seen alike.
• مَشْهُود — that which is witnessed.
• شَهِيد — both "witness" and "martyr". The lexicographers give different explanations of the relation of the second sense to the root; I do not enter into that disagreement.

That the core of the root is being present gives the logic of the concept of testimony: you can bear witness only to where you have been. A witness is not someone who has heard of the event from outside; he is someone who has been inside the event.

Innahū — "he". Who?

Both views have been defended in the classical sources. The first view is the more widespread and is the more consistent in respect of the chain of pronouns: in verses 6, 7 and 8 the subject stays the same.

I too prefer the first view. It is not binding; the second view has a force of its own, and it accords with the last verse of the sūra.

If the witness is the person himself, the verse says something very heavy: ingratitude is not unconscious.

This coincides exactly with what this commentary established at al-Baqara 2/6. There it was stated that kufr is not "failing to know" but "covering over what one knows", and therefore that ignorance and kufr are separate things. Here the same thing is said of ingratitude: a person is the witness of his own ingratitude, because he was inside the event.

And the root's sense of "being present" settles this: man has been present in his own life. A person's competence to bear witness to his own lifetime cannot be disputed — he is the only one who was there.

This finding has one further consequence. If ingratitude is not known, its remedy is information: the person is reminded of what he has received. But if it is known, the problem does not lie in knowledge. Three verses later the sūra will say this directly: "Does he not know?" — the question is a question of reproach, and its answer is "he does know".

The link with al-Takāthur. Sūrat al-Takāthur set its diagnosis as a problem of knowledge: "you shall soon know", "if only you knew with the knowledge of certainty". There the question was the kind of the knowledge — the knowledge was there but it did not work. Al-ʿĀdiyāt comes to the same place by another road: the knowledge is there, the person is even his own witness; and still it does not work.

Wa innahū li-ḥubbi'l-khayri la-shadīd "And truly he is hard in his love of wealth."

Root: خ-ي-ر. Good, benefit, the thing preferred. But in Arabic this word is used in the sense of wealth as well, and the Qurʾān makes this use itself:

"It is prescribed for you, when death comes to one of you and he is to leave khayr (wealth), that he make a bequest to parents and kin in a fitting way." (al-Baqara 2/180)

The khayr here is beyond dispute wealth; what is spoken of is the thing to be bequeathed.

In this verse too the overwhelming majority of the exegetes read khayr as wealth. Their grounds:

• The settled use of the word in Arabic.
• The context: ingratitude is a fault named together with wealth.
• The natural relation the word shadīd (hard, intense) forms with the love of wealth.

A small number of exegetes have read khayr in the general sense of "good" and understood the verse as "although he loves good greatly, he is ungrateful". This reading stays weak and does not sit with the context; I content myself with recording it.

The fineness in the choice of the word. For wealth Arabic has the word māl, and the Qurʾān uses it abundantly (twice at al-Humaza 104/2-3). Here khayr has been chosen in its place.

There is a diagnosis in this choice: man calls wealth not "wealth" but "good". He sees the thing in his hand not as a neutral object but as the thing that is good. The word itself carries man's way of looking at wealth.

I record this as a reading. But that the Qurʾān chose to name the same thing māl in al-Humaza gives one to think that the choice is meaningful.

Root: ش-د-د. The concrete sense of the root is to tighten, to tie a bond tight. Shadda'l-ʿuqdata — he tightened the knot. From this the sense "intense, harsh, strong" is born: what is tight is what is not slack.

From the same root: shadda (he tightened), shidda, ashadd (more intense), ishtidād.

There are two readings, and both come out of the root:

The first reading — "intense". Shadīd here means "excessive, dense", and li-ḥubbi'l-khayr is its object (brought forward): "he is intense in his love of wealth." That is, the degree of the love is what is described.

The second reading — "close-fisted". In Arabic shadīd is also used in the sense of "close-handed, holding, not letting go". On this reading the lām states a cause: "because of his love of wealth he is close-handed." That is, not the degree of the love but the result of the love is described.

Both readings have been defended in the classical sources and they do not exclude one another: the one who loves intensely holds tight. The root's sense of "tightening" carries them both at once.

Now set the two verses side by side. They are of the same structure word for word:

The two sentences are of exactly the same word order: emphasis + a fronted phrase with lām + a predicate with lām. And their verse-endings agree as well: kanūd / shadīd.

