al-Qāriʿa 101:1-3

Al-qāriʿa · Ma'l-qāriʿa · Wa mā adrāka ma'l-qāriʿa "Al-Qāriʿa! What is al-Qāriʿa? And what made you know what al-Qāriʿa is?"

Root: ق-ر-ع. The concrete sense of the root is to strike with something hard, to hit. Its derivatives show how concrete the root is:

• قَرَعَ ٱلْبَابَ — he knocked at the door. In Arabic, to knock at a door is "to strike the door".
• مِقْرَعَة — a stick, a whip. An instrument for striking.
• قَارِعَةُ ٱلطَّرِيقِ — the middle of the road, the part the feet tread. The "struck" part of the road.
• قِرَاع — clashing, colliding.
• ٱلْقَرْع — the blow itself, its sound.

So the word is not the name of a disaster; it is the name of a movement. Qāriʿa is an active participle: the one that strikes, the one that hits.

And the movement chosen matters. Not to demolish, not to crush, not to burn — to strike. A blow is the most sudden form of contact: unprepared for, in a single stroke, together with a sound.

That the sense of knocking at a door is present in the word is worth noticing besides. To knock at a door is for someone arriving to announce that he is there. So too al-Qāriʿa: it makes its coming heard, and it must be answered.

Read the word aloud: al-qāriʿa.

It is built on three hard letters: ق (a stop that comes from the very bottom of the throat), ر (a trill), ع (a pharyngeal). Three of the hardest sounds in Arabic, in a word of four letters.

As has been recorded several times in this commentary, the fit between sound and meaning is a phenomenon found in every language, and it is especially productive in Arabic. Here too it is real and striking. I do not present this as a proof of miracle; I record that at the opening of the sūra the sound of the word carries its meaning — especially when it is repeated three times in a row.

The first three verses of the sūra are built like this:

1. ٱلْقَارِعَةُ — the noun alone. A verse of one word. 2. مَا ٱلْقَارِعَةُ — a question. 3. وَمَآ أَدْرَىٰكَ مَا ٱلْقَارِعَةُ — a question declared unanswerable.

The same word three times in three verses. And note: in none of them is a pronoun used. It could have said "What is it?" (mā hiya); it does not. It could have said "And what made you know what it is?"; it does not. Each time the whole word is repeated.

In Arabic, repeating the noun where a pronoun would have served conveys magnification (tafkhīm) and the instilling of dread (tahwīl). We saw the same technique in this commentary at the second verse of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: "Allāhu'l-Ṣamad" is said where "huwa'l-Ṣamad" could have been.

But there is something more here. The meaning of the word is a blow; and the word is struck three times. The text performs by its form the very movement it names.

I record this as a reading. But this too should be noted: that the word never occurs again in the rest of the sūra makes the density of the first three verses still more marked. The sūra says its name three times and then leaves it.

Ma'l-qāriʿa — the analysis of the grammarians runs as follows:

• ٱلْقَارِعَةُ (verse 1) — the subject.
• مَا ٱلْقَارِعَةُ (verse 2) — the predicate. Within it mā is the subject and al-qāriʿa the predicate; this interrogative sentence as a whole becomes the predicate of the first verse.

That is, the three verses are a single sentence: "Al-Qāriʿa — what is that Qāriʿa?"

The question here is not a question after information. In Arabic this use is called istifhām al-taʿẓīm or tafkhīm: the question is asked not in order to obtain an answer but in order to show the magnitude of the thing asked about. The closest thing to it in English is an exclamation of the kind "What a thing that is!"

Exactly the same structure occurs once more in the Qurʾān:

"Al-Ḥāqqa. What is al-Ḥāqqa? And what made you know what al-Ḥāqqa is?" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/1-3)

Three verses, the same pattern word for word. The two sūras name the resurrection by two different names but enter it by the same three steps.

Root: د-ر-ي. Dirāya — to know, to become aware of. أَدْرَىٰ (Form IV) — to make known, to inform.

This pattern was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Humaza; rather than repeat it here I shall recall what was established there and apply it to this sūra.

The rule recorded there was this:

Sūrat al-Qāriʿa uses this pattern twice, and in both the perfect comes:

• Verse 3: wa mā adrāka ma'l-qāriʿa → an explanation of two verses follows (4-5).
• Verse 10: wa mā adrāka mā hiyah → an explanation of one verse follows (11).

The rule holds both times. This is worth recording as an instance that shows how firm the rule is.

The answer to the question is "you do not know". As was recorded in the section on al-Humaza, this pattern, before it gives any knowledge, declares that knowledge will not be enough. The description that follows is not a definition but a pointing.

This is another form of the distinction drawn in Sūrat al-Takāthur between ʿilm al-yaqīn and ʿayn al-yaqīn: knowledge given by report has a limit.

A shift of address. Adrā-ka — "you". The sūra is speaking in the third person and turns all at once to the second person singular. This device — iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address) — was treated in the section on al-Humaza; its function here is the same: the telling stops, the listener is drawn into the scene, then the telling goes on.

The Qurʾān uses many names for the day of resurrection, and each name brings one aspect of the event forward:

All these names share one grammatical feature: nearly all of them are on the pattern of the active participle, and they are feminine. That is, they all stand in the position of the one that acts. The resurrection is named not as something that happens but as something that acts.

قارعة: its use in this world. The word is not used in the Qurʾān for the resurrection alone:

"A qāriʿa does not cease to befall those who disbelieve, because of what they have done…" (al-Raʿd 13/31)

The qāriʿa here is a disaster that comes in this world. And:

"Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa." (al-Ḥāqqa 69/4)

Here it is the resurrection. So the word names both the small blow and the great one — the small one standing as the herald of the great.