69. Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa

Fifty-two verses. It takes its name from its first word: ٱلْحَاقَّة.

The sūra opens by saying the same word three times in three verses, and it does not define the word. This opening has come before us once already in this commentary: Sūrat al-Qāriʿa entered by the same three steps. The two sūras name the resurrection by two different names, but they use the same pattern. What the difference between them is will be the first question of this section.

The sūra has three parts, and all three turn about a single verb: a claim's coming true.

Part one (1-12): what came true in the past. Thamūd, ʿĀd, Pharaoh, the cities that were overturned, the people of Noah (Nūḥ). Every one of them denied a piece of news; the news came true. The sūra is not describing the resurrection here — it is enumerating instances of the resurrection that have already happened on a smaller scale.

Part two (13-37): the real coming-true. The ṣūr, the earth and the mountains lifted and levelled at a single stroke, the splitting of the sky, the bearing of the Throne, the being brought forward, and the two scenes of the book.

Part three (38-52): the source of the news. Here the sūra moves from what it has been describing to the text itself: what is this speech that tells you all this, whose speech is it, what would have happened had it been invented.

What binds the three parts together is the root in the sūra's name. The root ح-ق-ق means "to come true, to find its place, to be established as right"; and the sūra uses this root once at its opening and once again at its close:

• 69/1: al-Ḥāqqa — that which will come true.
• 69/51: wa innahu la-ḥaqqu'l-yaqīn — the reality of certainty.

The sūra opens with a word and closes with the same root. Everything that happens in between stands between the two ends of that word: something claimed turning out to be real. It turned out so in the past (1-12), it will turn out so in the future (13-37), and the speech that reports it is not an invention (38-52).

On its being Meccan there is something close to unanimity. Style and content support this: short verse-endings, the destruction of past peoples, a scene of the resurrection, the defence of the revelation, the absence of legal content, and an audience among whom the accusations of "poet" and "soothsayer" are still current. The last three items point in particular to the Meccan period: these are the accusations of a setting in which the Prophet was still becoming known.

The basmala was treated in the section on al-Fātiḥa and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without it.

The arrangement of the verse-endings in this sūra is remarkable quite apart from its content, and it needs to be seen before the analysis begins.

Read the ends of the first eighteen verses one after another:

al-ḥāqqa · al-ḥāqqa · al-ḥāqqa · al-qāriʿa · bi'ṭ-ṭāghiya · ʿātiya · khāwiya · bāqiya · bi'l-khāṭiʾa · rābiya · al-jāriya · wāʿiya · wāḥida · wāḥida · al-wāqiʿa · wāhiya · thamāniya · khāfiya

Eighteen verses, a single sound: -iya. And the sound does not come by chance; it comes from a single metre. Almost every one of the sūra's key words is on the pattern فَاعِلَة (the feminine active participle):

Eighteen words, one pattern. In the section on al-Qāriʿa it was recorded that the four key words of that sūra (qāriʿa, rāḍiya, hāwiya, ḥāmiya) are all cast from the same metre. Al-Ḥāqqa does the same work with eighteen words — and the dominant sound of the two sūras is the same as well: -iya.

I record this as an observation about sound. But the shared metre has a consequence for meaning, and it must be said now: فاعلة is an active participle, that is, "the one that does". All through the sūra the resurrection, the wind that destroys, the event that comes to pass and the death that decides are all named in the position of "the one that does". In the section on al-Qāriʿa it was recorded that the names of the resurrection are all active participles; al-Ḥāqqa spreads that grammar across the whole of a sūra.

And from verse 19 onward the verse-ending breaks — where that break occurs and why is the most concrete evidence there is for the structure of the sūra. I shall return to it when its turn comes.

Al-Ḥāqqa · Ma'l-Ḥāqqa · Wa mā adrāka ma'l-Ḥāqqa "Al-Ḥāqqa! What is al-Ḥāqqa? And what made you know what al-Ḥāqqa is?"

Root: ح-ق-ق. The concrete sense of the root is a thing's being fixed, finding its place, turning out to be real. Its derivatives show the centre of the root:

• حَقَّ ٱلْأَمْرُ — the matter came true, became settled. "The word of your Lord came true against them" (Yūnus 10/33) — that is, it was realised, it found its place.
• ٱلْحَقّ — the real; and at the same time a right, that is, a claim fixed upon someone. What English covers with two separate words is a single word in Arabic: truth and what is due.
• حَقِيقَة — the thing itself, its very substance; the opposite of the figurative.
• ٱسْتَحَقَّ — he deserved it, he was entitled to it. That is, "he made it fixed upon him".
• أَحَقّ — more entitled, having the better right.
• حُقّ — the place where the lid of a box seats exactly; the hollow into which a thing settles precisely. The most concrete form of the root shows here: to seat exactly.

This last item matters. At the core of the root there is not a verdict but a seating: a thing's coming exactly into the place opened for it. Ḥaqq is not a notion suspended in the air; it is what has come to rest in its place. This is why the same root yields both "the real" and "a claim": both settle upon their owner.

And its opposite shows the same thing: بَاطِل (bāṭil). Buṭlān means to come to nothing, to be annulled, to be left void. The opposition of ḥaqq and bāṭil is therefore not the opposition of correct and incorrect; it is the opposition of what stands and what disperses.

Ḥāqqa is an active participle, feminine: that which comes true, that which is established as right. But the classical explanations differ over what exactly it realises, and all three are possible in terms of the language:

The third explanation is worth pausing over, because it fits the structure of the sūra to a surprising degree.

What the sūra recounts throughout is a contention: peoples deny, the news comes true. "Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa" (4). "They disobeyed the messenger of their Lord" (10). "We know that among you there are deniers" (49). There is, that is, a claim and a counter-claim in the sūra; and al-Ḥāqqa is the moment at which one of the claims puts down the other.

I do not say that I prefer this explanation — all three arrive at the same place, and I can see no evidence that would require a choice among them. But the fit the third makes with the content of the sūra is worth recording.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa this finding was made: al-qāriʿa is not the name of a disaster but the name of a movement — the one that strikes, that hits. And it was recorded there that the same three-step opening occurs once more in the Qurʾān (here).

We can now set the two sūras side by side. The pattern is identical:

The place where the difference lies is the last row, and it settles the whole direction of the two sūras.

Al-Qāriʿa names the event from its felt side: a blow, an impact, a sudden contact. What the word addresses is the skin, the ear. And accordingly Sūrat al-Qāriʿa goes on to give two images: moths and wool.

Al-Ḥāqqa names the event from its verified side: a piece of news turning out true. What the word addresses is a mind that has already said something. And accordingly Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa goes on to recount two cases at law: peoples who denied, and news that was confirmed.

The same day, then, is named in two sūras from two different places: one by its striking, the other by its coming true. And this shows that the naming is not arbitrary: each name says in advance what its sūra is going to do.

I record this as a reading I have drawn from the comparison of the two sūras. Its ground is the fit between the roots of the two names and the content of what follows them; and that fit is plain in the text.

The rule recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa holds here as well: in Arabic, repeating the noun where a pronoun would have served conveys magnification (tafkhīm) and the instilling of dread (tahwīl). In none of the three verses is a pronoun used; the whole word is repeated each time.

But there is a difference between the two sūras, and it needs to be recorded.

In al-Qāriʿa the word never occurs again after the first three verses. The sūra says its name three times and lets it go.

So it is in al-Ḥāqqa too — the word ḥāqqa likewise never occurs again in the sūra after these three verses. But the sūra does not let the word go; it does not let its root go. The root returns in the fifty-first verse as ḥaqqu'l-yaqīn. Al-Qāriʿa says its name and falls silent; al-Ḥāqqa says its name, keeps its root in reserve, and brings it back at the end.

I record this difference as an observation; the distribution of the two words within their sūras is a datum that can be verified.

This pattern was treated in detail in the section on al-Humaza, and the rule recorded there was this:

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the rule was tested twice and worked both times. It works in al-Ḥāqqa too: the perfect is used in the third verse, and an explanation follows.

But the kind of explanation is striking, and here again the two sūras part.

Al-Qāriʿa answered its question with two similes (people like moths, mountains like wool). The answer, that is, was a description.

Al-Ḥāqqa answers its question with history: "Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa…" The answer, that is, is a record.