Since the two sentences are on the same pattern, the contrast between them is set up by the pattern itself:

• Towards his Lord: kanūd — barren, giving nothing back, slack.
• Towards wealth: shadīd — tight, holding, not letting go.

The same man looks in two directions and is of two different constitutions. In the one barren like soil, in the other tight like a knot. Tight where he ought to be slack, barren where he ought to be fruitful.

I record this as a reading I have drawn from the grammar of the two verses; I do not present it as transmitted. But the identity of word order in the two verses is plain in the text.

Verses 6, 7 and 8 are a sequence of diagnosis, and their order is meaningful:

6 — What he is: he is ungrateful. 7 — That he knows it: he is himself the witness. 8 — Why he is so: his interest is elsewhere, and there it is very dense.

The third explains the first two. Ingratitude is born not from an absence of feeling but from a displacement of feeling. The capacity for attachment is not lacking in the person; there is more than enough of it — but it has turned towards another object.

This is the same diagnosis as the one recorded for the word lahw in the section on al-Takāthur: there too the question was not the doing of an evil but the fastening of attention somewhere else. The core of lahw was displacement. Here the same displacement is said of love.

A-fa-lā yaʿlamu idhā buʿthira mā fi'l-qubūr · Wa ḥuṣṣila mā fi'l-ṣudūr "Does he not know — when what is in the graves is turned up and brought out, and what is in the breasts is sifted out and set forth?"

The two densest verses of the sūra. And the place where all the sūra's images of farming are gathered.

أَ — the interrogative hamza. فَ — a connective. لَا يَعْلَمُ — he does not know.

This is the kind of question called in Arabic istifhām inkārī or tawbīkhī: it is asked not to seek information but to reproach. Its answer is known already and it is negative — that is, "of course he knows" or "he ought to have known".

The closest thing to it in English is "Does he not know, then?" or "Can he really not know?"

That the verb is from the root of knowing. The sūra does not say "does he not reflect", "does he not fear", "is he not ashamed". It says "does he not know".

This is the same as the central verb of Sūrat al-Takāthur: sawfa taʿlamūn, sawfa taʿlamūn, law taʿlamūna ʿilma'l-yaqīn. Both sūras set the matter up as a matter of knowledge.

And the answer the two sūras give looks in the same direction as well. In al-Takāthur the diagnosis was this: the knowledge is there but it is not of the kind of certainty — although he knows the truth he does not live by it. In al-ʿĀdiyāt, in the seventh verse, it was said that the person is his own witness. That is, no lack of knowledge is spoken of here; what is spoken of is a knowledge that does not work.

What does he not know? The object of the verb is not expressly stated. The grammarians resolve this in two ways: either the object is elided and the idhā clause states its time ("does he not know the state of that day — when those in the graves are brought out"), or the idhā clause stands in place of the object. It makes no difference to the meaning.

What was recorded in the section on al-Takāthur holds here as well: a threat whose object is not stated is greater than one that is, because it has no limit.

Root: ب-ع-ث-ر — a four-letter root. Its meaning: to turn a thing upside down, to pour out what is inside it, to bring it out by scattering.

Some of the lexicographers count this word as a product of naḥt (the fusing of two words into one): بَعَثَ (to raise to life, to lift) + أَثَارَ / ثَارَ (to churn up, to turn upside down). I pass this view on as a possibility; it is disputed among the lexicographers, and I do not present it as a settled etymology.

But this is striking: whether the view is right or not, the second half of the word calls up the root ث-و-ر — and that root occurred in the fourth verse of this sūra: fa-atharna bihī naqʿā. The horses had lifted the soil; now the graves are lifted.

That the verb comes in the passive. Buʿthira — passive. Who turns them upside down is not said. The same choice was made in the first verse of Sūrat al-Zalzala (zulzilat). Both sūras build the scene without an agent.

Its other occurrence in the Qurʾān:

"When the graves are turned upside down…" (al-Infiṭār 82/4). The same verb, the same passive pattern, the same object. The word occurs in these two places in the Qurʾān.

A comparison with al-Zalzala. The two sūras tell of the same event with two different verbs, and the difference is meaningful:

In al-Zalzala the earth does something; in al-ʿĀdiyāt something is done to the earth. In al-Zalzala the verb calls up the plant (the soil yields its crop); in al-ʿĀdiyāt the verb calls up the plough (the soil is turned over).

