al-Dhāriyāt 51:10-11

Qutila'l-kharrāṣūn · Alladhīna hum fī ghamratin sāhūn "Perish those guessers! They are heedless within an engulfing flood."

This pattern was treated in the discussions of Tabbat 111/1 and ʿAbasa 80/17; I do not repeat it. The summary of the finding there: qutila is in form an imprecation and in substance a ruling — it looks as though it framed a wish, but it states something that has happened. And in the section on ʿAbasa, when the pattern's three occurrences in the Qurʾān were enumerated, this verse was already named.

What is to be added here is who is addressed.

Let us set the three occurrences of the pattern side by side:

The third row looks strange beside the first two. Ingratitude and mass torture are grave offences. Why, then, is "speaking by guesswork" named with the same pattern?

The answer is in the root of the word.

Root: خ-ر-ص. And the concrete sense of this root explains the judgement the word carries.

خَرَصَ النَّخْلَ — he estimated by eye the crop on a date palm, before it had been gathered. This is a settled operation in Arab agricultural life: while the dates are still on the branch it is reckoned how much they will yield, and the calculation of shares is made on that estimate.

The person who does this is called خَارِص; the name of the operation is خَرْص.

And from here the second sense arises: خَرْص — a guess, a shot in the dark, a word not resting on certain knowledge. And from there the third: a lie.

The Qurʾān uses the root regularly at this third end:

• "They do nothing but guess." (al-Anʿām 6/116; similarly 6/148; Yūnus 10/66; al-Zukhruf 43/20) — in hum illā yakhruṣūn.

And now the real point. The root's first sense — the estimating of dates — is a legitimate operation. Nobody measures dates by counting them; measuring by eye is a necessity and an accepted method. This is not a lie; it is an estimate, and it is known to be an estimate.

The act under the root, that is, is not bad. What is bad is the estimate changing its place.

The estimating of dates is legitimate on this condition: it is known to be an estimate, and it is done because nothing better is possible. But if the same operation is applied to a matter about which certain knowledge has been given — the day of reckoning, for instance — then the estimate has taken the place of knowledge.

Note the pattern خَرَّاص: the faʿʿāl measure conveys a trade and a continuity in Arabic (najjār a carpenter, khayyāṭ a tailor, kadhdhāb an inveterate liar). Kharrāṣ, that is, is not one who makes a guess once; he is one who has made guessing his habit.

This is why the pattern of imprecation is so heavy: what is censured is not being wrong once, but making a method of living by guesswork instead of by knowledge.

What this says to the present. This diagnosis has become still more visible in an age of abundant information. As the cost of getting information about a matter has fallen, so has the cost of speaking without getting it. Reading about a question takes time; framing a sentence about it takes seconds. The description of the kharrāṣ sits exactly here: the person does not think he is lying — he is simply speaking about something he does not know, and supposing that he knows what he is speaking about.

Root: غ-م-ر. Its concrete sense: water's covering a thing, closing over it, sinking it.

• غَمَرَهُ ٱلْمَاءُ — the water covered him, closed over him.
• غَمْرَة — the place where the water is deep, where it covers a man.
• غَامِر — covered, overwhelmed.
• مُغَامَرَة — to throw oneself into deep water, into danger. The Turkish macera ("adventure") comes from this branch.

Ghamra, then, is being in water deep enough to drown in.

The Qurʾān uses this root elsewhere as well: "their hearts are in a ghamra away from this" (al-Muʾminūn 23/63); "in the ghamarāt of death" (al-Anʿām 6/93). In the second verse the word is plural and gives the image of drowning directly.

And the delicacy of the choice is this: the verse does not say "in darkness" or "in heedlessness". It says inside the water.

A man in the dark does not see, but he breathes. A man under water neither sees nor breathes. And what matters more: the man in the water does not know what surrounds him — water is transparent, the obstacle is invisible.

In the section on al-Muddaththir a word from the same field was treated: خَوْض (khawḍ) — to wade about in muddy water (74/45). And the finding recorded there was this: khawḍ is "an idle occupation carried on together". The same word will occur in Sūrat al-Ṭūr as well (52/12).

The two words have to be set side by side:

Khawḍ is an action; ghamra is a condition. And the verse joins the two: fī ghamratin sāhūn — covered over, and unaware of being covered.

Root: س-ه-و. This root was treated in the discussion of al-Māʿūn 107/5; I do not repeat it. The summary of the finding there: sahw is attention's straying elsewhere, the mind's not being present; and because sāhūn is an active participle it conveys a settled state, not a repeated action.

What is to be added here is what the word is attached to.

In al-Māʿūn sāhūn was attached to the prayer: ʿan ṣalātihim sāhūn — heedless of their prayer. Here it is attached to nothing; there is only the qualification fī ghamratin.

In al-Māʿūn, that is, the heedlessness is towards a particular thing; in al-Dhāriyāt it is a general state.

And reading the two verses together gives a sequence: al-Dhāriyāt describes the general state (covered over and heedless), al-Māʿūn gives that state's appearance in one field (heedless of his prayer). I record this as a link; it is not a claim that the two sūras refer to one another.