al-Rūm 30:17-19

Fa-subḥāna'llāhi ḥīna tumsūna wa ḥīna tuṣbiḥūn · Wa lahu'l-ḥamdu fi's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍi wa ʿashiyyan wa ḥīna tuẓhirūn · Yukhriju'l-ḥayya mina'l-mayyiti wa yukhriju'l-mayyita mina'l-ḥayyi wa yuḥyi'l-arḍa baʿda mawtihā, wa kadhālika tukhrajūn

"So glorify God when you enter the evening and when you come into the morning. In the heavens and the earth, in the late afternoon and when you come into the noon hour, praise is His. He brings the living out of the dead and the dead out of the living, and He gives life to the earth after its death. So shall you be brought out."

Two verses enumerate four times, and the manner of the enumeration must be recorded — because two of them are verbs and two are nouns:

All three verbs are in Form IV (ifʿāl), and one use of this form in Arabic is "to enter upon a time": aṣbaḥa — he entered the morning, amsā — he entered the evening, aẓhara — he entered the noon hour. That is, the time is mentioned not as the name of a period but as the person's entering upon that time.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the pattern: the sentence does not say "glorify morning and evening"; it says "when you come into the morning, when you enter the evening". The subject is the person himself: the time is set up not as something passed over but as something entered into.

At Ghāfir (al-Muʾmin) 40/55 the same command had been given with two times: wa sabbiḥ bi-ḥamdi rabbika bi'l-ʿashiyyi wa'l-ibkār — in the late afternoon and early in the morning. What was recorded there was this: by naming the two extreme times, what lies between them is covered.

The two places can be set side by side, and the difference can be verified:

Two differences are worth recording, and both can be verified from the text:

One — number. Ghāfir names two extremes; al-Rūm names four times and fills in the space between the two extremes as well. That is, the interval covered in Ghāfir is separately marked out in al-Rūm.

Two — the one addressed. In Ghāfir the command is to the Prophet; in al-Rūm the verbs are plural: to everyone.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is that these two differences occur together: al-Rūm's block accords with the seventh verse of the sūra. There it had been said that the other side "knows the outside of the life of this world" — that is, living inside the day and seeing nothing from within the day. The seventeenth and eighteenth verses divide that same day into its times and set a turning in each of them. The same day, the same hours; the difference lies in what is done in those hours.

A note per the method (Method): it is reported that in the classical commentaries these times are connected with the times of the prayer; some try to match the four times with the five. I transmit these explanations as they have been transmitted, I draw no legal conclusion, and I do not impose an equating of numbers.

The sentence is built symmetrically: living↔dead, in both directions. And a third instance is added: wa yuḥyi'l-arḍa baʿda mawtihā — the coming to life of the soil.

This piece of evidence has been treated in many places in the series — Fāṭir 35/9 (kadhālika'n-nushūr), Qāf 50/11 (kadhālika'l-khurūj), Fuṣṣilat 41/39. I rely on those treatments.

What belongs here is the closing word: wa kadhālika tukhrajūn — "so shall you be brought out".

And the verb is from the same root as the verse's own verb: yukhriju (He brings out) — tukhrajūn (you will be brought out). One active, one passive, the same root (خ-ر-ج).

I record this as an observation about the word order: the sentence builds the comparison not with a particle but with the verb itself. The evidence and the conclusion share the same word.