al-Qamar 54:17

Wa-laqad yassarnā'l-Qurʾāna li'l-dhikri fa-hal min muddakir "We have indeed made the Qurʾān easy for remembrance. Is there anyone who will remember?"

This sentence occurs four times in the sūra in exactly the same form: 17, 22, 32, 40. And all four are at the end of an account.

The sentence opens with three elements of reinforcement:

1. وَ — here counted as the wāw of the oath; it shows that the sentence is the answer to an oath. 2. لَ — the lām of the answer: the reinforcing lām that enters the answer to an oath. 3. قَدْ — confirmation at the head of a perfect verb.

The sentence is therefore rendered "We have indeed, most certainly", and this is not exaggeration; it is the counterpart of three separate grammatical elements.

And this triple occurs in every sentence in the sūra that begins with wa-laqad. There are eight verses in the sūra opening with wa-laqad: 4, 15, 17, 22, 32, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 51. The most heavily reinforced sentences in the sūra, that is, are the joints of the accounts.

Root: ي-س-ر. This root was treated in al-Inshirāḥ, al-Layl, al-Aʿlā, al-Inshiqāq, al-Muzzammil, ʿAbasa and al-Dhāriyāt. Its concrete sense: ease, suitability, being able to be done without strain.

In al-Layl precisely this verse was cited: "In Form II, يَسَّرَ — to make easy. In the Qurʾān: 'We have indeed made the Qurʾān easy for remembrance' (al-Qamar 54/17, repeated four times in the sūra)." I rely on that.

Two things are to be added here.

One — the pattern. The verb is on Form II (tafʿīl): yassara. The load this form carries here is transitivising and gradual: to make a thing easy. This does not mean that the Qurʾān was not easy and was made so afterwards; it means that it was given as easy.

The Qurʾān uses the same verb of itself once more: "We have made it easy in your tongue" (al-Dukhān 44/58; Maryam 19/97 — fa-innamā yassarnāhu bi-lisānik).

Two — what was made easy. The verse does not simply say "We made the Qurʾān easy"; it says "We made it easy للذِّكْرِ". The ease, that is, was given for a particular work.

لِلذِّكْرِ — the lām conveys purpose: "for remembrance". And dhikr here can be read in two senses, both of which are transmitted:

Both readings are widely transmitted and I do not impose a preference. But the context of the sūra appears to support the second: the word muddakir in the continuation of the sentence is from the same root and means one who draws a lesson. Since dhikr and muddakir are from the same root, then, what was made easy and what is expected are two faces of the same work.

I record this not as a preference but as an observation about the context; it is not binding.

The two halves of the refrain build a logic, and this logic covers all four accounts of the sūra:

The first half is a claim: the instrument was made easy. The second half is a question: is there anyone using it?

And what comes between them is the accounts. The sūra does this: it relates the destruction of a people, then asks "this is easy to understand — is there anyone who understands?"

Four times.

And in all four the same thing is said, but the material piled up behind it changes. At verse seventeen there is one account behind it; at twenty-two, two; at thirty-two, three; at forty, four.

This is the reverse of the "first pile up, then ask item by item" observation recorded in the section on al-Raḥmān. Al-Raḥmān piles up a list of twelve verses and then makes each item in turn the subject of a question. Al-Qamar asks the same question after each account, and each time the question rides on more material.

I record this as my own reading. The distribution of the refrains in the two sūras has been given in tabular form and is verifiable data; the interpretation "increasing weight" is mine.