al-Raḥmān 55:14-15

Khalaqa'l-insāna min ṣalṣālin ka'l-fakhkhār · Wa khalaqa'l-jānna min mārijin min nār

"He created man from dry clay that rings like pottery · and He created the jānn from a smokeless flame."

The second section of the sūra, and two verses long. Two species, two substances, two sentences — and the sentences are in exactly the same pattern:

خَلَقَ + ٱلْـ[species] + مِنْ + [substance]

The repetition of the pattern does a piece of work: the two species receive equal treatment. As recorded in the section on al-Jinn, "the jinn are not the opposite of man but his parallel: two species under obligation, from two different substances." The word order of the verses makes this visible.

And note: the second verse has a وَ, the first does not. The second verse is thus attached to the first; the two are the halves of a single announcement.

Root: ص-ل-ص-ل. This is one of the muḍāʿaf rubāʿī roots of Arabic — a four-letter root built by doubling a two-letter core.

And this type of root was analysed in this commentary in al-Zilzāl. What was recorded there:

Doubled roots in Arabic do one piece of work: they describe a repeated, back-and-forth, oscillating movement and the sound that movement makes.

And the first item in the list of examples given there was precisely this word: "صَلْصَلَ — to ring, the clinking of dry clay (ṣalṣāl, al-Raḥmān 55/14)."

On the meaning of the word the lexicographers record two branches:

The comparison in the verse supports the first branch: ka'l-fakhkhār — "like pottery". The distinguishing feature of pottery is not that it smells but that it is fired and gives out a sound. The verse itself thus says which branch it means.

But the second branch cannot be struck out either, because the Qurʾān uses the same word elsewhere together with precisely that expression:

"We created man from dry clay, from moulded mud." (al-Ḥijr 15/26) — min ṣalṣālin min ḥamaʾin masnūn

There ṣalṣāl stands beside ḥamaʾ masnūn (clay given shape, clay that has undergone change). The Qurʾān has thus used the word with two different comparisons in two different places.

The Qurʾān does not use one single word for the substance from which man was made. The words form a series, and each seems to name a different stage:

The direction of the series is towards dryness: dust, wet clay, sticky clay, moulded mud, dried clay.

A note: I do not present this series as a description of stages. The Qurʾān uses these words in different sūras, in different contexts, and nowhere ranges them in an order. The ordering is an arrangement of mine and is not a claim.

Root: ف-خ-ر. Fakhkhār — clay fired in the kiln, pottery.

A second family of words comes from the same root, and it is striking: فَخْر (boasting), فَخُور (one who boasts much), مُفَاخَرَة (competition in boasting). The Qurʾān uses the word fakhūr as a censured attribute: "God does not love any conceited boaster" (Luqmān 31/18).

The two words share the same consonants. The link the lexicographers draw between the two is disputed, and I do not present it as a settled etymology.

But this observation can be recorded, and I record it as my own reading: the word chosen for the substance from which man was made is built of the same letters as the name of the fault against which the Qurʾān warns man most. This is not a proof but a nicety; and even as a nicety it becomes visible only when attention is paid to the sound-fabric of Arabic.

The work of the comparison. Ka'l-fakhkhār — "like pottery". Pottery has two properties, and both fit the context: it gives out a sound and it breaks. The verse does not state the second; but the sūra will state it twelve verses later: "Everyone upon the earth passes away" (26).

Root: م-ر-ج. And here is one of the tightest internal links of the sūra; I record it now and will complete it at the nineteenth verse.

The idea beneath the root: to mingle and to let loose. The two go together, and the reason is plain — things let loose become mingled.

• مَرَجَ — he let loose, he set free; he mingled. Maraja'l-dābba — he turned the animal loose into the pasture.
• مَرْج — meadow, pasture. The place where an animal is turned loose. In Turkish the borrowed words merc/mera ("pasture") are connected with this root.
• مَرِيج — mingled, tangled together. In the Qurʾān: "They are in a confused affair" (Qāf 50/5 — fī amrin marīj).
• مَارِج — the active participle: what mingles, what has been let loose.

A mārij is thus not a kind of fire; it is a state of fire. The word describes the confusion and freedom of the flame — a flame attached to nothing, unsettled, restless.

The choice of this word for the jinn is meaningful. Man from a substance that is dried, hardened, given shape; the jinn from a substance that is mingled, let loose, shapeless. The substance of the one is fixed, that of the other restless.

As recorded in al-Jinn, this verse is one of two pieces of information the Qurʾān gives about the substance of the jinn; the second is al-Ḥijr 15/27 (min nāri's-samūm — smokeless, scorching fire). And the measure recorded in that section holds here as well:

The Qurʾān does not speak of the jinn's shapes, their numbers, or where they live. This silence is no accident. The word jinn is not a definition but a boundary marker.

This verse stays within that boundary: it gives the name of a substance and says nothing else.

Two details are worth pausing over:

One. For man a comparison is given (like pottery), for the jinn none. A comparison rests on something the one addressed knows. Everyone knows pottery; there is no second object to describe the "mārij" state of a flame.

Two. For the jinn the source of the substance is further specified: min mārijin min nār — "a mārij of fire". Two mins, one upon the other. The substance is thus narrowed twice: from fire, and from a particular state of fire.

I record these as observations about the word order.

The verse names man first. Yet the Qurʾān says elsewhere that the jinn were created earlier:

"And the jānn We created before, from scorching fire." (al-Ḥijr 15/27) — wa'l-jānna khalaqnāhu min qabl

The order in time, then, favours the jinn, the order of the verse man. This is exactly the situation in the first four verses of the sūra, and the measure recorded there holds here as well: the order of mention is not the order of occurrence. The sūra is addressing man, and it puts man first.