This difference arises from the kind of the two names. The answer to "what is the one that strikes?" may well be what the blow is like. But the answer to "what is the one that comes true?" is what has come true before. The sūra offers past events as the proof of a future one.

This is a form of argument, and it explains the whole of the sūra's first part: the proof that al-Ḥāqqa will come to pass is that smaller ḥāqqas have come to pass already.

Iltifāt. Adrā-ka — "you". The telling has been running in the third person and turns all at once to the second person singular. This device was treated in the sections on al-Humaza and al-Qāriʿa; its function is the same. The sūra's later turns to the second person singular are worth recording too: "fa-tara'l-qawma" (7), "fa-hal tarā" (8), "ʿarsha rabbika" (17), "fa-sabbiḥ bi'smi rabbika" (52). While it narrates, the sūra stops and looks at the one listening.

Kadhdhabat Thamūdu wa ʿĀdun bi'l-qāriʿa "Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa."

The fourth verse names one sūra of the Qurʾān inside another sūra.

And this happens in this sūra not once but twice:

• 69/4: bi'l-qāriʿa — al-Qāriʿa (the name of sūra 101).
• 69/15: waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa — al-Wāqiʿa (the name of sūra 56).

Most sūra names are taken from some striking word occurring within the sūra; the occurrence of such a word in another sūra is therefore not in itself surprising. What is surprising is the gathering of the names of the resurrection in one place: Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa names the resurrection by three separate names — ḥāqqa, qāriʿa, wāqiʿa. All three are on the same metre, all three are active participles.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa a table of the names of the resurrection was given, and what was recorded there was this: each name brings forward one aspect of the event. We now see the first three rows of that table gathered in a single sūra:

And the distribution is meaningful: the sūra uses its own name at the opening, qāriʿa as the thing the past peoples denied, and wāqiʿa as the moment the ṣūr is blown. Three names, that is, at work in three separate tasks.

This verse was already mentioned in the section on al-Qāriʿa; the finding there was this: the word qāriʿa is used in the Qurʾān both of a disaster that comes in this world (al-Raʿd 13/31) and of the resurrection, and the smaller stands as the herald of the greater. Al-Ḥāqqa 69/4-6 establishes exactly this relation: what they denied was the great qāriʿa; what came upon them was the small one.

The verse does not say "they denied their messengers" or "they denied God". It gives the thing they denied as the resurrection.

This is a choice, and it carries the logic of the sūra. The story of Thamūd and of ʿĀd is told in detail elsewhere in the Qurʾān, and there what they reject is the call of the messenger. Here the sūra goes down to the core of the rejection: rejecting the resurrection.

The reason is the sūra's own subject. The destruction that comes upon a people in this world is a small-scale rehearsal of the resurrection: it was claimed, and it came to pass. Those who denied al-qāriʿa, that is, had al-qāriʿa come upon them. To say this, the sūra names the thing rejected and the thing that came in requital with the same word.

Historical order puts ʿĀd before Thamūd; and elsewhere in the Qurʾān they are generally named as "ʿĀd and Thamūd" (for instance al-Tawba 9/70, Ibrāhīm 14/9, al-Furqān 25/38, al-ʿAnkabūt 29/38; the sequence at al-Fajr 89/6-9 likewise begins with ʿĀd). Here the order is reversed: Thamūd first, then ʿĀd.

The classical explanations:

The third is the most cautious. The first two are possible explanations; I present none of them as a transmitted report.

A note on grammar. The verb كَذَّبَتْ has come in the feminine, although the subjects are Thamūd and ʿĀd. The reason is that in Arabic tribal names may be treated as masculine (counted as a people or a body) or as feminine (counted as a tribe). Here the feminine has been preferred; and the verb has moreover been inflected to agree with the first of the two subjects — in Arabic, when the verb comes first it agrees with the first subject. Thamūd here comes as diptote (taking no tanwīn), while ʿĀd has tanwīn. The word Thamūd occurs in the Qurʾān sometimes with tanwīn and sometimes without; when counted a tribal name it is diptote, when counted the name of a forefather or a people it is not. This does not change the meaning.

Fa-ammā Thamūdu fa-uhlikū bi'ṭ-ṭāghiya "As for Thamūd, they were destroyed by the overstepping."

This pattern was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa: أَمَّا is the particle of tafṣīl (setting out in detail); it is used in dividing a whole into its parts, its clause must contain فَ, and the division it makes is absolute.

Al-Ḥāqqa uses this pattern twice, and both times it stands at the spine of the sūra:

• 5-6: fa-ammā Thamūdu… wa ammā ʿĀdun… — two peoples, two modes of destruction.
• 19, 25: fa-ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-yamīnihi… wa ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-shimālihi… — two persons, two ends.

The sūra applies the same pattern once to history and once to the hereafter. And in both it does the same thing: it splits a mass in two. In the fourth verse "Thamūd and ʿĀd" were the shared subject of a single verb; in the fifth they are separated. In the eighteenth verse "you are brought forward" was everyone; in the nineteenth they are separated.

The movement of the sūra is the same as al-Qāriʿa's: one → two. Al-Qāriʿa did this once; al-Ḥāqqa does it twice, on two different planes.

Root: ط-غ-ي / ط-غ-و. The concrete sense of the root is to cross the limit, to pass the bound, to overflow. This root has been treated in two places in this commentary, and I shall rely on both:

• The root was analysed in the section on al-Baqara 2/15; and there, as an example of the sense "to overflow", precisely the eleventh verse of this sūra was given ("when the water overflowed").
• In the section on al-Shams 91/11 the verse "Thamūd denied in its overstepping" was treated.

The second item must be set beside this verse, because the same people, the same root, occurs in two different positions:

The same root: in one sūra the name of the offence, in the other the name of the penalty.

This leads to the most debated point in the verse: what is ṭāghiya here?

The first and second views do not exclude one another, and both have been maintained in the classical sources. To my mind the text itself inclines a little more to the first, and my ground is inside the sūra:

The next verse destroys ʿĀd by a wind that is "ʿātiya" — and ʿātiya also means "that which passes the bound". Two verses in succession, two peoples, and both instruments of destruction named by words of crossing the limit. The sūra names the punishment of the two peoples with two different words but with the same concept: overstepping.

This shows that the punishment is named after the offence. A people that oversteps is destroyed by something that oversteps.

This preference is not binding; the second view is sound too, and the practical difference is limited — because on either reading the name of the thing that destroys shares a root with the name of the people's own act.

Root: ه-ل-ك. To perish, to be annihilated. Here the passive is used: "they were destroyed."

The agent is not named. This is a frequent choice in the Qurʾān's accounts of destruction, and it has two functions: on the one hand the agent is already known (so there is no need to name him), and on the other the emphasis shifts from the agent to the act. What the sentence is concerned with is not who destroyed them but that they were destroyed.

Note also: uhlikū is plural (they), whereas kadhdhabat in the fourth verse was singular feminine (that tribe). The sūra makes the tribe deny as a single whole, but destroys it one by one.

I record this grammatical shift as an observation; the twofold treatment of tribal names in Arabic already makes the transition possible, and I therefore draw no firm conclusion from it.

Wa ammā ʿĀdun fa-uhlikū bi-rīḥin ṣarṣarin ʿātiya "As for ʿĀd, they were destroyed by a howling, raging wind."

The people of ʿĀd and Iram were treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Fajr: where the people lived, what the expression dhāt al-ʿimād means, the disagreements about them and the historical background were all given there. I do not repeat them here.

There is a link between what was recorded in al-Fajr and what is said here, and it needs to be made. Al-Fajr named ʿĀd by what they did — the pillars, the buildings, their being such that "the like of them had not been created in the lands". Al-Ḥāqqa names ʿĀd by what came upon them. In al-Fajr the people are a building power; in al-Ḥāqqa they are rubble.

And the choice of instrument in the two sūras completes itself as well. In al-Fajr three peoples were named by three structures (the column, the hewn rock, the tent-pegs); in al-Ḥāqqa the same peoples are destroyed by three natural events (sound or convulsion, wind, and an overturning together with water). What they raised in one sūra stands over against what levelled them in the other.

I record this as a reading I have drawn from the comparison of the two sūras.

Root: ر-و-ح. This root is very wide: rīḥ (wind), rūḥ (spirit), rawḥ (relief, a breath of air), rāʾiḥa (scent), istirāḥa (rest). The shared core is air in motion, and from it both the sense of life and the sense of relief arise.

