al-Furqān 25:45-50

"Have you not seen how your Lord stretched out the shadow? Had He willed, He would have made it still. Then We made the sun a proof for it; then We drew it in to Ourselves, little by little."

The choice of the proof is worth recording, and I give it as my own reading: a shadow is a thing that has no existence of its own. It cannot be grasped, it cannot be measured; it exists only through the existence of something else. The verse makes precisely this into a proof.

وَلَوْ شَآءَ لَجَعَلَهُۥ سَاكِنًا — "had He willed, He would have made it still."

Sākin — motionless. That is, the movement of the shadow is named not as something of itself but as the result of an ordering.

ثُمَّ جَعَلْنَا ٱلشَّمْسَ عَلَيْهِ دَلِيلًا — "We made the sun a proof for it."

The build of the sentence looks inverted, and the lexicographers dwell on it: what one expects is that the shadow should be the proof of the sun. The verse says the reverse: the sun is the proof of the shadow.

I record this as an observation: where a shadow falls is known by looking at where the sun is. That is, when one wishes to read the shadow, the place to look is not the shadow itself — it is its source.

قَبْضًا يَسِيرًا — "a drawing in slowly, by small degrees". Yasīr — easy, little by little. The shadow's withdrawal over the course of the day is described not as a sudden removal but as a taking back that goes unnoticed.

Three words, three distinct functions:

This triad was treated at al-Nabaʾ 78/9-11 (wa jaʿalnā nawmakum subātā wa jaʿalna'l-layla libāsā wa jaʿalna'n-nahāra maʿāshā). I do not repeat it here.

The difference here must be recorded: in al-Nabaʾ the day was named maʿāsh (livelihood); in al-Furqān it is called nushūr (spreading out / resurrection). And nushūr is at the same time the name of the resurrection — that is, the day is named as a small resurrection repeated every morning.