al-Wāqiʿa 56:95-96

Inna hādhā la-huwa ḥaqqu'l-yaqīn · Fa-sabbiḥ bi'smi rabbika'l-ʿaẓīm

"This is surely the very truth of certainty. So glorify the name of your Lord, the Mighty."

There are three emphases in the sentence: inna + la + huwa (the pronoun of separation). In Arabic this heaping up means the closing of what is said to debate.

And this stands exactly over against the objection in the forty-seventh verse of the sūra: there a question was asked with two emphases, a-innā la-mabʿūthūn. Here the answer is given with three.

Ḥaqq — root ح-ق-ق: what is fixed, what is in its proper place, the real. Yaqīn — root ي-ق-ن: the absence of any doubt.

In the Qurʾān the word yaqīn occurs in three separate constructions, and the three were treated earlier in the series:

In the classical exegeses this triad is generally explained as a gradation: certainty by knowing, certainty by seeing, certainty by living through. I relay this explanation as one widespread in the tradition; it is not an ordering that follows necessarily from the wording of the constructions, and the lexicographers explain the genitive structure of the expression ḥaqqu'l-yaqīn differently as well.

Hādhā — "this". What it points to is not said. The most widespread reading in the classical exegeses is that it points to the whole of what the sūra has recounted.

This verse is identical word for word with the seventy-fourth. The analysis of the words was made there; I do not repeat it.

The placing of the repetition must be recorded:

The same command, at the end of two separate sets of proof. In the section on the structure of the sūra I recorded that this repetition draws the boundaries of the blocks; here its function is completed.

And the close is worth recording: after ninety-six verses recounting the resurrection, the three classes, the Garden, the Fire, the proofs and death, the sūra asks of its hearer a single thing: glorification.

I give this as my own reading: what is asked is not a piece of knowledge, not even an act — it is an attitude. Sabbiḥ, by its root, is to hold apart: to declare God free of everything unbefitting Him. And what has been done throughout the sūra is exactly this: the striking out, one by one, of false suppositions about who can do what. The last command gives that striking-out its name.