al-Ṭūr 52:11-12

Fa-waylun yawmaʾidhin li'l-mukadhdhibīn · Alladhīna hum fī khawḍin yalʿabūn "So woe that day to those who call it a lie! Those who go on playing in a plunge."

The eleventh verse is almost word for word the refrain of al-Mursalāt.

This sentence was treated in detail in the section on al-Mursalāt: the word wayl, the fronting of yawmaʾidhin, the pattern mukadhdhibīn and the function of the repetition were given in a table. And its identity with al-Muṭaffifīn 83/10 was recorded there too.

I do not repeat it here. Two things are to be added here.

One — the work of the fāʾ. In al-Mursalāt the sentence had no connective; here there is a fāʾ at its head and this ties the sentence to the preceding one.

That is, the sentence is not an independent refrain; it is the consequence of the ninth and tenth verses (the sky heaves, the mountains walk). In English it is met with "and so, on that day".

Two — there is no repetition. In al-Mursalāt this sentence occurred ten times and divided the sūra. In al-Ṭūr it occurs once.

And this shows that the two sūras are built differently: al-Mursalāt was a text divided by a refrain; al-Ṭūr's division is made with something else — from the thirty-fifth verse onward, with the interrogative particle.

I record this as an observation about the structure.

Root: خ-و-ض. This root was treated in the discussion of al-Muddaththir 74/45; I do not repeat it here. The summary of the finding there: the concrete sense of khawḍ is to walk into water stirring up its mud, and the conclusion recorded in al-Muddaththir was "an empty occupation carried on together". And this verse was already cited in the section on al-Muddaththir.

And at al-Dhāriyāt 51/11 a word from the same field was treated: ghamra (water's covering over). There the two words were compared in a table: khawḍ is to go into (active, the person does it himself), ghamra is to stay inside (a state, the person is covered over).

I do not repeat it here. What is to be added here is the second verb.

يَلْعَبُونَ — root ل-ع-ب: to play, to amuse oneself. Luʿb — play. The Qurʾān qualifies the life of this world with this word: "The life of this world is only play and diversion" (al-Anʿām 6/32; al-ʿAnkabūt 29/64).

And the two words together set up a description:

That is, the sentence says this: there is a medium (muddy water) and in that medium a work is being done (play).

And the definition of play is decisive here. Play is seriousness without an outcome: the player spends real effort, but the effort he spends has no return outside the game.

The finding recorded for the word lahw in the section on al-Takāthur looks at this: "the matter is not the doing of an evil but the fastening of attention somewhere else."

And the word sāhūn (heedless) at al-Dhāriyāt 51/11 was in the same field.

Three words from three sūras together:

And the third is the hardest, because the person is occupied. A man standing idle can be told "you are standing idle"; a man playing cannot be — the man playing is working.

I record this as my own reading; the root meanings of the three words were given one by one in the relevant sections.

ٱلَّذِينَ هُمْ — a qualifying clause. This pattern was treated in the discussions of al-Māʿūn 107/5 and al-Maʿārij 70/22-34: the pronoun hum is not grammatically required; its addition is for specification and emphasis.

The state these two words describe is particularly visible today.

And the reason it is visible is that the description does not say "standing idle". Khawḍ is a movement, laʿb an occupation. Both consume time and attention; both tire.

What modern life produces most abundantly is exactly this: occupations that engage but do not accumulate. A person can read, watch, argue, write comments all day long — and at the end of the day may have nothing in hand. He has not been idle; but nothing has happened either.

And the real difficulty the verse records is this: a man standing idle knows he is standing idle. A man in a game does not, because the game looks serious — it has rules, it has a winner, it has excitement.

The diagnosis recorded for lahw in the section on al-Takāthur (attention changing place) and the one recorded for sāhūn at al-Dhāriyāt 51/11 (attention not being there) complete a series together with this third state: attention goes elsewhere, it is not there, and it fills with another work.

I record this as an application of the verse; the verse does not describe an age, it describes a state.