ثُمَّ أَنشَأْنَا مِنۢ بَعْدِهِمْ قَرْنًا ءَاخَرِينَ · فَأَرْسَلْنَا فِيهِمْ رَسُولًا مِّنْهُمْ أَنِ ٱعْبُدُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ مَا لَكُم مِّنْ إِلَٰهٍ غَيْرُهُۥٓ أَفَلَا تَتَّقُونَ
thumma anshaʾnā min baʿdihim qarnan ākharīn · fa-arsalnā fīhim rasūlan minhum ani'budū'llāha mā lakum min ilāhin ghayruh, a-fa-lā tattaqūn
"Then after them We brought into being another generation. And We sent among them a messenger from among themselves: 'Serve God; you have no god other than Him. Will you not guard yourselves?'"
The concrete sense of the root: to bring two things together, to join them. Qarana — he joined; qarīn — companion, consort; qurūn — horns (the two that stand side by side on the head).
| Sense | Explanation |
|---|---|
| 1 | A community living at the same time — from their being together |
| 2 | A stretch of time — the spans transmitted differ (forty, sixty, a hundred years) |
I do not repeat the figures given for the span, since I am not certain of their sources. The usage here is in the first sense — indeed ākharīn (a plural adjective) comes for a community.
A detail of word order must be recorded: qarnan is singular, its adjective ākharīn plural. The lexicographers record this and explain it by qarn being plural in sense (a community).
And this is a fact that must be recorded: the sūra does not say the name of this people. Noah was named; from here on the sequence runs without names.
| View | Ground |
|---|---|
| 1 | ʿĀd — it is transmitted that they came immediately after Noah |
| 2 | Thamūd — the punishment of the ṣayḥa (the cry) in the forty-first verse is named for Thamūd as well |
| 3 | It has been left indefinite — the withholding of the name is deliberate |
I pass the disagreement on; I do not impose a preference. And the third view has a ground in the text, which I record: the forty-second verse says qurūnan ākharīn (plural), carrying the sequence on with an unspecified number of peoples. The sūra, that is, is telling not individual peoples but a repeating pattern.
It was tabulated at the nineteenth verse. What belongs here is the one-word difference between the thirty-first verse and the forty-second:
| Verse | Sentence | The difference |
|---|---|---|
| 31 | thumma anshaʾnā min baʿdihim qarnan ākharīn | Singular — one generation |
| 42 | thumma anshaʾnā min baʿdihim qurūnan ākharīn | Plural — generations |
The rest of the sentences is word for word the same. This is a fact that can be verified from the text.
I record this as my own reading: the sequence is first set out in detail with one people (31-41), and then shortened by being put in the plural (42-44). The telling, that is, moves from the example to the rule.
The qualification must be recorded: minhum — "from among themselves". The messenger does not come from outside. And this is exactly the point on which the objection in the twenty-fourth verse rests (basharun mithlukum).
The text, that is, itself sets down as a qualification the very matter the objection is about. I give this as an observation. The same line was treated at al-Aḥqāf 46/9 (mā kuntu bidʿan mina'l-rusul).
And the sentence of the call is word for word the same as the twenty-third verse — the only difference being that Noah's vocative yā qawmi is absent here.