al-Naml 27:63

am man yahdīkum fī ẓulumāti'l-barri wa'l-baḥri wa man yursilu'r-riyāḥa bushran bayna yaday raḥmatih, a-ilāhun maʿa'llāh, taʿāla'llāhu ʿammā yushrikūn

"Or He who guides you through the darknesses of land and sea, and who sends the winds as bearers of glad tidings before His mercy? Is there a god beside God? Exalted is God above what they associate with Him."

The construction must be recorded: ẓulumāt is a plural — "darknesses."

The lexicographers record that the plural here covers three things at once: the darkness of the night, the darkness of cloud, the depth of the sea — that is, not a single darkness but darknesses laid one upon another.

And that the two domains are named together is a datum of the word order: al-barr and al-baḥr. Guidance is thus named for land as well as for sea.

I record this as an observation: the verse looks not at stars or at signs but directly at the act of guiding. No instrument is named.

And the proofs drawn from travel by sea were treated in Yāsīn at 36/40 and in al-Jāthiya at 45/12. I rely on that treatment.

بُشْرًا — root ب-ش-ر, the same root as the bushrā of the sūra's second verse.

The same root, at the two ends of the sūra, once for revelation and once for the natural world. This is a repetition that can be verified within the sūra.

بَيْنَ يَدَىْ — word for word "between his two hands"; as an idiom, before, ahead of. The pattern was treated in Fuṣṣilat at 41/42. I do not repeat it here.

And what the word raḥmatihī stands for must be recorded: in this context, the rain. The verse thus does not name the rain directly — it says raḥma.

I record this as an observation about the word order: the sentence names the cause (the wind) by its name and the outcome (the rain) by its quality. And at verse 58 the same thing coming from the sky was called maṭar (the rain of punishment). The sūra names the same phenomenon with two different words in two different places.

The fourth close differs from the others, and this is a datum of the word order: this close looks not at those addressed but at the subject.

Taʿālā — root ع-ل-و. And the sūra's line of ʿuluww occurs here for the third time:

The same root, in three different places in the sūra, twice condemned and once ascribed.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the three occurrences themselves: the root by itself conveys no verdict. What is decisive is to whom it is ascribed. And this has the same structure as the finding recorded for the word imāma in al-Qaṣaṣ at 28/41: there too the word by itself conveyed no value.