al-Raḥmān 55:31-45 — Reckoning and punishment

Here the sūra turns. For thirty verses favours had been counted; from the thirty-first verse to the forty-fourth what is counted is something else.

And the refrain does not change.

Sa-nafrughu lakum ayyuha'l-thaqalān

"We shall attend to you, O you two weights!"

Root: ف-ر-غ. This root was treated in al-Inshirāḥ, and precisely this verse was given there as an example. What was recorded there:

Its two uses in the Qurʾān illuminate the root: "And the heart of Moses' mother became empty" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/10) — here fārighan means emptied within. And "O you two weights! We shall set about attending to you" (al-Raḥmān 55/31) — the sa-nafrughu here comes from the verb "to become empty" but its sense is "we shall be free of other business and turn wholly to this". To be emptied is at the same time to become able to turn wholly to something. Emptiness is not a state in itself; it is the precondition of the next turning.

A note needs to be added here, because the expression is difficult at first sight.

The sentence says literally "we shall be free for you". And this is a settled idiom in Arabic for turning wholly to a task: faraghtu li-fulān — "I have given myself over to so-and-so, I shall attend to him now". The nearest rendering in English is "your turn will come" or "we shall now deal with you".

One further note is needed, and the classical commentaries enter it too: the expression does not say that God is occupied with some other business and will move to this when He has finished that. Indeed two verses earlier it was said "every day He is upon some task". The idiom is Arabic's own manner of expression and conveys a time, not an occupation.

The سَـ at the head of the verb — the particle of the future. It conveys the near future. The time will come, that is, and it is not distant.

In the muṣḥaf this word is written in the form أَيُّهَ, without the alif at its end (normally ayyuhā). The same spelling is found in two other places in the Qurʾān: al-Nūr 24/31 (ayyuha'l-muʾminūn) and al-Zukhruf 43/49 (ayyuha'l-sāḥir).

This is a feature of the writing, and in recitation the end of the word drops in any case when it is joined to what follows (waṣl). It does not change the meaning.

Root: ث-ق-ل. This root was treated in al-Insān, and precisely this word was entered in the list there. What was recorded there:

أَثْقَال (athqāl) — weights, burdens (al-Zilzāl 99/2). مِثْقَال (mithqāl) — the weight of a thing, a unit of weight (al-Zilzāl 99/7-8). ٱلثَّقَلَان (al-thaqalān) — "the two weights"; the Qurʾān uses this name for men and jinn (al-Raḥmān 55/31). The root's work in the Qurʾān is measuring. A weight is what is weighed.

And here that finding falls exactly into place.

The eighth verse of the sūra had set a balance. The thirty-first verse names those it addresses "the two weights".

The balance and what is to be weighed, in the same sūra.

I record this as my own reading. That the roots of the two words are distinct (و-ز-ن and ث-ق-ل) but that both belong to the field of weighing is a verifiable datum of the language; the connection I draw between them is an interpretation.

And the finding recorded for mawāzīn in the section on al-Qāriʿa completes this connection: there what was weighed were deeds, and the balance is in the hereafter. In al-Raḥmān the balance has been set on the earth, and what is to be weighed has been named as well.

The classical explanations are of three kinds:

All three are transmitted and they do not exclude each other. The second explanation is the one most in keeping with the sūra as a whole: the sūra has set a balance, drawn a limit, and declares a reckoning. Weight is the name of responsibility.

And note: this is the first place in the sūra where the one addressed is named by a dual noun. Since the thirteenth verse a dual pronoun had been used; the dual name of the addressee is given here.