Qāf 50:36

Wa kam ahlaknā qablahum min qarnin hum ashaddu minhum baṭshan fa-naqqabū fi'l-bilād; hal min maḥīṣ

"How many a generation We destroyed before them, whose grip was stronger than theirs. They bored through the lands. Is there any place of escape?"

Verses twelve to fourteen were a list of names. Here there are no names; there is a measure.

كَمْ — "how many", "how very many". In Arabic kam khabariyya: it states multiplicity without giving a number.

Root: ق-ر-ن — the same root as qarīn in the twenty-third verse.

Qarn is at the same time a body of people living together — "those yoked side by side". The word is used both for a generation and for an approximate span of time.

That the same root is used for two different tasks in the sūra is an observation: one is the companion beside a person (23, 27), the other the community living in the same age (36).

Its concrete sense: to grasp a thing violently and tightly. Baṭasha — to seize hard; bāṭish — one who grips tightly.

This root was treated in the section on al-Burūj; I rely on the note there.

The choice of word matters: power is named not as "strength" (quwwa) but as grip. Not an abstract power, that is, but the capacity to lay hold with the hand.

And ashaddu minhum baṭshan — "stronger than they in grip". What is said to the addressee, then, is: there were those stronger than you.

And this is the most concrete word in the verse.

The primary sense of the root: to bore, to make a hole.

• نَقَبَ الجِدَار — he bored through the wall.
• نَقْب — a hole made in a wall; a tunnel.
• نَقِيبَة — one who penetrates into a group; naqīb — the chief of a people, the one who knows their affairs.
• مِنْقَب — a boring tool.
• نِقَاب — a veil that covers the face; but from the same root, because it leaves a hole for the eye.

And the verb is in the tafʿīl form: naqqabū — to bore much, again and again.

The exegetes differ over what they did:

All three readings are transmitted. The third makes the tightest link with the verse's last clause, and this is an observation, not a preference.

This verb has a counterpart elsewhere in the sūra, and I present it as my own reading.

A person bores through the earth; in the end the earth splits open from the person.

The text does not build this link; I build it, and I record it as such. But the object and the subject of the two verbs stand in the text and have changed places exactly.

Root: ح-ي-ص. Its concrete sense: to slip away sideways, to shun, to turn and flee. Ḥāṣa ʿan — he turned away from it and fled.

And the root is very close in sense to taḥīd (ح-ي-د) in the nineteenth verse: both state swerving aside.

That the two roots are sometimes named together in the Qurʾān has drawn the attention of the lexicographers as well. Both are present in Qāf:

I record this as an observation; I do not claim that the two roots are the same. Their closeness is at the level of meaning, not of derivation. A similar caution was set down in the section on al-Insān: derivation is not to be inferred from resemblance of sound.

Maḥīṣ may be a noun of place or a mīm-verbal noun: "a place of escape" or "escape". Both analyses give the same result.

And the question is left unanswered. In the thirtieth verse Hell's question was not answered; here too this question is not answered. The sūra leaves both questions hanging.