al-Ṣāffāt 37:88-90

Fa-naẓara naẓratan fi'n-nujūm · Fa-qāla innī saqīm · Fa-tawallaw ʿanhu mudbirīn

"Then he cast a glance at the stars and said, 'I am sick'. Thereupon they turned their backs and left him."

These three verses are among the places in the sūra that require the most care. The reason is this: the text says very little, and what it does not say has been filled in, in the classical sources, in very different ways.

What the text says is this, and this is all of it:

1. He looked once at the stars. 2. He said "I am sick". 3. They turned and went.

What the text does not say: why he looked, what he saw, what he meant by "sick", why they went, where they went. None of this is in the verse.

In this commentary those gaps are not filled with details of the isrāʾīliyyāt kind. I will give the classical explanations in a table and will set up no firm ruling.

Naẓara — root ن-ظ-ر: to look. And there is a cognate accusative: naẓratan — "a glance".

And the word naẓra is in the marra pattern (the faʿla pattern): it announces a single occurrence. Not "he kept looking", then, but "he looked once".

This is a linguistic datum read off the text and worth noting: the verse describes not a continued observation but a single, brief glance.

Fi'n-nujūm — "in the stars". And the preposition is fī, not ilā. Naẓara ilā is "to look at", while naẓara fī in Arabic generally means "to think about a thing, to examine it". The grammarians record this distinction.

The expression is therefore closer to "he cast an eye over the stars / he considered them" than to "he looked at the stars". I give this as a linguistic note.

Nujūm — the plural of najm, root ن-ج-م: to rise, to come forth. The root was analysed in detail in al-Najm, and it was recorded there that the word is used of plants too (wa'n-najmu wa'sh-shajaru yasjudān — al-Raḥmān 55/6). I rely on that treatment.

Saqīm — root س-ق-م: illness, the breakdown of the body. Saqam — illness.

And the word occurs once more in the sūra — this is a countable fact:

The same word, two prophets, two different situations. One says it of himself, of the other it is said. Whether the text sets up this link is not clear; the sharing of the word is a datum.

What this expression means is one of the most disputed questions of the classical commentaries. I give the principal explanations transmitted. The table is not a list of preferences.

And a further note is required. In some sources this expression is taken up together with the report of "three utterances" attributed to Abraham. I am not in a position to assess the text and the chain of that report; for that reason I do not transmit it and build nothing upon it.

No firm ruling is set up in this commentary. What is recorded is this: the verse gives no explanation, and to fill in the explanation that was not given changes the work the verse does.

As my own reading I add only this, and it is not binding: all three of the three verses are joined with fāʾ (fa-naẓara, fa-qāla, fa-tawallaw) — that is, an uninterrupted chain. Between the look, the utterance and the departure there is no explanation whatever. That the telling is this fast suggests that the detail is withheld deliberately. The text recounts not what happened but what it resulted in.

Tawallā — root و-ل-ي, Form V: to turn one's face away and go. The root was treated in al-Layl and ʿAbasa.

Mudbirīn — root د-ب-ر: the back. Adbara — he turned his back. An active participle in the plural, in a circumstantial position.

And the two words announce the same thing: tawallaw and mudbirīn. In Arabic this is called reinforcement — the same sense said with two words.

The Qurʾān uses the same pair elsewhere too: thumma wallaytum mudbirīn (al-Tawba 9/25).

And the contrast within the sūra is worth noting — this is a textual datum:

The same people, four verses apart, two opposite directions. And the two verbs are opposites by their very roots: dubur (the back) and qubul (the front). The sūra sets up this contrast by its choice of words.