There is a striking distribution in the Qurʾān between رِيَاح (the plural) and رِيح (the singular):

• The plural (riyāḥ) generally occurs in the context of mercy: "Among His signs is that He sends the winds as bearers of glad tidings" (al-Rūm 30/46); "We sent the winds as fertilisers" (al-Ḥijr 15/22).
• The singular (rīḥ) generally occurs in the context of punishment: here; "We sent upon them a howling wind" (Fuṣṣilat 41/16); "the barren wind" (al-Dhāriyāt 51/41).

I want to draw attention to this distribution; I cannot say with certainty whether it has exceptions, and I therefore do not present it as a rule. But if the distribution holds, the logic behind it is this: mercy is many-directioned — winds come from different quarters, one balancing another, gathering the cloud and dispersing it. Punishment is single-directioned: from one quarter, without a break, without balance.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa an observation of the same kind was recorded about the singular-plural distribution of mīzān, and the same note of caution was entered.

The word is built on a two-syllable repetition: صَرْ-صَرْ. In Arabic such doubled forms are called rubāʿī muḍāʿaf, and in the language they mostly convey a repeated sound or movement: zalzala (to shake), qalqala, waswasa, gharghara.

There are two explanations of the word's sense, and both rest on two branches of the root:

Both are transmitted in the classical sources, and many exegetes combine the two: at once howling and freezing.

The form of the word carries its sense. The word repeats within itself: ṣar-ṣar. And what it describes is a wind that blows without a break for seven nights and eight days. The sound repeats, and so does the event.

This should be read together with the note recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the fit between sound and meaning is a phenomenon found in every language, and it is especially productive in Arabic. I do not present this as a proof of miracle; I record that here the form of the word and its sense coincide.

Its other occurrences in the Qurʾān. The word occurs in the Qurʾān in three places, and all of them are about the people of ʿĀd: here, Fuṣṣilat 41/16, al-Qamar 54/19. Ṣarṣar, that is, is in the Qurʾān almost the name of a single event.

The verse al-Qamar 54/19 is worth recording besides: "We sent upon them a howling wind on a day of continuous misfortune." There it is a single day, here seven nights and eight days. The classical explanation is that the qualifier "mustamirr" (continuous) in al-Qamar conveys duration and that the two verses do not conflict: the "day of misfortune" gives the day the event began, while al-Ḥāqqa gives its length.

Root: ع-ت-و. ʿAtā / yaʿtū — to cross the bound, to run wild, to be headstrong, to break out of obedience.

The occurrences of the root in the Qurʾān show the word's field:

• "They broke out of the command of their Lord" (al-Aʿrāf 7/77) — of Thamūd.
• "They ran wild with a great wildness" (al-Furqān 25/21).
• "I have reached the utmost limit of old age" (Maryam 19/8) — the words of Zechariah. The ʿitiyyā here is "age passing its bound". This is the one use of the root that is not negative; and precisely for that reason it is the place that best shows the root's basic sense: a thing's going beyond its normal limit.
• "They grew haughty against the command of their Lord" (al-Ṭalāq 65/8).

ʿĀtiya is thus a moral word, and here it is given to a wind. The wind becomes "raging": it passes its own measure, it cannot be reined in, it does not listen to an order.

And here the link with the preceding verse is made:

Two different roots, one concept. And that concept is the name of each people's own offence.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the lexical sense of the two roots, and that sense is not in dispute: ط-غ-ي and ع-ت-و are two roots in Arabic conveying the crossing of a bound, and the Qurʾān uses both of them of human behaviour. In these two verses both are used of a natural event.

A theological note. That the wind is "raging" does not mean that it has broken out of God's command — the next verse names the agent outright, saying "He loosed it upon them". ʿĀtiya is how the wind appears from the standpoint of those destroyed: unstoppable, without measure, without rein. The attribute describes the event not as it stands with God but as it stands with the one who undergoes it.

Sakhkharahā ʿalayhim sabʿa layālin wa thamāniyata ayyāmin ḥusūmā; fa-tara'l-qawma fīhā ṣarʿā ka-annahum aʿjāzu nakhlin khāwiya "He loosed it upon them for seven nights and eight days without a break. And you see the people there laid low — as though they were hollow trunks of palm."

Root: س-خ-ر. It carries two branches of meaning, and both are at work in the Qurʾān:

• سَخَّرَ (Form II) — to make a thing submit, to set it to service, to put it at one's command. "He made subservient to you the sun and the moon" (Ibrāhīm 14/33); "He made subservient to you the sea" (al-Jāthiya 45/12).
• سَخِرَ مِن — to mock, to make someone small. "Let no people mock another people" (al-Ḥujurāt 49/11).

The lexicographers give the shared core of the two branches thus: to put someone into a position not of his own willing. In subjection it is the body that is at stake, in mockery the standing.

The use here is from the first branch — and it is striking. The preceding verse described the wind as ʿātiya (raging, unbridled). This verse uses of the same wind the verb sakhkhara (he made it submit, he set it to service).

What emerges when the two words are set side by side is this: the wind is raging as it stands with those it comes upon; as it stands with the one who sends it, it is on duty. The same event is named from two sides by two different words.

And the proper place of the word taskhīr in the Qurʾān is the context of favour: the sun, the moon, the sea, the ships are made subservient to man. Here the same verb is used in the context of punishment. What is set to service is the same; the task it is set to differs.

I record this as an observation about the language; both uses are plain in the Qurʾān, and the sense of the verb is the same in both.

The particle ʿalā here conveys istīlāʾ (covering from above). In the section on al-Fajr the same function of the same particle was recorded at the verse "So your Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment": what comes does not come from the side but from above — not a direction that can be resisted.

It is rare for the Qurʾān to give a duration in its accounts of destruction. Generally the event is sudden and single: a cry, a thunderbolt, a shout. Here there is a counted span.

On the number itself. The count of nights is seven, of days eight. This is a count in which nights and days do not pair off, and the classical sources explain it in several ways:

The first two explanations complete one another and are arithmetically sound. I transmit them; I do not impose a preference.

No reckoning is done on the numbers. As is recorded in Method, claims of the number-and-letter-reckoning kind are not used in this commentary. I draw no meaning from the figures seven and eight. The one thing I record is this: compared with its neighbours, this sūra is dense in numbers — seven nights, eight days (7), eight (17), seventy cubits (32). I note this as a feature of style, not as a sign.

What the duration does. The real matter is not the number but that there is a duration at all.

In a sudden destruction a people does not grasp what is happening. In a destruction lasting eight days a people watches its own annihilation. The wind comes on the first day, continues on the second, is still blowing on the third. At some point it becomes clear that it will not stop.

What the sūra does here is to take destruction out of being a moment and make it a process. And this accords with the whole logic of the sūra: al-Ḥāqqa is a piece of news turning out true; and turning out true does not happen at a stroke, it happens by being understood.

I record this as my own reading. Its support in the text is that the duration is explicitly counted.

Root: ح-س-م. The concrete sense of the root is to cut off, to bring definitively to an end. Its derivatives:

• حَسَمَ ٱلْأَمْرَ — he settled the matter definitively, he closed the dispute. English carries the same logic: to decide a matter is, at the root of the word, to cut it off.
• حَاسِم — decisive, determining, putting an end to dispute.
• حَسْم ٱلْعِرْق — the cauterising of a vein. In classical medicine a wound is seared with hot iron to stop bleeding; the operation is repeated again and again until the bleeding is wholly cut off. This is the concrete example the lexicographers themselves give.

The word's position in the grammar is disputed:

All three are transmitted in the classical sources. The difference between the first and the second is meaningful:

• On the first reading ḥusūm describes the unbrokenness of the span: the days are joined one to the next with no gap between.
• On the second reading ḥusūm describes the root-cutting character of the destruction: it leaves nothing behind.

The two combine into a single image, and that image lies in the concrete sense of the root: cauterising. Cauterising is both repeated (unbroken) and terminating (cutting to the root). The word gathers the two senses into a single act.

I record this as an observation about the language. The sense "cauterising" is recorded in the lexicons; the interpretation that the two grammatical solutions meet in this single image is mine.

