Ṣād 38:6-8

Wa'nṭalaqa'l-malaʾu minhum ani'mshū wa'ṣbirū ʿalā ālihati-kum, inna hādhā la-shayʾun yurād · Mā samiʿnā bi-hādhā fi'l-millati'l-ākhira, in hādhā illā'khtilāq · A-unzila ʿalayhi'dh-dhikru min bayninā, bal hum fī shakkin min dhikrī, bal lammā yadhūqū ʿadhāb

"Their leading men rose and went off: 'Walk on, hold fast to your gods; there is a purpose behind this. We have not heard of this in the last religion; this is nothing but a fabrication. Has the reminder been sent down on him, from among us?' No, they are in doubt about My reminder. No, they have not yet tasted My punishment."

ٱنطَلَقَ — root ط-ل-ق. Its concrete sense: the loosing of a tie, being set free. Ṭalāq is from the same root; iṭlāq — to let go. Form VII (infiʿāl) here means "to set out, to rise and go".

The choice of verb builds a scene: people rise from a place where they had been sitting, and speak as they disperse. This is the end of a meeting.

ٱلْمَلَأ — root م-ل-أ: to fill. Malaʾ — the leading men who fill an assembly; the company that fills the eye when it is seen. The picture at the root of the word is a place being filled by them.

What must be recorded is who is speaking. In the fourth and fifth verses the speaker was al-kāfirūn (general); here the speaker is al-malaʾ, those in the seat of decision.

And what they do must be recorded: they are addressing their own body. The one addressed is no longer the envoy but their own base. This is a change of stage in the dispute: talking to one another has been abandoned, and an internal mobilisation has begun.

Two commands come in succession, and both are ordinary words. Their ordinariness is meaningful.

ٱمْشُوا۟ — root م-ش-ي: to walk. The imperative: "walk on".

The exegetes have understood this command in two ways:

The two do not exclude one another and both uses of the word are common in Arabic. I do not impose a preference.

وَٱصْبِرُوا۟ عَلَىٰٓ ءَالِهَتِكُمْ — and the most notable verbal equivalence in the sūra begins here.

It was tabulated above in the section on structure; here I open it out. The same command, from the same root and in the same mood, will come from the other side eleven verses later:

This is a datum that can be verified from the text. What is interpretation is the conclusion to be drawn from it; that I give as my own reading:

Patience is given in the sūra as a strength both sides possess. Endurance is nobody's monopoly. What divides them is not the act itself but what the act is attached to: one leans on its idols, the other on words.

And the grammar supports this: in both sentences the verb comes with the same preposition — عَلَىٰ. In Arabic ṣabara ʿalā means "to stand upon a thing, to bear with it". Both, that is, are standing upon something; the difference is the ground beneath them.

This sentence is one of the places in the sūra that must be handled with the greatest care.

يُرَادُ — root ر-و-د. Its concrete sense: to go back and forth after a thing, to seek. Rāʾid — the scout who seeks pasture and water for the tribe. Irāda — to want a thing and to turn towards it. The verb here is passive (yurād): "it is wanted, it is intended" — but the one who wants is not named.

The gap left by the passive produces the whole effect of the sentence. Who wants it? It is not stated. The nearest English rendering: "there is something behind this."

I record step by step how the sentence works:

All three steps produce indefiniteness. And it is precisely through this indefiniteness that the sentence becomes undiscussable.

I record this as my own reading: this is not a claim but an insinuation. Were it claimed, it could be tested — had it been said "he wants such and such, because such and such is the evidence", the evidence would be discussed. When it is insinuated, nothing is left to test. Whatever the one addressed says, the sentence stands: what he says can itself be counted part of "the thing that is wanted".

And this belongs to the same family as the diagnosis of ʿajab in the fourth verse:

No side is taken in present-day politics in this commentary, and none is taken here. But what the verse describes is a form of speech, and forms of speech are not bounded by a time. The note is this, and it concerns the attribute, not persons: to reject a view without looking at its content, by saying that a hidden purpose lies behind it, is exactly the posture the verse reports. Whoever does this is included in the attribute — at the beginning of the sūra as at its end, the verdict is attached to attributes and not to persons.

