al-Qamar 54:7

Khushshaʿan abṣāruhum yakhrujūna mina'l-ajdāthi ka-annahum jarādun muntashir "With their eyes cast down they come forth from the graves as though they were locusts spread abroad."

Root: خ-ش-ع. Its concrete sense: to be lowered, the dropping of the voice, the descent of the eye. Khushūʿ is submission, but first of all it is a physical lowering: the head bows, the eye drops, the voice falls. At Ṭāhā 20/108: "Voices are hushed (khashaʿat) before the All-Merciful."

In al-Ghāshiya the word's use of the eye was treated and this verse was cited there; I do not repeat it.

There is a variant reading. The word is read in two forms:

Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which imām, I write no names. This is the same note applied in the section on al-Ḥāqqa.

There is no difference in sense, and there is a grammatical reason for this: in Arabic an adjective coming before its plural noun may remain singular. So khāshiʿan abṣāruhum also means "with their eyes cast down". The two readings give the same picture.

The word's case-analysis is that of a ḥāl (an accusative of state): "they come forth in the state of…".

A point of word order: the sentence begins with khushshaʿan — that is, the appearance comes before the verb. The normal order would be yakhrujūna khushshaʿan abṣāruhum. What is brought forward is the eyes. The reader sees the eyes first and the coming forth second.

Root: ج-د-ث. A grave. Its singular is jadath.

Arabic has several words for a grave and the Qurʾān uses them distinctly:

جَدَث occurs in only three places in the Qurʾān, and in all three in the same scene: the coming forth from the grave.

This root was treated in al-Maʿārij. What is to be added here is this: in all three verses there is movement, and the movement is fast — yansilūn (to walk quickly), sirāʿan (as if running). The word is never used in the Qurʾān in the context of "the dead lying"; always in the context of coming forth.

I record this as an observation about usage; the wording of the three verses can be verified.

جَرَاد — Root: ج-ر-د. Its concrete sense: to strip, to lay bare, to peel off the covering. Jarada — he stripped. Ajrad — hairless, bare. Jarīda — a palm branch stripped of its leaves (and from this the sense "newspaper" arose later).

And the lexicographers explain the giving of this name to the locust as follows: it strips the place it passes over and leaves it bare. That is, the word itself carries the work the creature does. I transmit this explanation ascribing it to the lexicographers.

Jarād is a generic noun; its singular is jarāda.

مُنتَشِر — Root: ن-ش-ر. This root was treated in al-Mulk, al-Takwīr, al-Mursalāt and al-Ṭūr. Its concrete sense: to spread, to lay out, to open.

Its derivatives and their uses in the Qurʾān:

• نَشَرَ — he spread, he opened. To open something folded.
• مَنشُور — spread open (of a page). "Pages spread open" (al-Muddaththir 74/52).
• نُشِرَتْ — "When the pages are spread open" (al-Takwīr 81/10).
• ٱلنُّشُور — the resurrection. "To Him is the rising and the gathering" (al-Mulk 67/15).
• مُنتَشِر — the active participle of Form VIII: spread abroad, scattered.

And there is an overlap here worth recording: the coming forth of people from the graves is called nushūr; and at the moment of that coming forth the people are likened to muntashir locusts. The same root gives both the name of the event and the adjective of the comparison.

I record this as my own reading, and I mark its limit: that the two words are from the same root is verifiable linguistic data. I do not claim that this was a deliberate choice.

In al-Qāriʿa the comparison at al-Qāriʿa 101/4 was treated in detail: ka'l-farāshi'l-mabthūth — "like scattered moths/butterflies". It was recorded there that rendering farāsh into English is a matter of choice and that the Arabic word covers both. The seventh verse of this sūra was moreover already cited in the section on al-Qāriʿa.

I now set the two comparisons side by side, because the same event is told with two different creatures and the choices say different things.

The two comparisons are not telling the same thing.

Al-Qāriʿa is telling of lightness. As was shown in the section on al-Qāriʿa, that sūra first empties out all the weight in the world: the lightest creature (the moth) and the heaviest body (the mountain) come to the same state; then at exactly that point the balance is set up and a single question is asked — whose scales are heavy? The moth comparison is a preparation for the balance.

Al-Qamar is telling of multitude. In al-Qamar there is no balance; there is a crowd. The next verse of the sūra says "they run with necks outstretched towards the caller"; its forty-fourth verse relates their claim "we are a host that cannot be defeated"; its forty-fifth announces the scattering of that host. From beginning to end the sūra is concerned with crowds — peoples, hosts, jamʿ, ashyāʿ. A swarm of locusts is the crowd itself.

And here it can be seen plainly that the comparison is chosen for the one addressed. For desert and desert-edge societies a swarm of locusts is not an abstract image. A locust invasion finishes a region's yearly crop in a few hours; it darkens the sky; it covers the ground; it can be heard. This is the densest and most threatening image of a crowd that such a society has seen.

The Qurʾān itself also names the locust as a punishment: "So We sent upon them the flood, the locusts, the vermin, the frogs and the blood" (al-Aʿrāf 7/133) — and this is about the people of Pharaoh; that is, the people who will be named in the forty-first verse of this sūra.

In one sentence: for al-Qāriʿa people are like winged things flung into a fire; for al-Qamar they are like a swarm covering the ground. One gives weightlessness, the other numberlessness.

I record this comparison as my own reading. The wording of the two verses, the senses of the two roots and the continuation of the two sūras are verifiable data; the difference in function I draw from the choice of comparisons is my interpretation.