And the next verse supports the second reading: "Do you see any remnant of them?" The sūra asks besides, that is, whether the destruction left anything behind. The sense of ḥusūm as "cutting to the root" ties directly to the question of the eighth verse.

The telling turns here once more to the second person singular: fa-tarā — "you see".

And the verb is in the imperfect. Not "you saw" but "you see". The event happened centuries ago; the verb stands in the present.

Recounting a past event with the imperfect is called in Arabic ḥikāyat al-ḥāl, and its function is to bring the scene before the eye. English does it too: "So he walks in, and the place is empty." The shift of tense takes the event out of being something narrated and makes it something watched.

Here the sūra takes the one addressed to the scene. And in the next verse it will make him look for something there: "Do you see any remnant of them?"

The seventh and eighth verses thus build a scene together: the one addressed stands in the middle of the wreckage and looks about him.

Root: ص-ر-ع. Ṣaraʿahu — he threw him down, knocked him over, felled him. مُصَارَعَة — wrestling; two people trying to throw one another to the ground. مَصْرَع — the place of falling, the place of death.

صَرْعَىٰ is the plural of ṣarīʿ and is on the faʿlā metre. In Arabic this metre is generally used for the plurals of adjectives conveying calamity, illness and a collective condition: jarḥā (the wounded), qatlā (the slain), marḍā (the sick), asrā (the captives). Even the pattern of the word, that is, conveys a collective disaster.

And the choice of verb matters. The verse does not say "they died", does not say "they perished". It says "they were thrown down."

The association with wrestling is at work here: to be thrown down is the outcome of a contest. The people had made a claim to strength — the Qurʾān records it elsewhere: "Who is stronger than we are?" (Fuṣṣilat 41/15). The sūra finishes them with the word belonging to the very field of strength they had claimed: they are on the ground like men who have lost a bout.

I record this as my own reading. The word's relation to wrestling is not disputed in Arabic; the link with ʿĀd's claim to strength is mine.

One of the strongest images in the Qurʾān, and it is built in three words.

أَعْجَاز — Root: ع-ج-ز. ʿAjuz is the hind part, the base, the last section of a body. In a palm tree the ʿajuz is the lower part of the trunk that remains, on the ground or standing, after the crown has been broken off: the stump.

From the same root: عَجْز — powerlessness, inability; عَاجِز — incapable. The link the lexicographers make between these two senses is this: the ʿajuz is the part that stays behind; what stays behind is what cannot get ahead; and what cannot get ahead is incapable. I transmit this explanation; I issue no firm judgement on the historical development of the root.

But which of the senses is at work in this verse is not in dispute: the stump.

نَخْل — the palm tree. It is a collective noun; its singular is nakhla.

Why the palm? Because in Arabia the palm is the tallest, the most durable and the most labour-demanding of trees, and it stands at the centre of the economy. Years pass before a palm bears fruit; once it bears, it bears for generations. A palm grove is a family's wealth.

The tree chosen, that is, is the tree of permanence and of wealth.

خَاوِيَة — Root: خ-و-ي. Hawā al-manzilu — the house emptied, no one was left in it. Hawā al-baṭnu — the belly emptied, it went hungry. The centre of the root is the emptying of the inside.

Its occurrences in the Qurʾān always give the same image:

• "…he passed by a town standing desolate, its roofs fallen in." (al-Baqara 2/259)
• "…their houses fallen in because of their wrongdoing." (al-Naml 27/52)
• "How many a town We destroyed while it was doing wrong; and now they stand utterly empty, their roofs fallen in." (al-Ḥajj 22/45)

Khāwiya, that is, is the Qurʾān's standard word for a settlement that has been destroyed. Here the same word is given not to a settlement but to people.

Now put the three words together: hollowed-out trunks of palm.

Let me itemise why the image is so powerful:

One — not the standing part but the fallen part. A palm tree has a crown: leaves, fruit, life. The ʿajuz is its exact opposite — the part without fruit, without leaves, without a crown. The people are described in the condition of a tree whose living part has gone and whose trunk remains.

Two — a fit of scale. A palm stump is about the same size as a human body lying down. The comparison works physically as well: a man lying on the ground looks like a trunk lying on the ground.

Three — the emptiness of the inside. And here is the lock of the comparison. From outside the stump looks sound: the bark in place, the trunk thick, the shape recognisable. But inside it has rotted and emptied. It stands as though upright, and falls apart at a touch.

The sūra is saying that the outside of a people remained while its inside had gone. And join this with the ʿātiya of two verses earlier: the raging wind laid flat what had already emptied within.

Four — the choice of tree. The palm is the tree of permanence. A people that claimed permanence is likened to the dead part of the tree of permanence.

The first three of these four items follow from the lexical senses of the words. The fourth, and the general reading, are mine; I do not present them as transmitted.

The same image is used once more in the Qurʾān, of the same people — and a single word changes:

"[The wind] was tearing people away as though they were trunks of palm torn up by the roots." (al-Qamar 54/20)

Let us set the two verses side by side:

The two verses show two moments of the same event. Al-Qamar is in the middle of it: the wind is still blowing, people are being torn away. Al-Ḥāqqa is at the end of it: the wind has passed, and there are bodies on the ground.

And the attributes have been chosen accordingly. What is seen at the moment of uprooting is the root (munqaʿir); what is seen after the uprooting is over is the inside (khāwiya). You only learn that a tree is hollow within after it has come down.

I record this comparison as my own reading. The wordings of the two verses and the senses of the two attributes are, for their part, data that can be verified.

One further note. The verb at al-Qamar 54/20 is تَنزِعُ, from the root ن-ز-ع: to pull out and tear away. This root is taken up in this commentary in the section on Sūrat al-Maʿārij (nazzāʿatan li'sh-shawā, 70/16). The same root, that is, names in one place the wind that tears ʿĀd from its place and in another the work of the fire. I shall return to this link between two neighbouring sūras in the section on al-Maʿārij.

Fa-hal tarā lahum min bāqiya "Do you see any remnant of them?"

This is the sūra's second question; but it is of an altogether different kind from the question in the third verse.

• Verse 3: "And what made you know what al-Ḥāqqa is?" — a question that cannot be answered. The knowledge of the one addressed does not reach that far.
• Verse 8: "Do you see any remnant of them?" — a question whose answer lies with the one addressed himself. He need only look.

The sūra places the two questions deliberately in different places. The first is about the future and cannot be answered. The second is about the past, and its answer is plain: no.

And here the evidential structure of the sūra becomes visible. It supports the unanswerable question (the resurrection) with a question whose answer is known (the destructions of the past).

هَلْ is an interrogative particle in Arabic; but here it asks no real question. The grammarians call this use a rhetorical question of denial: a negation framed as a question. "Do you see?" = "You do not see."

The difference is this, and it was recorded in the section on al-Māʿūn as well: a plain statement gives information; a question draws the one addressed into the matter. Had it been said "nothing remained of them", the hearer would have heard it and passed on. When a question is asked, he is obliged to look for himself.

And there was a place for him to look. As was recorded in the sections on al-Shams and al-Fajr, the Mecca-Syria caravan route passed through the homelands of destroyed peoples; the ruins were there to be seen. The question is not an abstract one.

مِّن بَاقِيَةٍ — the min here is redundant (zāʾida), and its function is totality: to make the negation general.

The same phenomenon was treated in the section on al-Ṭāriq: "mā lahu quwwatun" = "he has no strength"; "mā lahu min quwwatin" = "he has not any strength".

So too here: the question is not "do you see a remnant?" but "do you see any remnant at all?" The particle opens the scope of the negation to its limit.

Root: ب-ق-ي. Baqā — to remain, to last, to continue. ٱلْبَاقِى — that which is lasting.

The word's grammatical position is disputed, like the other fāʿila words of the sūra:

All three have been maintained in the classical sources and the practical difference between them is limited. The third reading is the most comprehensive and accords best with the totalising function of min: without specifying a kind, the sūra sweeps away everything.

Verse seven: fa-tara'l-qawma fīhā ṣarʿā — "you see the people there laid low." Verse eight: fa-hal tarā lahum min bāqiya — "do you see any remnant of them?"

The same verb, in two consecutive verses. In the first the one addressed sees something: bodies laid out. In the second he looks for something and does not find it.

And the distance between the two seeings is time. The seventh verse is the immediate aftermath of the event; the eighth verse is today. In the first there are corpses; in the second there is nothing at all.

