al-Muʾminūn 23:79-80

wa huwa'lladhī dharaʾakum fi'l-arḍi wa ilayhi tuḥsharūn · wa huwa'lladhī yuḥyī wa yumītu wa lahu'khtilāfu'l-layli wa'l-nahār, a-fa-lā taʿqilūn

"It is He who scattered you over the earth, and to Him you will be gathered. It is He who gives life and gives death, and the alternation of night and day belongs to Him. Will you not use your reason?"

The seventy-eighth, seventy-ninth and eightieth verses all three begin with the same pattern: wa huwa'lladhī. This is a fact that can be verified from the text.

I record this as my own reading, its ground being that the three closings differ: three verses are built on the same pattern but attached to three different places — to thanks, to gathering, and to reason. The same proof, that is, is carried to three different conclusions.

The concrete sense of the root: to scatter as one scatters seed, to multiply. The lexicographers describe the root as lying somewhere between creating and scattering.

The root is worked out here for the first time in this series. The word occurs in several places in the Qurʾān: al-Aʿrāf 7/179 (wa laqad dharaʾnā li-jahannama), al-Naḥl 16/13, al-Shūrā 42/11 (yadhraʾukum fīh; it occurred in al-Shūrā), al-Mulk 67/24 (alladhī dharaʾakum fi'l-arḍ; treated in al-Mulk).

And the overlap between al-Mulk 67/24 and this verse must be recorded: the two sentences are almost exactly the same.

The only difference is at the beginning: al-Mulk has the command qul (say), here it is absent. This is an overlap that can be verified from the two texts.

And a detail of the word order is worth recording: fi'l-arḍ (scattering over the earth) and ilayhi tuḥsharūn (being gathered to Him) are opposite directions. A dispersal and a gathering.

The root ح-ش-ر: to bring together what is scattered. The root was worked out in al-Ḥashr on the occasion of that sūra's name. I do not repeat it here.

The root خ-ل-ف: to be left behind; to take another's place. Ikhtilāf — Form VIII: coming one after another; and falling into disagreement. Both senses come out of the root.

And the sense here is the first: the alternation of night and day.

The same phenomenon was told with a different word at al-Furqān 25/62: wa huwa'lladhī jaʿala'l-layla wa'l-nahāra khilfatan li-man arāda an yadhdhakkara aw arāda shukūrā. And it was treated there.

The two verses can be compared:

The same root, put to two different tasks in two sūras: al-Furqān reports an opportunity, al-Muʾminūn an ownership.

And lahū has been brought forward (taqdīm), and this must be recorded: in Arabic the fronting of the predicate reports specification — "it belongs to Him alone".

The root ع-ق-ل: to bind. ʿIqāl — the cord that binds a camel's knee; ʿaql — the bond that holds a person from swerving. The root was treated at Yāsīn 36/62 and al-Baqara 2/44.

And this question is the herald of the sūra's series of three questions between verses eighty-four and eighty-nine. There three separate closings will come: a-fa-lā tadhakkarūn (85), a-fa-lā tattaqūn (87), fa-annā tusḥarūn (89).

The four closings must be recorded together:

This series can be verified from the text, and I interpret it as my own reading: the three calls descend from reason to remembering, from remembering to guarding; the fourth is not a call but a finding. The series closes not with a question but with an astonishment.