The most beautiful word in the sūra, and the hardest to carry into English.

Root: ح-ص-ل. حَاصِل — what is left after a process, what is obtained. The root lives on as a loan in Turkish — hasılat (yield, takings), hâsılı (in short) — while English has no borrowing from it.

تَحْصِيل (Form II) — in the classical Arabic dictionaries it is described thus: to bring the kernel out of its husk. The examples given are taken from farming and from mining: separating the wheat from the chaff, separating the gold from its ore, taking the kernel out of its shell.

That is, taḥṣīl is an operation of sifting. There is a mixed heap; at the end of the operation there remains out of that heap one single thing, pure, and of a known identity.

The picture of the threshing floor. When wheat is harvested the straw and the grain are mixed together. On the threshing floor the sledge is drawn over it, and then it is winnowed against the wind: the light straw flies off, the heavy grain falls to the ground. What is left — what is obtained — is the grain.

This is the verb the verse uses of the breasts.

Now read the two verses together:

• The graves: buʿthira — they are turned over, their bottom comes to the top, what is in them comes out. The outward.
• The breasts: ḥuṣṣila — they are winnowed, sifted, their kernel comes to light. The inward.

Both verbs come from farming, and they are two operations in sequence: first the soil is ploughed, then the crop is harvested and the threshing floor is winnowed. The sūra has built the scene of the hereafter like a farming season: the sowing begins with the turning of the soil, the harvest ends with the sifting of the grain.

And do not forget: in this sūra man's name was kanūd — soil that yields no crop.

Let us set the four words together:

I record this as my own reading; I do not present it as transmitted. But the root senses of all four words were given above one by one, and none of them is disputed. I make no claim as to whether the words come together in this way deliberately; I only show the picture that appears when they do come together.

And the picture is this: the sūra opens with war and closes with harvest. At the beginning the horses lift the soil and nothing comes of it but dust — a lifting without result. At the end the soil is lifted again, and this time a harvest is taken. The difference between them is that the second lifting ends in a sifting.

The verse does not say "what is in your deeds" or "what is in the records". It says "what is in the breasts".

صَدْر — the breast. Its plural is ṣudūr. The Qurʾān uses this word regularly for man's unseen inner world:

• "Whether you keep your word secret or speak it aloud, He knows what is in the breasts." (al-Mulk 67/13)
• "Know that they turn their breasts away in order to hide from Him." (Hūd 11/5)
• "A healing for what is in the breasts." (Yūnus 10/57)

That is, the ṣudūr is the place of which no record is kept. A deed is visible; the breast is not.

A note on the root. This root was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Inshirāḥ: the core of ص-د-ر is the sense of what comes to the front, the place of issuing — maṣdar is the place of issuing, ṣadr al-majlis the head of the assembly, ṣadr the part of the body that comes to the front. And in the preceding sūra the going forth of people was told with a verb from the same root: يَصْدُرُ (al-Zalzala 99/6).

That is, two neighbouring sūras tell with the same root, the one of the outside (the going forth of people) and the other of the inside (the sifting of the breasts).

What these two verses say together is the most important judgement of the sūra:

The reckoning has two layers. What is in the grave is brought out — this is the things done, the side that can be measured, that can be seen, that can be put on record. What is in the breast is sifted — this is the intentions, the motives, the real reasons.

The relation between the two is not one-directional, and this is the harshest side of the verse:

• The deed may be right and the intention corrupt. On the threshing floor the straw takes up as much room to the eye as the grain; when it is winnowed it flies away.
• The deed may be deficient and the intention sound. This possibility too is inside the same operation.

That the verb taḥṣīl has been chosen is meaningful for this reason: the verb is not a verb of destroying but a verb of separating. In the operation of winnowing nothing is destroyed; only the heavy and the light are parted from one another.

And note this detail: the light flies off, the heavy stays. This measure will come before us one sūra later in al-Qāriʿa as a balance. Al-ʿĀdiyāt winnows the threshing floor; al-Qāriʿa weighs what is left.

The idea of sifting what is inside the breasts is expressed in the Qurʾān with other verbs as well, and all of them come from the field of refining:

• "…and that He might test what is in your breasts and purge what is in your hearts." (Āl ʿImrān 3/154). The verb here is مَحَّصَ: to separate a thing from its admixture, to make it pure. The same operation, a different word.
• "So that God might purge those who believe and blot out those who disbelieve…" (Āl ʿImrān 3/141). The same verb again.
• "That He may set the bad apart from the good." (al-Anfāl 8/37; similarly Āl ʿImrān 3/179). The verb here is مَازَ / يَمِيزَ — to separate, to set apart.

