وَمَن نُّعَمِّرْهُ نُنَكِّسْهُ فِى ٱلْخَلْقِ أَفَلَا يَعْقِلُونَ
The concrete sense of the root: to keep a place inhabited and full. ʿAmara'l-makāna — he lived there, he made it flourish; ʿimāra — building up; maʿmūr — made to flourish, full.
And ʿumr (lifetime) comes from here: the span in which the body is full and in working order. The root has occurred in al-Ṭūr (al-bayti'l-maʿmūr).
The choice of word is worth recording: the verse does not say "whomever We keep alive", it says "whomever We give taʿmīr" — Form II, that is, the lengthening of a life. And within the root there is "keeping full". What is lengthened is a span that is kept full.
- نَكَسَ الشَّيْءَ — he turned a thing over, he upended it.
- نُكِسَ فِى مَرَضِهِ — the illness came back: on the way to recovery it turned round again. (In Turkish the borrowed verb nüksetmek, "to relapse", comes from this root.)
- مَنْكُوس — turned upside down.
- نَاكِسُو رُءُوسِهِمْ — those who hang their heads (al-Sajda 32/12).
The picture beneath the word, then, is the reversal of the direction of a movement — not something that stops, but something that comes back.
It is transmitted in the sources on the variant readings that the word is read in the forms nunakkis-hu (Form II) and nankus-hu (Form I). I give no names; the difference in meaning is not fundamental — Form II announces the intensity of the act.
فِى ٱلْخَلْق — "in his make." What is reversed, that is, is the body and the body's strength, not position or standing.
In Ghāfir (al-Muʾmin) at 40/67 the stages of a human life were treated, and a table was given there: dust → a drop → a clot (ʿalaqa) → an infant → the age of full strength (ashudd) → old age (shuyūkh), all joined with thumma — that is, there is time between the stages. And the second thing recorded there was this: the verse builds an orderly series and adds the exception itself (wa minkum man yutawaffā min qabl).
| Ghāfir 40/67 | Yāsīn 36/68 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it gives | A series of stages — six phases counted | A direction — a single sentence |
| Connective | Thumma (five times) — with intervals | None — a conditional sentence |
| Where it ends | Shuyūkh — old age, the end of the series | Nunakkis-hu — the reversal of the series |
| The work of the sentence | Description | Proof — it ends with a-fa-lā yaʿqilūn |
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the structure of the two verses: Ghāfir counts the ascent, Yāsīn names the descent. Together the two draw an arc. And Yāsīn uses this not as a piece of information but as a proof — the sentence ends with a question about reason.
The structure of the proof is this, and it must be recorded: the verse does not only say that a person loses his strength; it says that the direction of the strength is turned round — and the agent of the verb is "We" (nunakkis-hu). Both the increase and the decrease, that is, are in the same hand.
My own reading: one who sees the direction turn round in his own body sees that the strength was not his own. For a thing that is owned does not go backwards without its owner's leave. The sūra builds this proof from the most concrete place of all: the arm of the one addressed.
The second of the sūra's two questions about reason (the other at 62), and one of the four rhetorical questions. It was tabulated in the section on structure.
ع-ق-ل — the concrete sense of the root is to bind: ʿiqāl, the rope that binds a camel's knee; ʿaqala'l-baʿīra — he tethered the camel. From here ʿaql: the bond that holds a person back from acting without thought.
Worth recording: the root carries the same picture as ḥakīm in the second verse of the sūra (ح-ك-م — rein, bit). Both words mean "what binds, what holds on course", and both occur in this sūra. I record this as an observation; I make no point of it.