al-Qamar 54:15

Wa-laqad taraknāhā āyatan fa-hal min muddakir "And We left it as a sign. Is there anyone who will remember?"

This verse is not the full refrain. It carries the refrain's second half (fa-hal min muddakir), not its first. This occurs twice in the sūra: here and in verse fifty-one.

Three first halves, one single second half. And all three begin with وَلَقَدْ.

So in the sūra the question fa-hal min muddakir is attached to three different things:

1. A sign left behind (15) — the remnant of an event in the past. 2. A Qurʾān made easy (17, 22, 32, 40) — the text in hand. 3. Destroyed counterparts (51) — those of the addressee's own kind.

The question rests, then, on three separate sources: the event, the text, and the addressee himself. And in all three it ends with the same sentence.

I record this as my own reading. The wording and distribution of the three verses are data of the text; the threefold classification is mine.

Root: ت-ر-ك. To leave, to abandon, to leave behind. Turāth / tarika — an inheritance, the property left behind.

The verb states that a thing was not removed. The verse does not say "we made it"; it says "we did not take it away". The sign is what remains of the event.

To what does the pronoun هَا refer? The verse does not say, and there is disagreement:

I do not impose a preference. The second view is the one that rubs least against the text, since āya in the Qurʾān generally names an event or a proof. But the reading "the ship" is not weak either; elsewhere the Qurʾān speaks as though pointing at a remnant of the ship: "We saved him and the people of the ship, and We made it a sign for all beings" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/15).

Al-ʿAnkabūt 29/15 is worth reading together with this verse: there jaʿalnāhā (We made it), here taraknāhā (We left it). To make is to do; to leave is not to do. The two verbs say the same result from two different directions.

Root: ذ-ك-ر. This is one of the roots most often treated in this commentary — in al-Aʿlā, al-Muddaththir, ʿAbasa, al-Ḥāqqa, al-Dhāriyāt and in many other places. Its concrete sense: to remember, to call to mind, to keep in mind.

The issue here is the word's form, and it requires attention.

مُدَّكِر is in fact مُذْتَكِر: the active participle of the pattern إِفْتِعَال (Form VIII), from the verb iddakara.

The sound change occurred in two steps: 1. The letter ذ of the root and the letter ت of the form come side by side: mudhtakir. 2. The two letters assimilate to one another and merge into د (assimilation): muddakir.

There are two more changes of the same kind in this sūra: مُزْدَجَر (4) and ٱزْدُجِرَ (9) — there, under the influence of ز, ت became د. And ٱصْطَبِرْ (27) — there, under the influence of ص, ت will become ط.

The sūra thus displays three separate sound-assimilations of Form VIII together: muzdajar (ز→د), muddakir (ذ→د), iṣṭabir (ص→ط). I record this as a datum of the language; I draw no meaning from it.

What Form VIII contributes in sense is this: here the pattern conveys effort and acquisition. Dhakara is to remember; iddakara is to take a lesson, to draw a moral. The word describes not a passive remembering but taking a thing and making it one's own.

The question consists of three elements, and all three are meaningful.

هَلْ — the interrogative particle. The difference the lexicographers record between a- (hamza) and hal: hal asks a yes-or-no question (is there / did it happen), while the hamza can ask both a yes-or-no and an identifying question (is it this one or that one). Here it is hal: the question is not "who" but "is there".

مِنْ — this min is of the kind the lexicographers call exhaustive or redundant. The same structure was treated in the section on al-Ḥāqqa (fa-hal tarā lahum min bāqiya). Its function is to make a negation or a question fully comprehensive: "anyone at all", "so much as one person".

مُّدَّكِرٍ — indefinite. It is not a name that is sought but a quality.

Putting the three together, the question becomes: "Is there so much as one person who takes the lesson?"

And here exactly the difference from the refrain of al-Raḥmān appears. In al-Raḥmān's question there is a pronoun of address (Rabbi-kumā, tukadhdhibā-n): the question is put to you. In al-Qamar's question there is no pronoun at all: the question is put into the open, and whoever is to answer places himself in that empty space.

In the section "The refrain of al-Raḥmān and the refrain of al-Qamar" above I gave this difference in tabular form; here I show its counterpart in the grammar.