al-Ṣāffāt 37:180-182

Subḥāna rabbika rabbi'l-ʿizzati ʿammā yaṣifūn · Wa salāmun ʿala'l-mursalīn · Wa'l-ḥamdu li'llāhi rabbi'l-ʿālamīn

"Glory be to your Lord, the Lord of might, above what they describe. And peace be upon the messengers who were sent. And praise be to God, the Lord of all the worlds."

The sūra closes with three short sentences, and the three do three different pieces of work:

And the middle verse is a salutation set between two sentences of declaring free and of praise. This is a fact of word order.

The verse is the expanded form of the hundred and fifty-ninth. The table was given in the section on the hundred and fifty-ninth verse.

Two things added:

1. Rabbika — "your Lord". The address turns to the Prophet. In the hundred and fifty-ninth verse there was the divine name (Allāh). 2. Rabbi'l-ʿizzati — "the Lord of might". An attributive construct is added.

ʿIzza — root ع-ز-ز. And the concrete sense of the root is worth noting: arḍu'l-ʿazāz — hard, barren ground that gives no passage. ʿAzza — he became strong, he prevailed, he became unattainable. In the root there are two things: hardness and unattainability.

The root was treated in al-Fatḥ, al-Ḥashr, al-Munāfiqūn and al-Najm.

And the placing of the construct here is worth noting — as my own reading: waṣf (describing) is to draw the bounds of a thing. ʿIzza is unattainability. The two words meet in the same sentence: those who describe draw a bound, the one described is unattainable. The sentence is built on this tension.

And at al-Munāfiqūn 63/8 the same word had occurred as a claim (la-yukhrijanna'l-aʿazzu minha'l-adhall) — there might was supposed to be something shared out among human beings. Here it is attributed to a single place.

And this verse completes the table set up in the section on the structure of the sūra.

The four salutations of the sequence had been given to individual persons:

And what was recorded in the section on the structure is completed here: Lot and Jonah received no peace in the sequence, but both had been presented as mina'l-mursalīn (133, 139). The hundred and eighty-first verse says al-mursalīn.

This is a link of wording that can be verified from the text. And whether the link is made is not said in the verse — I recorded this in the section on the structure as well.

Al-mursalīn — for the sixth and last time in the sūra (37, 123, 133, 139, 171, 181).

And a difference of word order must be recorded:

The wāw at the head binds the verse to the preceding verse. The peace, that is, comes not as an independent sentence but as the continuation of the sentence of declaring free. And the hundred and eighty-second verse is joined with a wāw too. The three verses are a single chain.

And the sūra closes with the first verse of al-Fātiḥa.

The construction al-ḥamdu li'llāhi rabbi'l-ʿālamīn was analysed in detail at al-Fātiḥa 1/1 — the differences between ḥamd, shukr and madḥ, the work of the lām, the root of the word rabb and the plural form of ʿālamīn were given there. I do not repeat it and I rely on that treatment.

What is to be added here is the link within the sūra — and this is a textual datum:

The sūra closes with the construction it set in Abraham's mouth. And Abraham had asked a question there; the sūra gives a judgement here.

I record this as my own reading: the question asked ninety-five verses earlier ("what do you suppose of the Lord of all the worlds?") was left unanswered. The sūra's last verse gives its own answer to that question: al-ḥamdu li'llāh. The text does not set up this link openly; the sharing of the words is a datum.

That a sūra of the Qurʾān should close with al-ḥamdu li'llāh is rare. And al-Ṣāffāt's closing is not of three words but of three verses: declaring free, peace, praise.

I record this as my own reading: the three sentences close the sūra's three main subjects.

The closing, that is, gathers the sūra in reverse order: the subject treated last comes first, the subject treated first comes last. This is an observation; the text claims no such order.

Through a hundred and eighty-two verses the sūra carried on a dispute: who serves what, who fabricates what, who leads whom astray, who witnessed what. And in its closing there is not one sentence of dispute.

What is worth recording is this: the text gives its last word not as a proof but as a bearing — to hold away, to give peace, to praise. In the section on al-Wāqiʿa it was recorded that the sūra's last command was not a piece of knowledge or an act but a bearing (al-Wāqiʿa 56/96). Al-Ṣāffāt does the same thing three times over.

And the middle sentence — wa salāmun ʿala'l-mursalīn — is a human utterance: peace is something said among people. The sūra sets a salutation between two sentences of declaring free. Between two sentences that look upward, that is, there is a sentence that looks sideways.