al-Ṭalāq 65:8

Wa kaʾayyin min qaryatin ʿatat ʿan amri rabbihā wa rusulihi fa-ḥāsabnāhā ḥisāban shadīdan wa ʿadhdhabnāhā ʿadhāban nukrā

"And how many a town went out from the command of its Lord and His messengers; and We called it to a severe reckoning and punished it with an unheard-of punishment."

The sharpest turn of the sūra is here. For seven verses the waiting period, the dwelling, maintenance, the wage for suckling have been spoken of. In the eighth verse, suddenly, towns destroyed.

This transition looks disconnected and requires explanation. The explanations proposed in the classical commentaries, and what I want to add:

And there is a word that binds these explanations to one another: أَمْر.

The word in eight places in the sūra, and each time on a different scale:

Eight occurrences, four scales: the inside of a household, a person's affair, the fate of a town, and the working of the cosmos. All with the same word.

And this arises from the two senses of the Arabic word amr (command / affair) being gathered in a single word. English cannot carry this unity; each time it must say either "command" or "affair", and the link breaks.

The work the sūra does may be described thus: by naming the divorce rulings amr, the cause of destruction amr, and the working of the cosmos amr, it makes the three parts of the same order. Whether a man pays his wife maintenance and the annihilation of a town stand under the same word.

I record this as an observation, not as a thesis. The number of the word's occurrences in the sūra and their distribution are the text's data; the expression "parts of the same order" that I draw from them is my reading. Amr is a very common word in the Qurʾān and not every concentration need mean a deliberate weave. But given the length of this sūra (twelve verses) eight occurrences are striking, and the last of them (65/12) standing in the sentence that closes the sūra does not look like an accident.

Root ع ت و (ʿ-t-w). Its sense: to exceed the bound, to run wild, to stiffen, not to bow. For the concrete sense of the root the lexicographers give "a thing's drying out and hardening, becoming unbendable" — like a dried branch that will not bend and breaks.

From the same root ʿātī (the insolent), ʿutuww (insolence), ʿitāʾ (obstinacy).

And the word's kinship with ط غ ي (ṭ-gh-y) is at the level of meaning, not at the level of root: ṭughyān is to overflow (treated at 2/15 in al-Baqara), whereas ʿutuww is to harden and not bend. The one overflows the vessel, the other refuses to bend.

The particle عَنْ — "from". ʿAtā ʿan: to run wild by going out from the command. The particle shows the going out.

قَرْيَة — root ق ر ي (q-r-y): to gather, to bring together. Qarya is the place where people gather — village, town, city. The word does not announce size; it announces gathering.

And note: the verbs are feminine. ʿAtat, ḥāsabnāhā, ʿadhdhabnāhā, dhāqat — all refer back to qarya and are feminine. The town is spoken of like a person: it went out, it was called to reckoning, it saw punishment, it tasted. This is the ordinary usage of Arabic (qarya is feminine), but its effect is this: a community is handled as a single agent.

حَاسَبَ — root ح س ب, in the مُفَاعَلَة (mufāʿala) form. And the pattern is meaningful here: mufāʿala conveys reciprocity. Muḥāsaba is the settling of accounts between two parties — not one party's calling the other to account, but the account's being settled reciprocally.

And this root occurs in the sūra for the third time. I recall the table I set up at 65/2-3: lā yaḥtasib (does not reckon), ḥasbuh (suffices him), and now ḥāsabnāhā (We called to reckoning).

The sūra had set up a language of reckoning and here it closes it. The period a human being counts, the source a human being cannot count, the authority that suffices a human being — and at the very end, the place where a human being's account is settled.

حِسَابًا شَدِيدًا — an absolute object: the repetition of the verbal noun of the verb. In Arabic this construction conveys intensification. "We called to reckoning, and to a severe reckoning at that."

شَدِيد — root ش د د (sh-d-d): to bind tight, to harden. Shadda (the sign of doubling in Arabic), shidda, ashadd are from the same root. The concrete sense of the root is the tightness of a bond.

نُكْر — root ن ك ر (n-k-r). And this word stands in direct opposition to مَعْرُوف in verses 2 and 6.

The sense of the root: not to recognise, to find strange, to find odd. Munkar (unrecognised, evil), inkār (not to recognise), nakira (the indefinite noun — the unrecognised), tankīr.

And the opposition is set up inside the sūra:

The sūra names the good "known" and the penalty "unknown". And this says more than a play on words: the measure of conduct is familiar, no one can say I did not know; its return is not familiar, no one can foresee what will happen.

I record this as an observation. The opposition of the two words is established in Arabic; the meaning I draw from their standing in these positions in the same sūra is my own reading.