al-ʿĀdiyāt 100:5

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.