al-Qalam 68:1

Nūn, wa'l-qalami wa mā yasṭurūn "Nūn. By the pen and by what they write, line upon line."

In the discussion of al-Baqara 2/1 the disconnected letters (al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭaʿa) were treated at length; I do not repeat those findings here. In summary: the meaning of these letters is not known with certainty; one body of scholars refers the meaning to God, while among the views that seek an explanation the one that finds most support from within the text is the "material/challenge" account. And as was written there plainly: no numerical reckoning is done on these letters.

I add here a few notes particular to this sūra.

One. Sūras that open with a single letter. Three sūras in the Qurʾān open with a single letter: Ṣād, Qāf, Nūn. What the three have in common is that the letter is followed by an oath or a description. In al-Qalam an oath follows.

Two. The name of the letter and the way it is written. In the codex this verse is written with a single letter (ن), but it is read "nūn" — that is, the name of the letter is read. This is the general rule for the disconnected letters, and it was recorded in the discussion of al-Baqara: not alam but alif-lām-mīm.

Three. The senses the word "nūn" carries. In Arabic the word nūn, besides being the name of a letter, expresses two further things: fish and — according to some lexicographers — an inkwell. Explanations built on both senses are transmitted in the books of exegesis.

Care is required with both:

I record both explanations and adopt neither. The first has an attraction from within the sūra — the sūra opens with nūn and closes with ṣāḥib al-ḥūt (the man of the fish) — and it is possible to note that overlap as an observation. But I do not present it as exegesis; the note in al-Baqara, that the meaning of the letter is unknown, stands, and overlaps of this kind slide easily into forcing.

Root: ق-ل-م. This root was treated in the discussion of al-ʿAlaq (96/4); I do not repeat it here. In summary of the finding there: the concrete sense of the root is to cut, to whittle, to trim the ends (qulāma — a paring; taqlīm — the cutting of nails). And the conclusion drawn from it was this: "the pen is not 'the thing that writes'; it is 'the thing that has been whittled'. It takes its name not from its function but from its making. […] The pen is not found in nature; it is made."

Now I add what belongs to Sūrat al-Qalam in particular: the Qurʾān here swears by a tool.

This is worth dwelling on. Oaths in the Qurʾān are generally sworn by elements of nature: the sun, the moon, the night, the morning, the fig, the olive, the star, the dawn, the horse, the mountain. All of these are given things; none is man-made.

The pen, by contrast, is man-made. A whittled reed.

That the Qurʾān should swear by a man-made object is worth noting, and I record it as an observation. But the observation has a limit: as was stated in the discussion of al-ʿAlaq, the verse there says that the one who taught this technology is likewise God. So what is sworn by is not a human invention; it is a capacity that was taught to the human being.

And the context of the oath is meaningful in its own right. The answer that comes in the second verse is: "You are not possessed."

The link between the pen and the charge of possession is one of the finest points in the sūra. The possessed man is one whose speech does not come from himself — he is the mouth of a jinn. The soothsayer's word is volatile: it cannot be measured, it is not recorded; the product of the pen, by contrast, stays put, is compared, is checked.

So the sūra answers an oral accusation on a written ground. I record this as my own reading, but that the two verses stand one after the other is a datum of the text.

Root: س-ط-ر. This root was treated in the discussion of al-Muṭaffifīn (83/13) by way of asāṭīr; I do not repeat it here. In summary of the finding there: saṭr — a line, a row, a series; saṭara — he drew a line, he wrote line upon line; misṭar — a ruler; musaṭṭar — set out in lines.

At the centre of the root stands the idea of an ordered sequence, and this explains the choice of the word. The verse does not say "wa mā yaktubūn" (what they write); it says "wa mā yasṭurūn". That is, not merely writing, but setting into lines — putting in order, arranging in sequence.

The difference is this: kataba is writing itself; saṭara is the shaping of writing. Scattering letters onto a page anyhow is kitāba; writing line upon line is tasṭīr.

And this distinction sets up a contrast with the fifteenth verse of the sūra. There the denier will call the revelation asāṭīr al-awwalīn — "the things the ancients set out in lines". The same root, in two different mouths:

The sūra exalts, in its first verse, the very root of the accusation that will be levelled against it. In the fifteenth verse it will be said "these are what the ancients wrote"; the first verse says "by what they write".

I offer this as my own reading, but that the two words share a root and stand in the same sūra is a datum of the text. A similar finding was made in the discussion of al-Muṭaffifīn, where it was recorded that three roots for writing (kataba, raqama, saṭara) occur together.

Yasṭurūn is plural, third person: "they write". But who?

I incline to the fourth view, and the ground is this: the verse does not state the subject, and its not stating it does not look like an omission. What is sworn by is not "they" but "mā yasṭurūn" — what they write. The weight falls not on the writer but on the written.

This is a preference, and it is not binding; the first view too holds a strong place in the classical sources and accords with the record of the angels in al-Infiṭār.

In the discussion of al-ʿAlaq what the pen says to the present was treated; I do not repeat those findings here. In summary: "Writing makes both truth and falsehood permanent. The record carries justice and slander alike."

Here I add a layer particular to this sūra: permanence is a ground for reckoning.

The first verse of the sūra is an oath, the second a defence. And the ground on which the defence is made is the ground of the pen: what is said is recorded, and what is recorded is compared.

The present-day counterpart of this is direct. When a claim is oral, it depends on the standing of the one who makes it; when it is written, it is bound to its own content. In disputes that run on reputation, who said it matters; in disputes that run on the record, what was said matters.

The sūra opens with a pen a dispute that is being conducted over mental health — that is, a dispute aimed wholly at a person. And where it ends, in the fifty-second verse, is not whose the word is but whom it addresses: "it is a reminder for all beings."