al-Wāqiʿa 56:35-38

Innā anshaʾnāhunna inshāʾā · Fa-jaʿalnāhunna abkārā · ʿUruban atrābā · Li-aṣḥābi'l-yamīn

"We brought them into being with a new bringing-into-being; We made them untouched — loving, of equal age. For the men of the right."

These four verses are not separate sentences. A verbal clause (anshaʾnā), a second verbal clause joined to it (fa-jaʿalnā), two attributes (ʿuruban atrābā) and a prepositional phrase with lām (li-aṣḥābi'l-yamīn). A single structure, that is, divided across four verses.

The division itself carries information: the verse-ends (inshāʾā · abkārā · atrābā · yamīn) build the rhyme of this part of the sūra. Up to the thirty-fourth verse the attributes came with the sound -ūd / -ūʿa (makhḍūd, manḍūd, mamdūd, maskūb, marfūʿa); here the sound changes. The change of sound marks the place where the subject of the table changes: from objects to living beings.

At the thirty-fourth verse (furushin marfūʿa) I recorded that there are two readings and that I make no choice. The thirty-fifth verse falls exactly upon that question, because the sentence begins with a pronoun: anshaʾnāhunna — "We brought them into being".

All three have their defenders in the classical exegeses. I impose no preference. This much can be read from the text itself: the verb is anshaʾnā — not "We created" but "We built up". And whatever the object of the verb may be, the verse conveys a rebuilding. The real weight lies in the word itself; the disagreement about the referent of the pronoun does not change that weight.

The concrete sense of the root: to rise, to come forth, to appear and grow. Nashaʾa'sh-shayʾu — a thing came forth and grew. Nashaʾa'l-saḥābu — the cloud rose.

The root has been analysed in three places in this series; I rely on those:

The common denominator of these three uses is this, and it can be carried here: the root describes not a bringing into being out of nothing but a building upward from an existing ground. The night is already there, and nāshiʾa is what rises out of it. The tree is already there, and munshaʾāt is the ship built from it. The Turkish word inşaat (building works), borrowed from this root, carries the same picture: the material stays, what is built rises.

A link within the sūra — and this link matters: the same root will return in the sixty-second verse: wa laqad ʿalimtumu'n-nashʾata'l-ūlā fa-lawlā tadhakkarūn — "you have known the first bringing-into-being; will you not then reflect?" The verb the sūra uses in the thirty-fifth verse for the Garden, that is, it will use twenty-seven verses later for birth in this world. The same root, two nashʾas: al-ūlā and — as it is named at al-Najm 53/47 — al-ukhrā.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the sūra itself: the verse describes existence in the hereafter with a familiar verb. It does not say "something you know nothing of will happen"; it says "what has already been done to you once will be done once more."

The coming of its own verbal noun after the verb is in Arabic an absolute object, and its work is emphasis. There is no exact English equivalent; one would have to say "We built them with a building", which is odd in English. The approximate rendering: "We truly, fully built them."

But there is more than emphasis here. When the absolute object comes indefinite, the lexicographers mostly count it as conveying kind: that is, "a building of a certain sort" — a building of another order, particular to itself.

This is a stance that will meet us elsewhere in the sūra as well: while the thing is being described, a note is entered at the same time that it "is not of the sort you know".

The concrete sense of the root concerns time: the early hour, the first part of the day. Bukra — the early hour of the morning. Ibkār — to do early. Bakkara — he was early.

This root has been analysed at one place in the series: al-Insān, al-Insān 76/25 — bukratan wa aṣīlā (morning and late afternoon). I do not repeat the analysis there.

The question here is this: how does a root conveying time become an attribute of a person?

The link the lexicographers give is direct: bikr means the first of a thing. A she-camel that gives birth for the first time is called bikr, the first fruit of a tree is called bākūra (the English "first-fruits"). At the core of the word, that is, "first" comes before "untouched". The morning too is the first of the day.

And there is a point to notice here: the verse frames the word abkār not to state a condition but as the result of an act: fa-jaʿalnāhunna abkārā — "We made them abkār". The attribute is an attribute conferred, that is; it was not so from the start.

