al-Najm 53:17-18

Mā zāgha'l-baṣaru wa mā ṭaghā · Laqad raʾā min āyāti rabbihi'l-kubrā "The eye neither swerved nor overreached. He indeed saw of the greatest signs of his Lord."

The sūra's two densest words are here, and both have been analysed earlier in this commentary. What is new is what the two do together.

Root: ز-ي-غ. This root was analysed in full in the section al-Ṣaff, and precisely this verse was given there as an example. I do not repeat that analysis; I take its conclusion:

Its sense: to deviate from a straight line, to incline, to bend. Zāghati'l-shams — the sun declined from its zenith; it left its highest point and inclined. Zāgha'l-baṣar — the eye swerved, it missed the target. At the centre of the root stands this: a departure from a line, a difference of angle. And this is the most important feature of the word: zaygh is not a sudden break but an inclination. The sun does not drop suddenly from its zenith; it departs by a small angle, and that angle grows with time.

The section on al-Ṣaff also gave al-Aḥzāb 33/10: "when the eyes swerved" — the loss of focus in a moment of fear.

Root: ط-غ-ي. This root was analysed in the section al-ʿAlaq and has become one of the roots most put to work in this commentary (al-Nāziʿāt, al-Shams, al-Ḥāqqa, al-Raḥmān, al-Dhāriyāt). I do not repeat it; the summary:

The proper, concrete sense of the root is water passing its limit, overflowing. The evidence is the Qurʾān's own usage: "When the water overflowed (ṭagha'l-māʾ), We carried you in the running ship" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/11) — there the word carries no moral sense whatever, only the water's passing of its bound. Ṭughyān is a being's passing of its own limit. Water becomes a flood when it passes its bed.

The description added in the section on al-Raḥmān is useful here too: "transgression is not the possession of something bad; it is the carrying of something good beyond its own limit."

And now the work of the verse becomes visible.

To say that the eye saw truly the verse does not build a positive sentence. It does not say "the eye saw fully." It makes two negations: it neither swerved nor overreached.

For there are two ways in which a look can be corrupted, and the two are each other's opposite:

Swerving is the look's loss of direction; overreaching is the look's passing of its own limit.

And between the two there is a single point: exact hitting. For one who aims at a target there are three possibilities — to miss to the side, to overshoot, and to strike true. By eliminating the two, the verse describes the third.

I record this as an observation, and in this form it is my own reading. The concrete senses of the two roots (the sun's inclining / water's overflowing) are lexical data and have been recorded separately in two different sections of this commentary. What is new is the finding that the two together describe a "middle".

And this finding touches a general feature of observation.

When a person sees something unaccustomed he can make two kinds of error:

1. Failing to see. His mind cannot process the thing; he looks but cannot register, his eye swerves aside. Astonishment scatters the look. 2. Seeing too much. His mind fills the gaps; on top of what he saw he adds what he expected. Excitement magnifies what was seen.

The second error is more insidious than the first, because the person does not know that he is speaking falsely. Expectation mixes into perception, and the person is sincere when he says "I saw".

The verse closes off this second possibility too. And read together with verse 11 the system is complete:

Three possibilities, three negations. The sūra counts and closes one by one all the ways in which a testimony can be corrupted.

Root: ب-ص-ر. This root has been treated in many places in this commentary (al-Mulk, al-Ḥāqqa, al-Qiyāma, al-Inshiqāq and others). Its concrete sense: sight, perception by the eye. Baṣīra — inner sight; baṣīr — one who sees.

And note: at verse 11 fuʾād, at verse 17 baṣar.

Two different organs, two different verifications. One the recording instrument (the eye), the other the place of assessment (the heart). And the sūra clears each of them separately.

Why this is necessary is plain: in a testimony error can occur at two different places — at the stage of reception and at the stage of processing. The eye may see rightly and the heart assess wrongly; or the heart may be sound and the eye mistaken. The verses close off both at once.

I record this as my own reading; that two different words are used in two different verses is data of the text.

There is a grammatical disagreement in the eighteenth verse, and it changes the meaning.

Laqad raʾā min āyāti rabbihi'l-kubrā.

ٱلْكُبْرَىٰ is a feminine elative: "the greatest (feminine)". The question is what it qualifies:

The difference is real: on the first reading what he saw is some of the great signs; on the second, the greatest of them.

The particle مِنْ is decisive here: min āyāti — "of the signs of". In Arabic this particle is used for the partitive (conveying a part of a whole). What he saw, that is, is not the whole of the signs but a part of them.

This supports the first reading and says: he saw not all the greatest signs but some of them.

As a preference I find the first reading the stronger, on the ground that the particle min conveys a part. It is not binding.

And this must be added: in the section al-Nāziʿāt a warning was recorded about the word al-kubrā — "al-kubrā is used in other places in the Qurʾān as well (al-Najm 53/18; Ṭāhā 20/23). That a word occurs twice in one sūra is therefore not by itself evidence of intent." The same reserve holds here: the word is an ordinary adjective of superiority.

The eighteenth verse closes the sūra's second block, and the closing sentence is striking:

The verse does not say what he saw. For fourteen verses an act of seeing has been recounted — who taught, where he stood, how near he came, beside which tree he was, that his eye did not swerve — and the block closes without saying what the thing seen was.

The one thing said is a category: āyāti rabbih — "the signs of his Lord."

And this is directly connected with the sūra's next block. The nineteenth verse begins: "Have you seen al-Lāt and al-ʿUzzā?"

The same verb: رأى.

Immediately after saying "he saw", the sūra asks "and what have you seen?"

This transition is the very middle of the sūra's argument about knowledge, and I record it as an observation: two verses in succession, with verbs from the same root, compare two different claims of seeing. And what the second group saw will be stated four verses later: names.