al-Qamar 54:41-42

Wa-laqad jāʾa āla Firʿawna'l-nudhur — kadhdhabū bi-āyātinā kullihā fa-akhadhnāhum akhdha ʿazīzin muqtadir "And the warnings came to the house of Pharaoh too. They denied all Our signs; so We seized them with the seizing of One mighty, All-Powerful."

This is the question most often asked about the structure of the sūra, and it can be answered by an observation about word order. Below, without conjecture, I set out five observations from the text's own data.

One — this account falls outside the pattern.

The four accounts opened with the same verb: kadhdhabat. The fifth opens with a different verb: جَاءَ.

In the fifth account the subject is not the people but the warnings. The agent of the sentence changes: in four accounts peoples were doing something; here something comes to a people.

Two — this account has no refrain.

All four closed with wa-laqad yassarnā. The fifth does not. Verse forty-three turns straight to the addressee: a-kuffārukum khayrun min ulāʾikum?

Three — this account does not name the instrument of destruction.

In the four accounts the instrument of destruction was given by name:

In place of the instrument, verse forty-two names the one who seizes: akhdha ʿazīzin muqtadir. The drowning is not mentioned; the sea is not mentioned; the staff is not mentioned. In the fifth account the sūra brings forward not the instrument but the agent.

Four — in this account the object of the denying is widened.

Thamūd and Lot had denied bi'l-nudhur (the warnings). Here the object is بِآيَاتِنَا كُلِّهَا — "all Our signs".

The word كُلِّهَا occurs once in the sūra, here, and it is worth recording: elsewhere the Qurʾān counts the signs given to Moses as nine (al-Isrāʾ 17/101; al-Naml 27/12). The longest list of signs, that is, belongs to this people — and the sūra gathers it into a single word.

Brevity is balanced by scope. An account of two verses takes in the widest list by saying "all of them".

Five — this account closes the list, it does not narrate.

Four accounts narrate something: an offence, an instrument, an outcome. The fifth does not narrate; it enumerates. It has two sentences: a warning came, they denied. And then the seizing.

The conclusion that follows, and I record it as my own reading:

The account of Pharaoh is not an account here but an item on a list. Having told four accounts the sūra closes the list, and in closing it uses the best-known example — because the best-known example is the one that needs telling least.

The Qurʾān relates the account of Pharaoh at length in al-Aʿrāf, Yūnus, Ṭāhā, al-Shuʿarāʾ, al-Qaṣaṣ and many other sūras. Al-Qamar's addressee knows this account. What is known need not be told; naming it is enough.

And what the sūra is doing is in any case not telling but listing. As I recorded above under the heading "What is absent from the sūra", this sūra uses not the content of the accounts but their coming one after another. The fifth item shows that the list is complete.

This is an observation about word order and it is not conjecture; its ground is the five points above, and all of them can be verified from the text. I draw from it no claim about the order of revelation or the arrangement of the text.

أَخْذَ is the verbal noun of the verb akhadhnāhum and is in the accusative as an absolute object. But it is not an ordinary absolute object; it is in annexation: akhdha ʿazīzin muqtadir — "with the seizing of One mighty and All-Powerful".

In Arabic this structure does the work of qualification: it says how the act was done, by reference to the identity of the agent.

In al-Ḥāqqa a structure of the same kind was treated: akhadhahum akhdhatan rābiya (69/10) — there the verbal noun was qualified by an adjective, here by an annexation.

عَزِيز — Root: ع-ز-ز. Its concrete sense: to be hard, firm, unwearing. Arḍun ʿazāz — hard ground that cannot be dug. And from this: to be unconquerable, to be superior, to be precious.

The word carries two things at once: power and worth. For a thing to be ʿazīz is both that it cannot be reached and that it is precious. From the same root ʿizza, iʿzāz, muʿāzza.

مُقْتَدِر — Root: ق-د-ر, the active participle of Form VIII: one whose power suffices to its measure, possessed of full power.

And this word is the same as the last word of the sūra (55). I take up that circle below.

That the two attributes come together is worth recording, and I record it as my own reading: ʿazīz conveys irresistibility, muqtadir conveys measure. The seizing, that is, is both unstoppable and measured. Without both together the sentence would be incomplete: with ʿazīz alone, invincibility would be understood; with muqtadir alone, sufficiency. The two together describe a power that does not miss its measure.

And this is precisely what will be said in verse forty-nine: innā kulla shayʾin khalaqnāhu bi-qadar.