What these verses have in common is this: the Qurʾān often describes the reckoning of the hereafter as an operation of separation — not as a punishing. Separation is the making visible of what is already there. This comes out at the same place as the verb "he shall see" in Sūrat al-Zalzala.

Inna Rabbahum bihim yawmaʾidhin la-khabīr "On that day their Lord is surely aware of them."

Root: خ-ب-ر. This root occurred in the fourth verse of Sūrat al-Zalzala as well (akhbārahā), and what we recorded there finds its function here.

The core beneath the root: to know a thing by trying it, by looking inside it, by testing it. From the same root come اِخْتِبَار (trial, testing) and خِبْرَة (knowledge gained by experience). The Turkish words hibre (expert appraisal) and haberdar (informed) come from here too; English has no borrowing from this root.

For this reason خَبِير and عَلِيم are not the same thing. ʿAlīm is the one who knows; Khabīr is the one who knows the inner side of the matter. This distinction is regularly drawn in the classical sources: the knowledge of the khabīr is knowledge that comes not from the outside of a thing but from within it.

The verse's word is apt for this reason: the name that comes after the breasts have been sifted is the name of inner knowledge. The ninth verse brought out the outside, the tenth verse sifted the inside, the eleventh verse gave the name of the one who already knew that inside.

A note on the language, and a record. In some dictionaries it is recorded that the word الخَبِير, from the same root, is also used in the sense of "the farmer who ploughs the soil". I pass this report on not as a firm ground but as a recorded usage; since I cannot verify its source and how widespread it is, I have given it no weight in my comment on the sūra's weave of farming. The four-word table above does not rest on this record.

The ordinary word order of the sentence would have been inna Rabbahum la-khabīrun bihim yawmaʾidhin. In the verse بِهِمْ has been drawn in front of the predicate — the same fronting as that of li-Rabbihī in the sixth verse.

Set the two verses side by side:

• Verse 6: inna'l-insāna li-Rabbihī la-kanūd
• Verse 11: inna Rabbahum bihim yawmaʾidhin la-khabīr

The same structure, turned around. In the sixth verse the subject is man and the party brought forward is the Lord. In the eleventh verse the subject is the Lord and the party brought forward is people. The judgement of the sūra and its close are each the other's image in a mirror.

This is another form of the "turning around" we recorded in the section on al-Takāthur: there the one who counted turned into the party about whom questions are asked. Here the one who is ungrateful to his Lord turns into the party of whom his Lord is aware.

A small but decisive detail: the verse does not say bi-aʿmālihim (of their deeds), it says بِهِمْ (of them).

The Qurʾān mostly uses the word khabīr together with deeds: the pattern "God is aware of what you do" occurs many times over. Here, however, the object is not the deed but the person himself.

This accords with the preceding verse. After the breasts have been sifted, what stands there is not a file but a person. When the operation of sifting is over, what is left — what is obtained — is the person himself.

In verses 6, 7 and 8 the sūra was speaking in the singular: al-insān, innahū, innahū. In the eleventh verse it goes over to the plural: Rabbahum, bihim.

The reason for this transition is in the ninth verse: "what is in the graves" — there the subject became plural. The singular that began as the name of the species is distributed, in the scene of the reckoning, among individual persons.

The same movement was there in the preceding sūra as well: al-Zalzala said al-insān (singular) in its third verse and al-nās (plural) in its sixth. Both sūras pass from singular to plural at the same place: in the scene of the reckoning.

We have come to the most important question of the sūra: why is an oath sworn by war horses, and how is this oath linked to the judgement of ingratitude?

There are several explanations in the classical sources and in the later commentaries. I shall set them out and then add my own reading.

The animal is faithful, man is ungrateful.

The horse spends itself for its master. It runs until its breath is choked, it strikes out sparks as its foot beats against the stones, it travels in the dark, it throws itself into the very middle of the danger. And it does this neither expecting a return nor knowing what it does.

Man is the one to whom the horse was given. And there is nothing he gives in return.