And that the verse records this as a defect is clear from where the sentence is placed: all four objections between four and seven are given in the same section, in the same order, and with no evidence accompanying any of them.

مِلَّة — root م-ل-ل. On the root of the word the lexicographers make a connection with imlāʾ (to dictate): milla, a dictated road that is followed; the religion a community has adopted.

ٱلْءَاخِرَة — "last", "final". And the construct is disputed:

I do not impose a preference. But the structure of the objection is the same on all three views, and that is the real matter: "we have not heard this" is advanced as evidence.

I record this as my own reading: this is the ʿajab of the fourth verse cast into the form of knowledge. Astonishment says "I am not used to it"; this sentence says the same thing as "it is not in our records". In both, the measure is the speaker's own store.

Root: خ-ل-ق. And this is the most instructive point of vocabulary in the sūra — because the same root will be used for "to create" in the seventy-first verse (innī khāliqun basharan min ṭīn).

In al-Qalam at 68/4 the khalq (outward form) and khuluq (character, inward form) branches of this root were treated; in al-Ḥashr and al-Infiṭār the concrete sense of the root was given. I rely on that and do not repeat it here. The summary was this: the original sense of the root is to cut and shape to a measure — khalaqa'l-adīma, he measured and cut the hide before cutting it out.

Now the third branch, which must be added here:

The lexicographers record that a second use came out of the root's sense of "cutting and shaping": اِخْتَلَقَ (ikhtalaqa) — to fabricate a saying, to construct and put forward something with no basis. Ikhtilāq — a fabrication. From the same root khalq — both creation and (in some uses) a made-up saying.

The relation between the two branches, as the lexicographers record it, is this:

The common point: in both, something is put forward by cutting and shaping; in both there is a work of making. The point of divergence: in the one, what comes out really exists; in the other it exists only in the saying.

The lexicographers record this second branch from the usage of Arabic itself, and the Qurʾān uses both branches: in the verse "…and you fabricate a falsehood" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/17 — wa takhluqūna ifkā) the same root carries the sense "to fabricate".

Now I come to the link within the sūra, and I record it as my own reading:

In the seventh verse the other side calls the envoy mukhtaliq (a fabricator). In the seventy-first verse God names Himself khāliq (creator). The two words are from one root.

And the sūra puts thirty-two verses of prophets between these two words — that is, the content of the thing called "fabrication". The accusation first, the material after.

I record this as an observation about a pattern; I am not claiming that the sūra sets up a deliberate play on words. What I record is that the same root has been used in the sūra for two opposed works.

And in the second half of the eighth verse the text takes the floor. Two bals come one on top of the other:

The first correction changes the subject of the objection. The other side had asked "why him?"; the answer says the question is really "is this it?" The dispute about the envoy, that is, is diagnosed as a cover for the dispute about the text.

The second correction goes further still, and must be read with care.

لَمَّا — in Arabic this differs from lam: lam says "it did not happen", while لَمَّا says "it has not happened yet, but it is expected". The grammarians record the difference explicitly: in lammā there is a continuation and an expectation.

The sentence, that is, does not say "they did not taste the punishment"; it says "they have not yet tasted it." The time-note is inside it.

And the verb yadhūqū — root ذ-و-ق: to taste. The concrete sense of the word is tasting with the tongue; that is, the most immediate and least disputable form of knowledge. Sight can be deceived, hearing can err; taste is direct.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is that the two words were chosen together: the sentence traces the source of the doubt to a lack of experience. Astonishment (4), insinuation (6), not having heard (7) and doubt (8) — all four come out at the same place: the other side does not yet know the thing it is passing judgment on.

And this joins with the last verse of the sūra: wa la-taʿlamunna nabaʾahū baʿda ḥīn — "you will surely know its report after a time." What is called "not yet" in the eighth verse becomes "after a time" in the eighty-eighth.

عَذَابِ — the yāʾ at the end of the word has dropped (ʿadhābī, not ʿadhāb). The same dropping occurs in the fourteenth verse too: ʿiqāb. In Qāf it was recorded that this dropping occurs twice in Qāf (waʿīd); in Ṣād too it occurs twice, and both times at the end of a verse. This is a conformity to the verse-ending: the word has been set into the sound pattern of the sūra.