al-Jumuʿa 62:5

Mathalu'lladhīna ḥummilu't-Tawrāta thumma lam yaḥmilūhā ka-mathali'l-ḥimāri yaḥmilu asfārā. Biʾsa mathalu'l-qawmi'lladhīna kadhdhabū bi-āyātillāh. Wallāhu lā yahdi'l-qawma'ẓ-ẓālimīn

"The likeness of those who were laden with the Torah and then did not carry it is the likeness of the donkey that carries volumes. How evil is the likeness of the people who denied God's verses! God does not guide the wrongdoing people."

The whole force of this verse is gathered in the use of a single root in two different patterns.

The root ح-م-ل: to take up a load, to carry. From the same root come ḥaml (a load, and also pregnancy), ḥamūla (a load) and ḥammāl (one who carries loads).

Now look at the two usages in the verse:

In Arabic ḥamala (the first form) is "to carry", while ḥammala (the second form) is "to lay a load on someone". The second form increases transitivity: it requires a carrier and a loader.

Accordingly what the verse says is: the load was placed, but it was not carried.

This is, logically, a strange sentence. A creature on whose back a load has been placed must carry it — if it does not carry it the load falls to the ground. The verse seems to be saying something impossible.

And the comparison comes in exactly to resolve this strangeness. For there really is something being carried: the weight. What is not carried is what is inside that weight.

ثُمَّ (thumma) differs in Arabic from wāw and from fāʾ: it states sequence with an interval. Fāʾ joins without a break, thumma says that time has passed in between.

That is, the sentence does not say "they were laden and did not carry"; it says "they were laden, then they did not carry". There is a stretch of time in between.

This changes the picture. What is at issue is not a trust refused from the outset. It was carried for a while, then ceased to be carried. That is, what is being described is not a rejection but a wearing away. It was recorded at al-Baqara 2/10, where the metaphors of "sickness" are used of the hypocrites: a sickness does not stay fixed, it either heals or advances. Here too there is a similar process — the relation was established at some point, and afterwards was hollowed out.

The word is not derived from an Arabic root; it is the Arabicised form of the Hebrew tôrāh, and it means "teaching, instruction, guidance". The Qurʾān uses this word as the name of the book given to Moses (Mūsā).

That the word preferred here should be a particular book is meaningful. The verse does not say "those who were given a book", it says "those who were laden with the Torah". That is, the addressee is determinate and is a historical community.

But the continuation of the verse at once widens this determinacy: "How evil is the likeness of the people who denied God's verses." In the second sentence the Torah does not occur; a general attribute is laid down. That is, the comparison is set up for a particular community, but the ruling is given by way of an attribute.

This means that the basic caveat of the method (Method) is found in the text itself: the Qurʾān here names a community but ties the ruling to a behaviour. Whoever performs that behaviour, the description fits him too — and the eleventh verse of the sūra will show exactly this.

There is a point that must be attended to: the sentence does not say "they are like a donkey".

It says: mathalu'lladhīna… ka-mathali'l-ḥimār — "their likeness is like the likeness of the donkey." What is compared is not persons but states.

This difference is worked on with particular care in the classical books of rhetoric, and it is important. Had a man been likened to a donkey, this would have been an insult. When a state is likened to a state it becomes a finding: a structural commonality is established between two situations. The commonality is this — in both situations there is a carrier, what he carries has value, and the carrier cannot reach that value.

الْحِمَار — the root ح-م-ر. The relation between the root of the word and "red" (aḥmar) is disputed among the lexicographers; I say nothing definite about it.

The choice of animal needs to be dwelt upon. Why a donkey?

In the classical commentaries the donkey's lack of understanding is generally pointed to. This may be right, but the real force of the comparison lies, in my view, elsewhere: the donkey is a beast of burden. What describes it is that it carries. And for a beast of burden, what the thing it carries may be is by definition immaterial — it may be wheat, it may be stone, it may be a book. The weight is the same.

That is, the animal chosen is not "a stupid animal" but "a carrier indifferent to content". What the comparison touches is not intelligence but the form of the relationship.

The Qurʾān uses this animal in another place too: "The ugliest of voices is surely the voice of donkeys" (Luqmān 31/19). There the measure is voice, here it is load. What emerges when the two verses are read together is interesting: in the Qurʾān the donkey is mentioned both as the creature that makes much noise and as the creature that does not know what it carries. The disconnection between sound and content is the same in both verses.

يَحْمِلُ أَسْفَارًا — this expression is the circumstantial qualifier of al-ḥimār, that is, a clause describing its state: "a donkey in the state of carrying volumes". The verb is imperfect; it states continuity. It is not a load carried once and set down.

The root س-ف-ر was treated in the section on Sūrat ʿAbasa (80/15 safara, 80/38 musfira) as the backbone of that sūra; I do not repeat that web here, but the branch of it at work here needs opening out.

At the centre of the root there is bringing to light, lifting the cover. The words that issue from this centre:

• سَفَر (safar) — a journey. The explanation the lexicographers give for its bearing this name is that a journey brings to light people's characters. What is not evident at home becomes visible on the road.
• سَفَرَة (safara) — the word occurring at ʿAbasa 80/15: those who bring the text to light, the scribes.
• مُسْفِرَة (musfira) — ʿAbasa 80/38: a face uncovered, lit up.
• سَافِرَة / سُفُور — the uncovering of the face.
• سِفْر (sifr) — a large book, a volume. Its plural is أَسْفَار.

That the book should take its name from this root is precisely the crux of the matter: sifr means "that which brings to light." A book, in the logic of the word itself, is an instrument for lifting a cover.

Now read the comparison with this knowledge.