This explanation is widely voiced in the exegetical tradition and sits well with the structure of the sūra: five verses set up a picture of faithfulness, the sixth verse declares the ingratitude. The oath serves as a comparison.

The Qurʾān counts the horse among the favours given to man:

"And horses, mules and donkeys [He created] for you to ride and as an adornment." (al-Naḥl 16/8)

And more striking still, the place where it occurs in the list of the things man loves intensely:

"The love of desires — of women and sons, of hoarded heaps of gold and silver, of horses of mark, of cattle and of tilled land — has been made to seem fair to people. That is the passing enjoyment of the life of this world." (Āl ʿImrān 3/14)

This verse is directly related to the eighth verse of the sūra before us. There it was said "he is intense in his love of wealth"; here the items of that love are enumerated — and the horses are on the list.

That is, the thing sworn by is one of the objects of the attachment criticised in the judgement. The sūra declares man's ingratitude by swearing by the thing man loves intensely.

Here I add my own reading, and I state that I do not present it as transmitted.

What is a morning raid? In pre-Islamic Arabia it is a way of acquiring wealth. A raid is not production but a change of hands: one man's flock becomes another man's flock.

Now look at the order of the sūra:

1. Verses 1-5: the most violent form of acquiring wealth — an armed raid. 2. Verses 6-8: the diagnosis of this man — barren towards his Lord, tight towards wealth. 3. Verses 9-11: the same soil ploughed once more, but this time with a harvest taken.

On this reading the oath does not set up a contrast; it shows the subject of the judgement. The five verses are the living picture of the sentence in the eighth verse, "he is intense in his love of wealth". The name of that movement which raises the dust and plunges into the middle of a host is given three verses later.

This reading has a force of its own: on it the transition between the oath and the judgement stops being abrupt. The text shows a scene, then says what the scene is.

And the verb of the fourth verse — atharna, that is, the verb of ploughing — gains a distinct sense on this reading: a raid too is an attempt to take something out of the soil, but the only thing it produces is dust.

The three explanations do not exclude one another. The text swears by something it does not name; and because no name is given it can carry more than one reading. This is not a vagueness but, as we recorded in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ, a gain.

The verse-endings of the eleven verses fall into three groups, and the groups change at exactly the point where the content changes:

The observation recorded in the section on al-Takāthur is clearer still here: the sound changes where the subject changes. The raid scene is short and stressed, the section of diagnosis long and heavy, the section of the reckoning long and rounded.

And one detail more: verses 9 and 10 rhyme exactly (al-qubūr / al-ṣudūr) — the same metre, the same plural pattern, the same sound. The outward and the inward are matched in sound as well.

There is an order here worth noticing: the sūra narrates with the verb and pronounces judgement with the noun. The scenes are verbal sentences (ḥudūth — what takes place); the diagnoses are nominal sentences (thubūt — what is fixed). Man's ingratitude is not an event but a state; and so it is said with a nominal sentence.

• No way out is shown. The same gap we recorded in the sections on al-Takāthur and al-Humaza is here too.
• There is no description of punishment. Neither fire nor torment. The sūra closes with "He is aware".
• There is no name of an addressee. No one is called, no one is spoken to. The sūra speaks in the third person.

The common consequence of these three gaps is this: the sūra is not a warning but a statement of fact.

First: ingratitude is not a feeling but a question of yield.

The sense of kanūd as "soil that yields no crop" takes ingratitude out of the class of emotional deficiencies. The ungrateful person is not the one who feels no gratitude; he is the one who turns what he has received into nothing.

The practical measure of this is: since you received a thing, has that thing turned into something in you? Has health turned into work, or was it merely consumed? Has knowledge turned into a benefit? Has an opportunity turned into an opening?

The measure asks not after the feeling but after the output. And this takes in a life too that knows how to say thank you but transforms nothing.

Second: the places where you are tight and the places where you are slack.

That the sixth and eighth verses are on the same pattern gives a practical instrument of diagnosis: a person is at one and the same time very slack and very tight; the question is which of the two is where.

It is not hard to see where the energy in a life is concentrated: what one is afraid of missing, what one gives up sleep for, whose loss one reckons up. These questions show a person the field in which he is shadīd. The places left over are the places in which he is kanūd.

The sūra characterises this distribution morally, but before characterising it, it makes it visible.

Third: counting the losses and not counting the gains.

The description of kanūd so often repeated in the commentaries — counting misfortunes and forgetting favours — is a valid observation for the present as well.

