أَفَرَءَيْتُم مَّا تَحْرُثُونَ · ءَأَنتُمْ تَزْرَعُونَهُۥٓ أَمْ نَحْنُ ٱلزَّٰرِعُونَ · لَوْ نَشَآءُ لَجَعَلْنَٰهُ حُطَٰمًا فَظَلْتُمْ تَفَكَّهُونَ · إِنَّا لَمُغْرَمُونَ · بَلْ نَحْنُ مَحْرُومُونَ
A-fa-raʾaytum mā taḥruthūn · A-antum tazraʿūnahu am naḥnu'l-zāriʿūn · Law nashāʾu la-jaʿalnāhu ḥuṭāman fa-ẓaltum tafakkahūn · Innā la-mughramūn · Bal naḥnu maḥrūmūn
"Have you seen the seed you sow? Do you make it grow, or are We the growers? Had We willed, We would have turned it into dry chaff, and you would have gone on exclaiming: 'We are laden with debt! No — we are utterly deprived!'"
| Verb | Root | To whom given |
|---|---|---|
| taḥruthūn | ح-ر-ث | To you — it is not even asked, it is granted |
| tazraʿūn | ز-ر-ع | Questioned — "is it you?" |
Ḥarth — root ح-ر-ث: to plough the soil, to cast seed, to sow. The root occurred in al-Qalam in the context of the story of the owners of the garden.
Zarʿ — root ز-ر-ع: the splitting and springing of the seed, the coming up of the crop from the ground. The root is analysed here for the first time in the series.
The distinction is this, and it is fixed by the lexicographers' descriptions: ḥarth is what man does — to plough, to cast, to water. Zarʿ is what goes on inside the seed: the splitting, the striking of roots, the greening.
The verse hands over man's share in full — mā taḥruthūn, "what you sow". It makes it no matter of dispute. Then it draws the line: the sowing is yours, the growing is not.
This is the same as the proof in the fifty-eighth verse and cuts at the same place: there too the act of emitting was left to man and the creating was questioned.
| Proof | What man does | What man does not do |
|---|---|---|
| 58-59 | Tumnūn — to emit | Khalq — to create |
| 63-64 | Taḥruthūn — to sow | Zarʿ — to make grow |
I record as my own reading: both proofs stand in the same place — where man's hand ends and the outcome begins. And both proofs are chosen from the two works into which man puts the most labour.
Ḥuṭām — a plant broken and crumbled, turned into dry chaff. The root ح-ط-م: to break, to shatter, to crumble.
The root was analysed in al-Humaza — al-Ḥuṭama, as a name of the Fire — and occurred in al-Ḥadīd (the life of this world turning to ḥuṭām). I do not repeat it.
What belongs here is this: the same root is in one place the name of the Fire and in another the end of a crop. The shared picture: a wholeness broken and dispersed.
Law nashāʾu — "had We willed". This pattern conveys an unfulfilled condition. The verse is not speaking of a disaster that happened, that is; it speaks of what could have happened and did not.
This is the finest point of the proof, and I give it as my own reading: man takes the crop's growing to be his own work because it grows every year. By recalling that its not growing is also possible, the verse shows that what is ordinary is not guaranteed. The proof is built not against a miracle but against the taking of an order for a permanence.
The verb is striking: tafakkahūn, root ف-ك-ه — the same root as the word fākiha (fruit), which occurs twice in this sūra.
| Verse | Word | For whom | Sense |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | fākihatin mimmā yatakhayyarūn | The sābiqūn | Fruit |
| 32 | fākihatin kathīra | The aṣḥābu'l-yamīn | Fruit |
| 65 | tafakkahūn | Those whose crop has dried | ? |
| Reading | Sense | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | To go on exclaiming in bewilderment, to lament | The context: the two sentences that follow are a complaint |
| 2 | To talk to one another, to pour out one's trouble | The root's branch of "conversation, talk" |
| 3 | A contronym (aḍdād) | The lexicographers record that some words carry opposite senses; tafakkuh is both to take pleasure and to lament |
I impose no preference. But this is worth recording and is verifiable from the text: after using the root of "fruit" as a favour in two tables, the sūra uses the same root here in the scene of the favour's departing. Whichever sense the disagreement settles on, this tension among the root's three occurrences is in the text itself.
Ẓaltum — originally ẓaliltum, lightened by the dropping of the middle letter. The verb ẓalla in Arabic carries the sense of lasting through the daytime. "You went on exclaiming from morning to evening", that is.
The verse relays two sentences from the mouth of the farmer whose crop has dried. Both are short, both emphatic.
Mughramūn — root غ-ر-م: debt, loss, a price that must be paid. The Turkish words garâmet/gramet and cereme (a fine, a penalty one is made to bear) are attached to this root. The root occurred in al-Ṭūr and al-Qalam.
Maḥrūmūn — root ح-ر-م: to be deprived of something. And the second branch of this root is ḥarām: what is forbidden, what one is barred from touching. The lexicographers give the shared core as "being barred".
And this link is a measurable fact: the sentence bal naḥnu maḥrūmūn occurs in one other place in the Qurʾān, letter for letter the same: al-Qalam 68/27 — from the mouths of the owners of the garden whose gardens were ruined in a night. That story was treated in al-Qalam; I rely on that.
The same sentence in two places, the same scene: the same words from the mouth of a man whose crop has gone.
Bal — "no, rather". This particle corrects what precedes it. The second sentence cancels the first, that is: not "we have fallen into debt" but "we have been deprived".
I record as my own reading: the first reaction is a reckoning — how much have I lost. The second reaction is deeper: the matter is not the loss but that what was given was not given. The verse relays a man correcting himself within two seconds. And the corrected form is exactly what the proof wants to show: a thing could be taken because it had been given.