In two steps, that is, the sūra does this: it shows the destruction, and then it shows the permanence of the destruction. That a people is wiped out is an event; that nothing at all remains of that people is a result.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the use of the same verb in two consecutive verses from two different perspectives in time.

The wording of the verse is absolute. But the Qurʾān itself records in many places that among the destroyed peoples those who believed were saved: "Until, when Our command came and the oven boiled over…" (Hūd 11/40); and for ʿĀd: "We saved Hūd and those who believed with him by Our mercy" (al-Aʿrāf 7/72).

The classical explanation is this: the subject of the verse is those who were destroyed, not those who were saved. The pronoun "of them" refers back to those who overstepped and denied. Those who were saved stand outside the destruction to begin with.

This explanation fits the text and creates no contradiction within the Qurʾān. I content myself with recording it.

Wa jāʾa Firʿawnu wa man qablahu wa'l-muʾtafikātu bi'l-khāṭiʾa · Fa-ʿaṣaw rasūla rabbihim fa-akhadhahum akhdhatan rābiya "And Pharaoh, and those before him, and the overturned cities brought the offence. They disobeyed the messenger of their Lord, and He seized them with a mounting seizure."

The verb is جَاءَ (he came), made transitive by the particle bāʾ: jāʾa bi- = he brought.

This is an ordinary construction in Arabic; but its being chosen is meaningful. The verse does not say "they committed an offence" or "they did wrong". It says "they brought the offence."

To bring is to carry something from one place to another. The offence, that is, is depicted as an object carried and set down before us. And it is counted who brought it: Pharaoh, those before him, the overturned cities. Three separate parties bringing the same load.

I record this as an observation about word order.

The expression is indeterminate, and it has two readings:

The existence of the variant reading is recorded in the sources. Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I give no name.

The first reading is the more widespread and fits the movement of the sūra better: the sūra is making a list and completes the list by saying "and those before him". Everything not enumerated is covered by a single expression.

Root: أ-ف-ك. And this root makes one of the most striking verbal links in the Qurʾān.

The concrete sense of the root is to turn, to turn inside out, to turn a thing from the direction it faced to another. It has two great branches:

First branch — physical overturning:

• ٱئْتَفَكَ (Form VIII) — it was overturned, it was turned upside down.
• ٱلْمُؤْتَفِكَة — a place overturned.

Second branch — the turning of speech:

• إِفْك (ifk) — slander, fabrication, a lie. The exact sense of the word: speech turned from the direction of truth.
• أَفَّاك — one who fabricates much falsehood. "Woe to every sinful liar" (al-Jāthiya 45/7).
• مَأْفُوك — one whose mind has been turned about.

And the Qurʾān reserves the most famous use from the second branch for an episode of accusation: "Those who brought the ifk are a group among you" (al-Nūr 24/11).

Now let us make the link.

In Arabic, to lie is to turn speech. A lie is to take something true and change its direction; the word itself carries that movement.

And the same root is used for the overturning of cities: al-muʾtafikāt — settlements turned about, turned upside down.

What stands in this verse, therefore, is this: the cities of those who turned speech were themselves turned.

I record this link as a linguistic datum lying in the root of the words — the shared root is not in dispute and is recorded in the lexicons. The conclusion I draw from the relation between the two senses is my own; I ascribe it to no exegete.

And there is a support inside the sūra as well. The word at the end of the same verse is ٱلْخَاطِئَة — an offence, a deliberate sin. And in the root sense of khāṭiʾa too there is a deviation: خ-ط-أ, to miss the mark, to swerve from what is right. There are two words in the verse, that is, and both are words of direction: one conveys a turning, the other a missing.

Al-Muʾtafikāt is plural, and the singular occurs in the Qurʾān too: "And the overturned city He cast down" (al-Najm 53/53).

In the classical sources and among the majority of the exegetes it is said that what is meant is the cities of the people of Lot. The ground is the Qurʾān's own expression:

"When Our command came, We turned it upside down and rained upon it stones of baked clay." (Hūd 11/82)

The expression there is "jaʿalnā ʿāliyahā sāfilahā" — "We made its top its bottom". The physical inversion of the city is stated outright, that is. Read as the name of this event, al-muʾtafikāt fits exactly.

In another verse the people of Lot and the people of Midian are named side by side and al-muʾtafikāt occurs in the same list (al-Tawba 9/70). This shows that the word can cover more than one settlement.

What must be recorded: the Qurʾān gives neither the names of these cities, nor their number, nor their location. In the literature of transmitted reports and in later sources names and numbers are mentioned; I do not relay them, because they are not of the same degree of certainty as the text of the Qurʾān. This is the same note that was entered for Iram in the section on al-Fajr and for Thamūd in the section on al-Shams.

Root: خ-ط-أ. And here there is a critical distinction in Arabic:

The same root carries both the unintended mistake and the deliberate swerve. The shared core is failing to hit the mark; the difference lies in whether the failure is willed.

The use here is the second, and the ground is inside the verse itself: the verse says that they "brought" the offence. A thing that is brought cannot be unintended. And the next verse says "they disobeyed the messenger" — and disobedience requires intent.

Khāṭiʾa here, like the other fāʿila words of the sūra, is read as a verbal noun: "error, sin, wrong" — the act itself.

And the word will occur once more in the sūra: "None but those who offend eat it" (69/37) — there al-khāṭiʾūn is the plural active participle of the same root. What is brought in the ninth verse, that is, the sūra gives back to the bringers in the thirty-seventh: those who brought the offence will eat what the offence earns.

I record this link as a repetition of a word within the sūra; the two occurrences can be verified.

عَصَىٰ — Root: ع-ص-ي. An interesting root: from the same root comes عَصَا (ʿaṣā) — a staff, a rod.

The link the lexicographers make is this: the ʿaṣā is what holds gathered fibres together; and ʿiṣyān is to break away from the gathering. In Arabic the expression "to split the staff" (shaqqa'l-ʿaṣā) is used in the sense of breaking away from the community. I transmit this explanation; I do not present it as a settled etymological judgement.

The sense at work in the verse is plain: to go against a command.

The singular "messenger". The verse speaks of three separate parties (Pharaoh, those before him, the overturned cities) but of a single messenger: rasūla rabbihim — singular.

This is explained in two ways, and both are possible in the language:

• A singular used generically: "the messenger of each of them"; a singular noun in Arabic can convey a class.
• The shared message of the messengers: a separate messenger came to each, but what they brought was one; and so they are named as a single messenger.

The second explanation accords with the Qurʾān's own emphasis: the messengers differ, the call is one.

"The messenger of their Lord". The verse does not say "the messenger of God", it says "the messenger of their Lord". In the section on al-Fajr the eight occurrences in that sūra of the word Rabb in that sūra were set out in a table, and the word's burden of "nurture, care, ownership" was recorded.

Its function here is this: the authority rebelled against is not a foreign authority. It is the party that fed and raised them, that ordered their affairs. The rebellion is not against a stranger but against the one who cares for them.

And the pronoun is hum: rabbi-him — their Lord. The bond between the one who sent the messenger and those who rebel is made within the verse.

أَخْذَة — Root: أ-خ-ذ. To take, to hold, to seize. Here it comes as an absolute object (akhadhahum akhdhatan): the verb is reinforced by its own verbal noun.

In the sections on al-Qāriʿa and al-Inshiqāq the function of this construction was recorded: the absolute object conveys that the act took place fully. And here the verbal noun has taken an attribute as well, so that the quality of the act is specified.

In the Qurʾān أَخْذ is a settled verb for destruction:

• "So I seized them; and how was My retribution!" (al-Raʿd 13/32)
• "Such is the seizing of your Lord when He seizes the towns while they do wrong. His seizing is indeed painful and severe." (Hūd 11/102)

The image the verb carries is capture: the catching of something that flees. It carries the assumption of flight within it.

رَابِيَة — Root: ر-ب-و. And this root is the most loaded point of the verse.

The concrete sense of the root is to increase, to multiply, to swell, to rise:

• رَبَا — it increased, it swelled. "You see the earth barren; and when We send down water upon it, it stirs and swells." (al-Ḥajj 22/5)
• رَبْوَة — a hill, a raised place. "We settled them on a height." (al-Muʾminūn 23/50)
• رِبًا (ribā) — usurious increase. The exact sense of the word is "increase"; ribā is the increase added on top of the principal.

