al-Najm 53:13-15

Wa laqad raʾāhu nazlatan ukhrā · ʿInda sidrati'l-muntahā · ʿIndahā jannatu'l-maʾwā "And he saw him at another descent. By the Lote Tree of the Boundary. Near it is the Garden of Refuge."

نَزْلَة — root ن-ز-ل. To descend. Nazla is a pattern conveying a single occurrence of the descent (in Arabic this measure — faʿla — names one performance of the verb: ḍarba one blow, akla one eating).

And its grammatical position is debated: nazlatan is accusative and can be read as an adverbial or as an absolute object — "during a descent" or "with the seeing of a descent". Neither reading changes the sense much.

The real matter is this: since it says "another descent", there is a first one.

The text speaks, that is, of two separate seeings. The first is the one recounted in verses 5-10 (the highest horizon, the drawing near, the leaning down); the second is the one recounted here (by the Lote Tree).

And this bears directly on the disagreement above. That the text speaks of two separate scenes is what makes the "mixed reading" possible — the view that the first scene is Gabriel and the second something else. But the text does not itself establish that distinction; it says only "another".

The word أُخْرَىٰ occurs four times in this sūra (13, 20, 38, 47), and each time in a different job:

The sūra uses the same word for a seeing, an idol, a burden and a creation. I record this as an observation about the distribution of a word; I draw no conceptual link between them, because the word is everyday and ordinary.

Root: س-د-ر. سِدْر — a real tree, widespread in the lands of the Arabs.

This tree was treated in the section al-Wāqiʿa (al-Wāqiʿa 56/28: fī sidrin makhḍūd — "amid thornless lote trees"); what was recorded there holds here unchanged:

سِدْر — a tree widespread in the lands of the Arabs. In English it is called the lote tree, the jujube, or Christ's thorn. I do not speak with certainty about the tree's botanical identification; the properties described in the sources are these: it gives abundant shade, its fruit is eaten, and its branches are thorny.

سِدْرَة is the singulative (ism al-waḥda): a single sidr tree. In Arabic sidr conveys the species, sidra one of that species.

And the choice of the tree is worth dwelling on.

The sidr was, in that region, one of the few trees that gives shade in the desert. In hot, waterless country a sidr tree was a landmark and a resting place: its shade broad, its fruit (nabq) edible, its branches used as fodder. Travellers found their direction by it, and caravans camped beneath it.

The first thing the word raises in the one addressed, then, is nothing exotic but a tree he knows. And the first thing he knows about that tree: shade and a halting place.

A lexical note, with reserve. The classical dictionaries record under the same root entry the words سَدِرَ (to be dazzled, to be giddy, to be bewildered) and سَادِر (one who goes on heedlessly, with darkened eyes). Whether the two groups of sense (tree / dazzling) come historically from a single root is disputed, and I build no interpretation upon it. Only this is of interest, and it may be a coincidence: four verses later, at verse 17, there will come a sentence in which precisely the swerving of the eye is negated.

Root: ن-ه-ي. This root has occurred in several places in this commentary (al-Ḥashr, al-Nāziʿāt, al-Fajr).

The concrete sense of the root: a thing's ending, coming to its close, reaching its final bound.

And from here two separate directions come out:

• نِهَايَة (nihāya) — the end, the finish.
• نَهَىٰ (nahā) — he forbade. The link: a prohibition is the setting of a thing's bound; it fixes how far one may go.
• نُهْيَة / نُهَىٰ (nuhā) — the intellect. The Qurʾān uses this word: "In this are signs for those possessed of intellect (uli'l-nuhā)" (Ṭāhā 20/54). The lexicographers' explanation: the intellect is what restrains a person from what will harm him. The name of the intellect thus comes from a root of forbidding.

مُنْتَهَىٰ — the passive participle / noun of place of Form VIII: the place where things come to an end, the far limit reached.

And this word occurs twice in this sūra:

Verse 14: ʿinda sidrati'l-muntahā — "by the lote tree of the boundary" Verse 42: wa anna ilā rabbika 'l-muntahā — "and that the final end is to your Lord"

In the section al-Nāziʿāt these two verses were already set side by side (on the occasion of al-Nāziʿāt 79/44). There, in counting the uses of muntahā in the Qurʾān, both 53/14 and 53/42 were given.

Now it is possible to read the two together, and this is the sūra's own datum:

The sūra attaches the same word once to a tree and once to the Lord. And twenty-eight verses lie between them.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the repetition of the word: the fourteenth verse says how far an ascent could go — as far as a tree. The forty-second states the real end beyond which nothing can pass. The first end is a marker stone standing beside the second.

This compound occurs only here in the Qurʾān, and the Qurʾān does not explain it.

Various explanations are transmitted in the tradition of exegesis: that it is the last point those ascending can reach, that what descends from above and what rises from below meet there, that the knowledge of the angels ends there. Some of these explanations rest on transmitted reports and some on inference, and I do not put any of them forward as transmitted.

What the text says itself is this, and no more:

1. It is a sidr tree (sidrat). 2. It is the tree of a "boundary" (al-muntahā). 3. Beside it is the Garden of Refuge (15). 4. Something has covered it, and that thing is not named (16).

All four are a description of a place, and none of them is an explanation. The text gives the name of a place and does not describe it.

جَنَّة — root ج-ن-ن. This root was analysed in full in the section al-Baqara (2/25) and has been relied on in many places in this commentary; I do not repeat it. The summary: the sense of the root is to cover, to conceal, and all its derivatives turn about invisibility — janīn (covered in the womb), jinn (unseen), majnūn (whose mind is covered), mijann (a shield), janna (a garden that covers the soil with its trees).

And there is a coincidence of word order here: a tree (sidra) is named, and immediately after it comes a word whose root is "a garden that covers with its trees". The two words are from the same family of images.

مَأْوَىٰ — root أ-و-ي. This word was treated in the section al-Ḍuḥā (al-Ḍuḥā 93/6: a-lam yajidka yatīman fa-āwā); what was recorded there:

مَأْوَى (maʾwā) — a shelter, a place of refuge. In the Qurʾān it is used both of the garden and of Hell: "jannatu'l-maʾwā" (al-Najm 53/15) and "maʾwāhumu'l-nār" (Āl ʿImrān 3/151). Maʾwā thus conveys no valuation; it means simply "the place arrived at in the end".

The section on al-Ḍuḥā had already pointed to this verse; I complete the connection here.

That the word is neutral matters. A maʾwā is not a good or a bad place; it is the place one goes to. An animal's fold, a person's house, a traveller's inn — all are maʾwā.

And joined with the fourteenth verse this yields an image: the tree of an "end", and beside it a "place to be arrived at". Both convey arrival. The Lote Tree a boundary, the garden a halting place.

The word order of the fifteenth verse is inverted. The normal order would be jannatu'l-maʾwā ʿindahā (subject + predicate). The verse begins with عِندَهَا.

In Arabic the fronting of the predicate conveys specification (restriction) or emphasis. The sentence says, that is: "right there" — and nowhere else.

And this is an emphasis to be expected in a description of a place: to say that two things are in the same place.