One reason for this is structural and calls for no blame: most of what is given is invisible because it is unbroken. What is unbroken goes unnoticed; for it to be noticed it must break off. Health becomes visible when one falls ill, safety when it is lost, opportunity when it narrows.

This is not a fault in man but a limit having to do with the way attention works. But the sūra does not accept it as an excuse, because the seventh verse says that the person is his own witness: the limit is not unknown, it is known.

Fourth: the difference between inward and outward.

What the ninth and tenth verses say together is especially sharp for the present. In modern life a person's outward record is more detailed than it has ever been: the work he does, the words he writes, the places he goes, the money he spends. This record is very nearly complete.

But the only thing this record keeps is the category of what is in the grave: the things done. Of what is in the breast there is no record, and there can be none.

What the verse says is that a second operation will be carried out as well. And this operation assesses the first anew: on the threshing floor the grain and the straw are in the same heap, and until they are parted both look like corn.

The practical side of this for the present is: a record that looks good does not guarantee that it is a good record. And the reverse is true as well: a record that looks bad may, when it is winnowed, give a different result from the one expected. The sūra says this not as a threat but as the nature of the operation.

Fifth: a text that opens at speed and closes at a standstill.

For five verses the sūra moves without a break — sound, spark, dawn, dust, clash. Then it stops. In the last three verses there is no movement at all: only an opening and a sifting.

This change of rhythm is the text doing by its form the very thing it says: speed is not the subject of the reckoning. How fast one went, how much distance was covered, how much dust was raised — none of this occurs in the last three verses. The last three verses ask only after what is left.

Al-ʿĀdiyāt closes with the sifting of the breasts — that is, with an operation in which the light flies off and the heavy stays.

The next sūra will bring the instrument of this operation. In al-Qāriʿa the measure is openly a balance: "he whose scales weigh heavy" and "he whose scales weigh light". Al-ʿĀdiyāt winnows the threshing floor; al-Qāriʿa weighs what is left.

I shall return to the whole of the three-sūra sequence at the end of the section on al-Qāriʿa.

• Whether the sūra is Meccan or Medinan is disputed; no preference was stated.
• The disagreement over what the oath is sworn by (horses / camels) was given in a table. The majority view, "horses", was preferred, its ground was written out, and it was recorded that it is not binding. The ascription of the two views to two Companions is widely transmitted; since I cannot give its chain with certainty, no names were given.
• The connection between the "scorching / changing of colour" sense in the root of ḍabḥ and the sense "the sound of breathing" was passed on as a relation drawn by the lexicographers; it was not presented as a settled etymology.
• The connection between the senses "dust" and "standing water" in the word naqʿ was likewise recorded as a relation drawn by the lexicographers.
• The view that the verb buʿthira was fused (naḥt) out of the words baʿatha and thāra was passed on as a possibility; it is disputed among the lexicographers.
• The three views about the referent of the pronoun bihī in verse 4 were given; no preference was stated.
• To whom the pronoun in verse 7 belongs (man / God) is disputed; a table was given, a preference was stated, and it was recorded that it is not binding.
• Whether the word shadīd in verse 8 means "intense" or "close-fisted" is disputed; both readings were given, and neither was presented as certainly correct.
• The description of kanūd so often repeated in the commentaries — "one who counts his misfortunes and forgets his favours" — was passed on, but since it is ascribed in different sources to different names it was ascribed to no one.
• The dictionary record that the word khabīr is used in the sense of "farmer" was not used as a firm ground, since I could not verify it, and the comment on the sūra's weave of farming was not made to rest on it.
• For the report about the Prophet's practice in the matter of the morning raid, al-Bukhārī and Muslim were recorded.
• The reading that four of the sūra's words come from the field of farming and form a weave is mine; it was not presented as transmitted. The root senses of the words were given one by one.
• The reading that the five-verse oath follows "the order of perception of the one who is raided" is mine as well.
• The third explanation given for the link between the oath and the judgement (that the raid is a way of acquiring wealth) is mine; the first two explanations are explanations voiced in the exegetical tradition.
• Psychological concepts such as negativity bias and loss aversion were mentioned as literature whose scope is disputed; they were not presented as knowledge foretold by the verse.
• The links drawn with al-Zalzala and al-Qāriʿa are observations about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf; they are not claims about the order of revelation.