Rābiya, then, means "swelling, increasing, growing".

And that the word shares a root with ribā is striking.

The seizure described in the verse is a "mounting" seizure: one that passes the measure of the offence, that swells, that adds on top. And this is also the word the Qurʾān uses for ribā.

Can a link be made between these two uses? I think it can, but I record it as my own reading and with caution: what increases in the hand comes back increased in the requital. The Qurʾān itself frames this idea plainly elsewhere: "God wipes out ribā and makes the alms grow" (al-Baqara 2/276) — there too the same root works in two opposite directions.

I do not present this as a claim of wordplay. What I record is that the sense of the root is not in dispute in the lexicon, and that the Qurʾān uses the same root both for wealth that increases and for punishment that increases.

An alternative reading. Some exegetes explain rābiya as "severe, heavy"; this is a natural extension of "increasing" and does not go anywhere different in meaning.

These two verses close the historical part of the sūra, and they do it by giving a formula:

The offence was brought → the messenger was disobeyed → they were seized.

Three steps. And these three steps hold for the peoples enumerated earlier as well: Thamūd and ʿĀd also denied (4), and they too were destroyed (5-6).

The sūra, that is, first gave two examples in detail (Thamūd, ʿĀd — down to the duration of the wind), then reduced all the rest to a single formula. A passage from the particular to the rule.

And note: there is no name in the tenth verse. "They disobeyed, and He seized." Who they were no longer matters; what matters is the mechanism at work.

I record this as an observation about the structure; the ordering of the verses is in the text.

Innā lammā ṭagha'l-māʾu ḥamalnākum fi'l-jāriya "When the water overflowed, We carried you in the vessel that runs."

This verse has been mentioned three times already in this commentary — but always for the same reason, and always as a one-sentence witness:

• In the section on al-Baqara 2/15, for the concrete sense of the root ṭughyān: "The Qurʾān uses this word for the overflowing of water as well… Ṭughyān is not to be contained in one's vessel."
• In the sections on al-Shams 91/11 and al-Fajr 89/11, as the concrete ground on which the moral sense of the same root rests: "here the word carries no moral sense at all."

The verse's word, that is, has been used three times; the verse itself has never been treated. Now I shall do the reverse: I shall not repeat the analysis of the root, and shall look at what the verse does.

The root was analysed in the three sections named above. The only summary needed from here on is this: ط-غ-ي is a thing's crossing of its own limit; and the most concrete use of the word is water overflowing its vessel.

Now let us put this into the sūra. Six verses earlier the verse had used the word ٱلطَّاغِيَة from the same root:

The sūra uses the same root on two different planes six verses apart. And the order matters: first the moral sense (5), then the physical (11). The sūra gives the word's figurative use and then shows its origin.

I record this as my own reading. The shared root and the order of the two occurrences are, for their part, data that can be verified.

And something further follows from this. So far the sūra has enumerated three instruments of destruction, and all three are named by the same concept:

• Thamūd: ٱلطَّاغِيَة — that which crosses the limit.
• ʿĀd: عَاتِيَة — that which crosses the limit.
• The people of Noah: طَغَا ٱلْمَآءُ — water that crosses the limit.

Three peoples, three different calamities, one family of words. The sūra names destruction as an overflowing. And overflowing is exactly the name of what the peoples themselves did.

لَمَّا is a conditional particle conveying a time that has already come to pass. "When…". The difference is this: idhā is used for the future, lammā for the past. The verse gives, that is, not a forecast but a record.

This is the most striking word in the verse.

The verse does not say "We carried them". Nor does it say "We carried Noah". It says "We carried you" — to the one addressed, that is, to a listener in seventh-century Mecca.

Yet the one addressed was not there. The event happened thousands of years earlier.

The classical explanations:

The second explanation is the most widespread and is supported by the Qurʾān's own wording: "…you who are of the offspring of those We carried with Noah!" (al-Isrāʾ 17/3) — there the ones addressed are named directly as "the children of those who were carried".

But quite apart from the explanation, what the expression does is plain.

The sūra makes a leap in time here. For nine verses there were peoples recounted in the third person: they denied, they were destroyed. Up to the tenth verse the one addressed was a spectator.

In the eleventh verse the one addressed enters the scene — and on the side not of those destroyed but of those saved.

This rearranges the whole historical part of the sūra. Until now the one addressed had been listening to "what happened to them"; now he learns that he too is inside that story, but in the other pan of the balance. He is the descendant of one who was carried.

And this prepares the demand of the next verse: "and that a retaining ear might retain it." It is intelligible that one who is himself the descendant of someone saved should be asked to remember the event.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the shift of pronoun in the text: nine verses in the third person, then suddenly the second person plural.

A note on grammar. The verb is ḥamalnā — the plural of majesty (taʿẓīm). And this is the first place in the sūra where God speaks of Himself in the first person. In the fifth and sixth verses the passive was used (uhlikū — "they were destroyed"), and the agent was not named. In the seventh verse sakhkharahā — third person. In the tenth akhadhahum — third person. In the eleventh, for the first time: "We."

The sūra, that is, declares its agent in the verb of saving. While destroying, the agent was concealed; while carrying, it was declared.

I record this as an observation about word order. The distribution of the pronouns can be counted in the text.

Root: ج-ر-ي. Jarā — to flow, to run, to go swiftly. جَارِيَة is an active participle, feminine: the one that flows, the one that runs.

The word means a ship — but it is not the word for ship. The proper words for ship in Arabic are safīna and fulk, and both occur in the Qurʾān: "…when they boarded the ship…" (al-Kahf 18/71); "We revealed to Noah that he should build the ship" (Hūd 11/37).

Here the sūra uses neither. It says ٱلْجَارِيَة: "the one that runs."

Why?

One reason is the verse-ending: the dominant sound of the sūra is -iya, and al-jāriya fits that sound; al-safīna or al-fulk would not. This is a fact that must be recorded, and it explains part of the choice of word.

But it is not merely a matter of sound. The sense the word carries pairs with the other half of the verse:

The water overflows; the vessel runs. Both are in motion. The verse does not set a fixed refuge against the overflowing water; it sets there something that shares the same movement.

A ship saves not by standing against the water but by going along with it. A fixed structure collapses before a flood; a floating structure rises.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the sense of the two words and their occurrence in the same sentence.

The other uses of the root in the Qurʾān show the word's field:

• ٱلْجَوَارِ — the ones that run. "His too are the running ships in the sea, like mountains" (al-Raḥmān 55/24); "And among His signs are the ships running in the sea like mountains" (al-Shūrā 42/32).
• جَنَّٰتٍ تَجْرِى مِن تَحْتِهَا ٱلْأَنْهَٰرُ — "gardens beneath which rivers flow." One of the most frequently repeated constructions in the Qurʾān.
• ٱلْجَوَارِ ٱلْكُنَّس — used at al-Takwīr 81/16 of the heavenly bodies; it was treated in that section.

The same root, that is, names in the Qurʾān the ship that goes on the water, the river that flows in the garden and the body that moves in the sky. The single idea the root carries is the continuity of movement.

And now one of the most concrete internal links in this sūra.

The root ح-م-ل (to carry) occurs three times in this sūra, and the object of the three occurrences is entirely different each time:

Three verses, one root. And the three rise in scale: a shipload of people → the earth and the mountains → the Throne.

In all three, moreover, the carrier changes: in the first God carries; in the second the carrier is not named (passive); in the third the carrying is done by a body whose number is given and whose kind is not.

I record this as a verifiable internal weave of the sūra; the shared root and the wording of the three verses are not in dispute. The interpretation that the weave constitutes an order and rises in scale is mine.

And I draw a conclusion from it, which I likewise record as my own reading: the sūra uses the verb "to be carried" for the salvation of man. In this sūra man does not carry himself; he is carried. He was carried in the ark, he will be brought forward at the reckoning, his book will be given to him. Most of the verbs are passive. The same observation was recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa: to be weighed is for one who cannot carry his own weight to be left to another's measure.

Li-najʿalahā lakum tadhkiratan wa taʿiyahā udhunun wāʿiya "That We might make it a reminder for you, and that a retaining ear might retain it."

The لِـ at the head is the lām of causation: it conveys cause and purpose. The carrying of the eleventh verse, that is, was done not for its own sake but for this.

