يَٰحَسْرَةً عَلَى ٱلْعِبَادِ مَا يَأْتِيهِم مِّن رَّسُولٍ إِلَّا كَانُوا۟ بِهِۦ يَسْتَهْزِءُونَ
Yā is the particle of calling, and it normally requires an addressee who can be called. What is called here is a feeling: ḥasra.
The lexicographers call this nidāʾ majāzī and explain it thus: to announce the intensity of a state, that state is called as though it were a being that could be called. What is implied is: "O regret! If you have a time to come, this is exactly that time."
There are similar usages in the Qurʾān — yā waylanā (36/52), yā ḥasratā ʿalā mā farraṭtu fī janbi'llāh (al-Zumar 39/56). The second is directly the same word.
- حَاسِر — one left bare-headed, without a helmet (unprotected in battle).
- انْحَسَرَ — it drew back, it receded (of the sea going out).
- حَسِير — an animal broken down with exhaustion; whose strength is spent.
The root was treated in al-Ḥāqqa and recorded there as the doubleness of "stripping / regret"; it has occurred in al-Mulk too (yanqalib ilayka'l-baṣaru khāsiʾan wa huwa ḥasīr). I do not repeat it here.
What belongs here is this: ḥasra is the third branch of the root, and it derives from the first two. Regret is the state that appears when the lifting of the covering and the spending of one's strength come together: the person sees, but there is nothing left he can do. The word carries within it both the knowledge side and the power side of the feeling of "if only".
| View | To whom the regret belongs | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | To the servants themselves — the regret they will feel at the resurrection | Understanding ʿalā as "upon" rather than "concerning"; agreement with al-Zumar 39/56 |
| 2 | To the angels, or to the narration itself | The sentence's coming in the form of a call |
| 3 | A saying belonging to the style of the narrative — ascribed to no one | Its being a nidāʾ majāzī; the addressee's not being real |
And a caveat of transcendence must be entered — the caveat kept consistently across the index holds here too: states such as regret, sorrow and remorse cannot be ascribed to God in a way that would imply deficiency. Two attitudes are transmitted in the classical commentaries for expressions of this kind: to accept the wording as it stands and leave its manner to God (tafwīḍ), or to interpret it as a mode of expression (taʾwīl). I transmit both; I do not impose a preference.
A choice of word that must be recorded: in speaking of those who mock, the verse does not call them al-kāfirūn or al-mukadhdhibūn. It says al-ʿibād — "the servants".
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the word itself: what is regretted is not their enmity but their being servants. The attribute may change, that is, but the belonging does not. And this agrees with the attitude of the man in the story: he too had called them qawmī.
Word order: mā … illā — the pattern of restriction. And the verbs are imperfect: yaʾtīhim, yastahziʾūn. In Arabic the imperfect announces a repeated and ongoing event.
The sentence, then, recounts not an event but a rule. And min rasūlin — indefinite, in a negative context: "no messenger at all".
My own reading: here the story stops being the history of a single town. In the twenty-ninth verse a people had gone out; the thirtieth verse ties this to a general rule; and the thirty-first will open it out onto history. The sūra widens the story in three steps: one town → all messengers → all generations.
The concrete sense: to make light of a thing, to laugh at it with contempt. Form X (istihzāʾ) here announces not a request but a person's counting a thing to be so — istahzaʾa bihī: he counted him worth mocking.
Worth recording: the verse gives the reaction the name not of denial but of mockery. And the standing of mockery before evidence is the same as in the table set up for "astonishment" in Qāf at 50/2: mockery rests on no premise, cannot be argued with, cannot be falsified. It makes its subject not what is said but the one who says it. And precisely for that reason it produces no answer.