In the classical exegeses a sense of "renewal" is drawn from this verse and it is put thus: to be bikr is to be as though it were the first time on every occasion. I relay this explanation as a reading widespread in the tradition; it is not a sense that follows necessarily from the wording, but it accords with the "first" core of the root.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here. Its singular is ʿarūb.

The root is analysed here for the first time in the series. The core sense the lexicographers give for the root ع-ر-ب: to express clearly and plainly, to set out one's meaning without concealing it. Aʿraba ʿani'sh-shayʾ — he made a thing plain. Iʿrāb — a bringing into the open (the grammatical term iʿrāb comes from here too: a word's bringing into the open its function in the sentence by the vowel at its end). The ʿarabī in the expression lisānun ʿarabiyyun mubīn is also related to this sense of clarity.

From this comes the description of ʿarūb: the equivalent the lexicographers give is a woman who does not hide her love for her husband, who shows her state openly. The word is not an attribute of beauty, that is, but an attribute of communication.

I find this worth recording and give it as an observation: everything enumerated throughout the table was an object seen, tasted or touched. In the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth verses I recorded that the table closed with sound, and that what was enumerated was not an object but an environment of speech (lā yasmaʿūna fīhā laghwan). The same thing happens here: the attribute looks not at outward appearance but at the openness of the relation formed. The root's core of "not hiding one's meaning" supports this.

The concrete sense of the root: soil. Turāb — earth. And tirb, by the description the lexicographers give, means of the same age.

How is the link made? The lexicographers record this: children born at the same time who play together in the same soil are one another's tirb. Being of an age, that is, is described by shared earth.

The root has been analysed in three places in this series:

Three uses, three separate tasks of a single root: to cling to the ground, the bones of the breast, to be of an age. The distance between matraba in al-Balad and atrāb here is worth recording: the same root describes in one place the lowest poverty and in another equality. What they share is that both rest on the picture of being level with the earth — the one by having fallen, the other by being equal.

What is the word's work here? Two readings are transmitted and both are possible:

At Ṣād 38/52 the same word occurs again in a description of the Garden (wa ʿindahum qāṣirātu'l-ṭarfi atrāb), and so it does at al-Nabaʾ 78/33. The word is settled in this context, that is.

The four-verse structure leaves the ones addressed to the very end. The table opened in the twenty-seventh verse with wa aṣḥābu'l-yamīni mā aṣḥābu'l-yamīn and is sealed in the thirty-eighth with the same name.

This was not present in the sūra's first table. The table of the sābiqūn (12-26) ended without taking a closing sentence such as hādhā, and passed straight to the name of the new group. Here, by contrast, the table is framed with the name of its owner: the name at the start, the name at the end.

I record this as an observation about word order. The framing shows that the second table is kept separate from the first — the difference between them will be put into figures two verses later (39-40).

Per the method (Method) I must write something plainly here, because when it is not said the text is misunderstood.

First — the matter of the audience. These verses came down to a community living in the desert, for whom thirst and want were part of daily life. Shade, running water, fruit that is not cut off, a raised couch: all of them are things really lacking in that life. That the description is built from this material is a speaking in a language the hearer can understand. To say this does not diminish the description; to take into account to whom something is said is the work of exegesis.

Second — literal or figurative. How much of these descriptions is literal and how much representative has been debated in the classical exegeses:

I make no choice. I record this: the sūra speaks in the thirty-fifth verse of a new bringing-into-being. This expression makes it hard, by the text's own doing, to equate the description exactly with its counterparts in this world.

Third — who is addressed. In this table the address appears directed to men, and this has to do with the order of address in the society into which the verse came down. Across the whole of the Qurʾān it is stated plainly that the recompense is not divided by gender — al-Naḥl 16/97: "Whoever does righteous work, male or female, while a believer, We shall give a good life." There are places, too, where spouses are named together in the descriptions of the Garden: Yā-Sīn 36/56 (hum wa azwājuhum fī ẓilālin ʿala'l-arāʾiki muttakiʾūn), al-Zukhruf 43/70 (udkhulu'l-jannata antum wa azwājukum tuḥbarūn), Ghāfir 40/8.

To read this table as though it were the whole of the Qurʾān's understanding of recompense, that is, runs against the text's own coherence. This is not a preference but the result given by the sum of the verses.