This is a striking sentence. What is given as the ground of an act of rescue is not the rescued themselves but being remembered. The purpose of the event, that is, is something that continues after the event is over.

Root: ذ-ك-ر. To remember, to call to mind, to mention.

The word has occurred in several places in this commentary; it was treated by way of dhikr and mudhakkir in the sections on al-Aʿlā and al-Ghāshiya. I do not repeat that here. The one thing that must be recorded is the pattern: tadhkira is on the tafʿila metre and conveys a verbal noun — the act of reminding itself, or the thing that reminds.

And this word occurs twice in this sūra:

The sūra names two different things with the same word: an event and a text.

This link explains the structure of the sūra. The first part (1-12) recounts history and ends by calling it a tadhkira. The third part (38-52) defends the text and defines it as a tadhkira. Two things that do the same work: an event that happened and a speech that is recited.

And the difference between them is stated in the forty-second verse: "How little you reflect" — qalīlan mā tadhakkarūn, the same root. The sūra uses this root in three places, then: a reminder was given (12), it is not remembered (42), and it is a reminder all the same (48).

I record this as a weave of words within the sūra; the three occurrences can be verified.

As was recorded in the section on ʿAbasa, the Qurʾān calls itself a tadhkira in many places (al-Muzzammil 73/19, al-Muddaththir 74/54, and verse 48 of this sūra). The text, that is, gives here to a flood the name it has chosen for itself.

Root: و-ع-ي. This root was treated in detail in the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/23, and this verse was already mentioned there. Rather than repeat the findings there, I summarise them:

• The concrete centre of the root is an object: وِعَاء — a vessel, a sack, a thing into which something is put. At Yūsuf 12/76 the word is plainly a baggage sack.
• وَعَىٰ — to hold in the mind as one puts a thing into its vessel, to retain.
• أَوْعَىٰ (Form IV) — to fill a vessel, to store up.
• The conclusion recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq: "a good ear is an ear that takes in what it hears and keeps it"; and "the vessel is not empty, it is only not full of the right thing."

There are three things I need to add here.

One — three vessels. When the three uses of the root in the Qurʾān are set side by side, a table emerges, and this table joins three separate sections of this commentary:

Three verses, three vessels. And two of them are next door to this sūra: al-Maʿārij comes immediately after al-Ḥāqqa in the arrangement of the codex. Two neighbouring sūras use the same root and put two different things into the vessel: the one a reminder, the other wealth.

I shall return to this link in the section on al-Maʿārij. What I record here is the shared root, and that is not in dispute. The interpretation that the three verses form a weave is mine.

Two — why is the ear singular and indefinite?

The verse does not say "ears", nor "their ears". أُذُنٌ — an ear. Singular and indefinite.

And compare it with the preceding clause: "that We might make it a tadhkira for you" — there the address is plural (lakum). Here it is singular.

The reminder, that is, has been given to everyone; the retaining has been left to individual persons.

The indefiniteness may have a further function here. As was recorded in the sections on al-Qāriʿa and al-Ikhlāṣ, indefiniteness sometimes conveys magnification and sometimes fewness. Read as fewness, the sense here becomes: "let at least one ear retain this" — few in number, but even one is enough.

I record this reading as a possibility; I do not present it as certain.

Three — why the ear and not the eye?

The sūra had just used the verb of seeing twice (fa-tarā, fa-hal tarā, 7-8). Now it moves to the ear.

The reason may be this: what is to be seen is wreckage, and wreckage passes. The seventh and eighth verses had already said as much: you look, and nothing is left. Sight depends on a source that does not last.

News, on the other hand, is carried by the ear and handed on from generation to generation. Even after the wreckage of an event has disappeared, the report of it remains.

In the twelfth verse, that is, the sūra changes the channel of transmission: from a witness resting on the eye to a handing-on resting on the ear. And this transition prepares the sūra's last part in advance — because what will be disputed there (38-52) is precisely this: the source of a speech that comes to the ear.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the move, within two verses, from the verb of seeing to the organ of hearing.

The idea of the ear's "holding" is framed elsewhere in the Qurʾān too, and generally by way of its negative:

• "They have hearts with which they do not understand; they have eyes with which they do not see; they have ears with which they do not hear." (al-Aʿrāf 7/179)
• "In their ears there is a heaviness." (Fuṣṣilat 41/44)

Everyone has the organ, that is; not everyone has its function. Al-Ḥāqqa 69/12 says the same thing from the positive side: there is an ear that retains.

And this ties to the forty-ninth verse of the sūra: "We know full well that among you there are deniers." From beginning to end, that is, the sūra assumes that its audience is divided: there is an ear that retains, and there are also deniers.

In the section on al-Inshiqāq an application was made by way of this verse, and I do not repeat it. The one thing I shall add here is that the verse is a sentence of purpose.

The verse says this: the reason an event happens is that it be remembered.

This yields a practical consequence for the way we look at history. The meaning of an event is not exhausted at the moment it occurs; it continues as long as it is handed on. And what is chosen as the carrier of that handing-on is not an institution, a monument or a record: it is an ear.

Monuments fall, records are lost, institutions break up. The ear, meanwhile, is there afresh in every generation. But in every generation there must again be one that retains; the ear itself is not enough, its attribute is required.

Fa-idhā nufikha fi'ṣ-ṣūri nafkhatun wāḥida · Wa ḥumilati'l-arḍu wa'l-jibālu fa-dukkatā dakkatan wāḥida · Fa-yawmaʾidhin waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa "So when the ṣūr is blown with a single blast, and the earth and the mountains are lifted and beaten flat at a single stroke — on that day the befalling befalls."

The particle فَ here is critical. The twelfth verse ended with a purpose: "that it be remembered." The thirteenth verse begins with fāʾ: "So then…"

The sūra passes, that is, from the historical part to the part on the resurrection by a connective, not by a break. What happened in the past is framed as the entry to what will happen in the future.

And the particle إِذَا: as was recorded in the sections on al-Zalzala and ʿAbasa, idhā conveys a time whose coming is certain, while in (the conditional) conveys a possibility. The sūra sets the resurrection not as a condition but as a time.

Root: ص-و-ر. There are two readings of what the word is:

The first reading is the reading of the majority and accords better with the structure of the verb: nufikha fī'ṣ-ṣūr — "it was blown into the ṣūr". Blowing into a form would call for a different construction.

The Qurʾān moreover associates the ṣūr with a sound and speaks of that sound's being heard. I content myself with recording this; the disagreement makes no great difference to the sense, because on either reading what is described is the same: the dead and the whole order set in motion by a signal.

I do not speak about the nature of the thing. What the ṣūr is, what sort of thing it is, who blows it, are not detailed in the Qurʾān. There are details in the literature of transmitted reports; since I cannot judge their soundness, I do not relay them.

نَفْخَة — the coming of nafkha on the faʿla metre conveys in Arabic a single occurrence (ḍarba — one blow, akla — one eating). The word itself, that is, already means "once".

And on top of that the attribute وَٰحِدَة (a single one) is added. The pattern already conveys singleness, and it is further reinforced by the attribute.

Why this emphasis?

Elsewhere the Qurʾān speaks of two blasts: "And the ṣūr is blown, and whoever is in the heavens and the earth falls dead, except whom God wills. Then it is blown again, and there they are, standing and looking on" (al-Zumar 39/68).

Is there a tension between that verse and al-Ḥāqqa 69/13? The classical explanation is this: the subject of al-Ḥāqqa is the moment of destruction, not the raising. The sūra is describing that moment, and that moment happens with a single blast. The question of two blasts is the subject of another verse.

This explanation fits the text. But the real question is why singleness is emphasised, and the answer to that is in the next verse:

Root: د-ك-ك. This root was treated in detail in the section on al-Fajr 89/21: to beat, to crush flat, to level a rise to the ground; dakka — a flat hilltop; the occurrences at al-Aʿrāf 7/143 and al-Kahf 18/98. I do not repeat it.

In the section on al-Fajr a tension involving this verse was also recorded, and no firm judgement was issued there:

In the section on al-Fajr three solutions were proposed and left open: (a) the two verses may describe different phases of the event; (b) al-Ḥāqqa may be emphasising the decisiveness of the blow and al-Fajr its intensity; (c) if the repetition in al-Fajr is read as circumstantial, the tension disappears of itself.

