Ṣād 38:15-16

Wa mā yanẓuru hāʾulāʾi illā ṣayḥatan wāḥidatan mā lahā min fawāq · Wa qālū rabbanā ʿajjil lanā qiṭṭanā qabla yawmi'l-ḥisāb

"These too await nothing but a single cry; and it has no pause. And they said: 'Our Lord! Hasten our portion to us before the Day of Reckoning.'"

Root ن-ظ-ر: to look; and to wait. The two senses come from one root: to look at a thing is to watch for its coming.

The verb here has the sense "to wait", and the pattern contains a restriction: mā yanẓuru… illā — "they await nothing but…"

And the point here is this: they are not in fact waiting for anything; their not waiting comes out at the same place as their waiting for one single thing to come. In Arabic this is an ironic usage: to say of a person who takes no notice of a thing, "he awaits only this."

Root ص-ي-ح: to raise the voice, to shout. Ṣayḥa — a loud sound uttered once. And the word is reinforced with an adjective of oneness: wāḥida.

The same word was used of the Resurrection in Qāf at 50/42 (yawma yasmaʿūna'ṣ-ṣayḥata bi'l-ḥaqq), and was treated there.

What is added here is the qualifying clause that follows.

فَوَاق — root ف-و-ق. And the concrete sense of the word is very sharp and very local:

The lexicographers describe fawāq thus: the interval allowed while a she-camel is being milked, so that her udder may gather milk a second time. The milker draws a little, leaves off, waits for the milk to come down, then draws again. The name of that interval of waiting is fawāq.

At the centre of the root is this: a thing's coming back, its returning to itself. The milk comes back to the udder; consciousness comes back to the person.

Now what the verse says becomes clear: mā lahā min fawāq — this cry has no "interval of return".

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the lexicographers' description of the root: the verse does not say "this cry is very violent"; it says "it has no interval." It will not break off and begin again, and it will leave no gap in which one might come to oneself.

And the fifteenth verse must be read together with the third: there it was said wa-lāta ḥīna manāṣ — "it was no longer the hour of escape". Both announce the absence of a time: the one, that there is no time to flee; the other, that there is no interval in which to come to.

Some of the exegetes have also understood the word as "return, repetition" — that is, "there is no turning it back". Both readings come out of the same root and do not exclude one another.

قِطّ — root ق-ط-ط. Its concrete sense: to cut crosswise, to slice. Qiṭṭ — a cut piece; and from there: a written document, the slip of paper on which a person's allotted share is written, a deed.

The word has two branches of meaning, and the exegetes differ:

I do not impose a preference. On all three readings the posture of the sentence is the same: mockery and haste.

عَجِّل — root ع-ج-ل: to hurry. Form II: to bring a thing forward, to hasten it. That the verb comes in the form of a prayer must be recorded: they call out rabbanā and then say ʿajjil. A mockery is being framed, that is, in the shape of a prayer.

I record this as my own reading: the verse shows a stage of denial. The other side is no longer arguing — it is jeering. And jeering is the point the objections between the fourth and eighth verses arrive at: astonishment (4), insinuation (6), "we have not heard" (7), doubt (8), and finally mockery (16).

And there are other examples of this posture in the Qurʾān: "If this is the truth from You, then rain down stones on us from heaven" (al-Anfāl 8/32). The same structure: asking for a threat to be carried out in order to show that one does not take it seriously.

This root will occur four times in the sūra: as the construct at 16, 26, 53; and at 39 as bi-ghayri ḥisāb. And its distribution is worth recording:

I record this as an observation: the same word is used at four different works — hastened, forgotten, lifted and awaited. And the construct bi-ghayri ḥisāb ("without reckoning") in the thirty-ninth verse is the word's only positive use in the sūra.