What is on the donkey's back? Things that bring to light. And for the donkey nothing comes to light. The word itself says what the load carried is good for; the comparison shows that this work does not take place. This is an irony built into the choice of word.

And the link with Sūrat ʿAbasa is completed here. There the text comes to light in the hand of the safara, and the face of the one who receives it becomes musfira — the same root, on two levels, two uncoverings. Here the same root stands in a third position: an uncoverer that does not uncover. The name of the load states its function; the function does not take place.

Its indefiniteness. Asfāran is indefinite: "certain volumes". Not particular books. This preserves the generality of the comparison — for the donkey it makes no difference which book it is. The indefiniteness is the grammatical counterpart of indifference.

Read together with two pictures treated in Sūrat al-Baqara, this verse completes a set of three. All three catch the same fault, through three different organs:

In all three pictures the instrument works and produces no result. And the shared diagnosis of the three is this: the fault is not in the transmission but in the reception.

But there is a fine difference among them, and it must be seen:

• At 2/171 only sound reaches the animal. That is, what reaches it is the carrier of the content; the content itself has not reached it at all.
• At 62/5 the book itself reaches the donkey. Physically it possesses it. The content is there, it is on its back, it is being carried.
• At 2/44 the text has both reached and been read and is moreover being transmitted to others.

That is, the three pictures form an ordering of intensity: to hear, to carry, to transmit. And if one looks closely, as contact increases the situation grows heavier. The heaviest diagnosis is for the one nearest the text. As was recorded at al-Baqara 2/44: "Telling takes the place of doing. Indeed, the better the work of telling is done, the stronger the substituting effect becomes."

Al-Jumuʿa 62/5 is the middle link of this set of three, and the most visible one — because in a single comparison both possession and deprivation are pictured at once.

بِئْسَ — the verb of blame in Arabic, the opposite of niʿma: "how evil it is". Niʿma and biʾsa are the frozen verbs used for praise and for blame.

This pattern had occurred at al-Baqara 2/90 as well: biʾsamā'shtaraw bihi anfusahum — "how evil is that for which they sold themselves!" There what was sold was the person himself; here what is blamed is a state.

The point to attend to in the sentence is that the ruling is given not for "those laden with the Torah" but for "the people who denied God's verses". That is, the verse draws back one step from the concrete community for which it built the comparison and ties the ruling to a behaviour.

كَذَّبُوا — the root ك-ذ-ب, in the tafʿīl form. This pattern was treated in detail at the first verse of Sūrat al-Māʿūn: kadhaba is "he lied" (the agent is a liar), while kadhdhaba is "he called another's true word a lie" (the agent may not be a liar; what he does is to reject what is true). Takdhīb is an active stance, a taking up of a position.

The choosing of this pattern here says something interesting. The people the verse describes do not deny the book — they carry it, they hold it in their hands, they count it as their own. Yet the verse counts them mukadhdhib.

That is, takdhīb is here defined not as a word but as a manner of treatment. It is possible to have called a text a lie without saying "this is a lie": when you leave its content without function, you have in fact called it a lie. This was the argument of Sūrat al-Māʿūn as well — there the proof of denying the religion was not a word but the treatment given to the orphan.

The root ظ-ل-م: to put a thing somewhere other than its place, to set it where it has no right to be. From the same root comes ẓulma (darkness) — light's not being where it ought to be.

This sense of the root fits the verse exactly. The people described have displaced something: the book, where it was to be read, was a thing to be carried; it was placed on the back and not in the heart. Wrongdoing, in the logic of the word itself, is exactly this — putting something in the wrong place.

لَا يَهْدِي — guidance not being given. Here the balance recorded for the seal at al-Baqara 2/7 holds: this is not an arbitrary obstruction but the consequence of a choice. Indeed the sentence says "He does not guide the wrongdoers" — the absence of guidance has been placed after the wrongdoing.

To understand the force of this comparison fully, one has to know what a book was in that period.

In the seventh century a book was not a cheap object. It was written by hand on leather or papyrus; the production of a single volume could take months and required a serious outlay. For this reason carrying a book was in fact a matter of status: the man who had a book was set apart from the man who did not.

And precisely for this reason the relationship formed with a book was open to a two-sided corruption. A book was both a text to be read and an object to be possessed. The second could take the place of the first.

That the comparison should choose the donkey is well judged at this point: the donkey is the extreme example of possessing the object side of the book while being wholly deprived of its text side. And the more valuable the load on its back, the sharper the picture becomes.

One. Access is not possession. The counterpart of the verse today works most here. To reach a text is easier now than it has ever been in history; carrying is almost costless. A person carrying thousands of volumes on his telephone is closer to the state the comparison describes than anyone in history — because, since the load exerts no weight, it is not even noticed that it is being carried. The volumes on the donkey's back were at least heavy; today's load exerts no weight at all.

Two. Carrying indifferent to content. At the centre of the comparison lies not a lack of intelligence but a lack of interest. This is a warning valid for everyone who carries knowledge as a matter of profession: the person who teaches, transmits, spreads or defends a text is also a carrier. When the work of carrying becomes professionalised, breaking away from the content becomes easy — because the work of carrying forms criteria of its own, and the content falls outside those criteria.

Three. The limit of the comparison. The verse speaks by way of the Torah; but if you stay within the sūra and come to the eleventh verse, you see the same description recorded about another community. This is a limit the sūra sets up within itself: the comparison cannot be stuck onto one community and left there. Whoever carries the book without carrying it, the description is his. Per the method (Method) I record this plainly here: this verse cannot be used to establish a wholesale ruling about a religious community. The verse itself has tied the ruling to the attribute "those who deny God's verses", and six verses later the same sūra has seated its own first addressees before the same mirror.