al-ʿĀdiyāt 100:4

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.