I do not reopen that discussion here, and I preserve the suspension of judgement given there. The one thing I need to add here is the function of singleness within al-Ḥāqqa — because that was not taken up in the section on al-Fajr.

The word وَٰحِدَة occurs in this sūra in two consecutive verses:

• Verse 13: nafkhatun wāḥida — a single blast.
• Verse 14: dakkatan wāḥida — a single stroke.

And both words stand in the same place: at the verse-ending. The sūra pairs the two verses both by word and by sound.

I read the work of this repetition as follows — and I record it as my own reading:

Until now the sūra has recounted destructions as processes. ʿĀd was destroyed over seven nights and eight days. For the people of Noah the water rose, the ark was built, it overflowed. For Pharaoh and those before him a mechanism was described. In the historical part everything had a duration.

Now the duration falls to zero: one blast, one stroke.

The difference between the two parts of the sūra, that is, is not scale but speed. The destructions of the past were small and slow; this one is great and sudden. And the twofold repetition of the word "a single" carries that suddenness into the rhythm of the text.

Its ground is the contrast between the counted duration of the seventh verse (seven nights, eight days) and the singleness of these two verses; both are in the text.

This expression needs pausing over, because it is unusual.

In the Qurʾān's scenes of the resurrection the mountains generally undergo their change in place: they are set moving (al-Ṭūr 52/10), they are scattered (Ṭāhā 20/105), they become like carded wool (al-Qāriʿa 101/5), they turn to dust (al-Wāqiʿa 56/6).

Here, though, the mountains are lifted — and not the mountains alone but the earth as well. The two rise into the air together, and are then beaten.

The choice of verb builds this image. Ḥumilat — "it was carried, it was lifted." And then dukkatā — "the two were beaten." The verb is in the dual: the earth and the mountains, as two subjects, are beaten together.

The image is this: to crush a thing you first lift it, then strike. Or, to beat with a hammer, you first set the thing on an anvil. The verse gives the two movements one after the other: lifting, striking.

And note: the earth is the ground one stands on. At al-Baqara 2/22 it was called firāsh (a bed); at al-Ghāshiya 88/20 suṭiḥat (it was spread out). As was recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa, those words convey not the shape of the earth but its function: that it can be stood upon.

Here that function is removed. The thing that is stood upon is lifted away.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the sense of the verb and the order of the two verbs.

And the third occurrence of the root ح-م-ل is here. In the eleventh verse God carried human beings; here the earth and the mountains are carried. The same verb: the one to save, the other to beat.

One of the densest sentences in the sūra, and it is three words.

Root: و-ق-ع. Waqaʿa — it fell, it occurred, it came to pass. The concrete sense of the root is falling: a thing's coming down from above and touching the ground. Wāqiʿa is an active participle: that which falls, that which comes to pass.

ٱلْوَاقِعَة is one of the names of the resurrection in the Qurʾān and is the name of sūra 56. The aspect recorded for it in the table of the names of the resurrection in the section on al-Qāriʿa was this: "the inevitability of its coming to pass."

The structure of the sentence: the verb and its subject are from the same root. Waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa — "the falling fell", "what happens happened". In Arabic this is called ishtiqāq (the use together of derivatives of a single root), and it conveys reinforcement.

It is hard to carry into English. The nearest: "The befalling befell."

And note: the verb is in the perfect. Waqaʿat — "it happened", past tense. Yet the event lies in the future.

Recounting in the perfect something that will certainly happen in the future is a settled device in Arabic and conveys certainty: the event is so certain that it is told as though it had happened. In the section on al-Humaza the same phenomenon was recorded for the verb akhlada — but there the certainty was in the mind not of the speaker but of the one who supposes. Here the certainty is the speaker's.

The link with the name of the sūra. Now read the sentence together with the sūra's title:

• 69/1: ٱلْحَآقَّة — that which will come true.
• 69/15: وَقَعَتِ ٱلْوَاقِعَةُ — that which was to come to pass came to pass.

The fifteenth verse is the answer to the first. The sūra reports that the thing it named "that which comes true" has come true. Two different roots (ح-ق-ق and و-ق-ع) but one idea: a claim's finding its place.

And the name al-Qāriʿa had occurred in the fourth verse. The sūra names the resurrection by three names, then, and uses all three in three separate tasks: itself (1-3), the thing denied (4), the thing that comes to pass (15).

I record this as my own reading. The distribution of the three names within the sūra is, for its part, a datum that can be verified.

Wa'nshaqqati's-samāʾu fa-hiya yawmaʾidhin wāhiya "And the sky is split; on that day it is slack and sagging."

Root: ش-ق-ق. This root was treated in detail in the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/1, and this verse appeared there in the table of its occurrences in the Qurʾān; the assessment given there was "coming undone". I do not repeat it.

What needs to be added here is the second half of the verse — because Sūrat al-Inshiqāq begins with the splitting of the sky and then goes off in another direction, whereas al-Ḥāqqa adds an attribute after the split sky.

Root: و-ه-ي. Wahā / yahī — to go slack, to come undone, to sag, to lose its strength.

The concrete uses of the root in Arabic:

• وَهَى ٱلْحَبْلُ — the rope slackened, its fibres came apart, it is about to break.
• وَهَى ٱلسِّقَاء — the waterskin tore, its seam opened, it leaks.
• وَاهٍ — worn out, aged, no longer holding.

Wāhiya, that is, conveys not a hard fracture but the undoing of a fabric. The fibres of a cloth parting, a rope unravelling, a seam bursting.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here.

A note. Arabic also has the root و-ه-ن, and it too conveys weakness ("Truly the frailest of houses is the spider's house", al-ʿAnkabūt 29/41; "The bone has grown weak", Maryam 19/4). The two roots are close in sound and their semantic fields overlap. But they are separate roots, and I draw no meaning from this closeness of sound. The same note was entered in the section on al-Aʿlā for ص-ل-ي and ص-ل-و, and in the section on al-Ṭāriq for ق-ر-ع and ط-ر-ق.

Now let us look at the choice of word, because there is a real choice here.

The Qurʾān describes the state of the sky at the resurrection with many words:

Most of the words in the list convey a hard and sudden operation: stripping, splitting, rolling. Wāhiya is none of these: it is a loss of strength.

And this stands in contrast with the other words the Qurʾān uses in describing the sky:

• "And We built above you seven strong [heavens]." (al-Nabaʾ 78/12) — shidād, strong.
• "And We made the sky a roof kept safe." (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/32)
• "Do you see in it any flaw?" (al-Mulk 67/3) — fuṭūr.

Al-Mulk 67/3 is especially important, because there the same question is asked and answered in the negative: there is no crack in the sky, no slackness. Al-Ḥāqqa 69/16 turns that answer over.

The choice of word says this, then: the very emblem of soundness loses its soundness. It does not merely collapse; it no longer holds.

I record this as my own reading. The senses of the words and the list of verses are, for their part, data that can be verified.

Note: the verse has two parts, and the grammar of the two parts differs.

• وَٱنشَقَّتِ ٱلسَّمَآءُ — a verbal sentence, perfect. An event.
• فَهِىَ يَوْمَئِذٍ وَاهِيَةٌ — a nominal sentence with an active participle as predicate. A state.

In Arabic a verbal sentence conveys occurrence, a nominal sentence permanence (thubūt). This distinction has been recorded several times in this commentary (al-Māʿūn 107/5-6, al-Takwīr 81/19).

The verse does this, then: the splitting happens once; the slackness remains as the settled state of that day. After the sky is split, it does not right itself.

And yawmaʾidhin (on that day), coming in between, fixes this in time as well.

Wa'l-malaku ʿalā arjāʾihā; wa yaḥmilu ʿarsha rabbika fawqahum yawmaʾidhin thamāniya "And the angels are upon its edges. On that day eight [beings] bear the Throne of your Lord above them."

ٱلْمَلَك is singular, yet "upon its edges" conveys a plural distribution. In Arabic it is ordinary for a collective noun to be used in the singular with a plural sense; the same phenomenon was recorded at al-Fajr 89/22 (wa'l-malaku ṣaffan ṣaffā).

And there is a link between the two verses: in al-Fajr the angels were drawn up rank on rank; in al-Ḥāqqa they stand at the edges. Two different dispositions, two different scenes.

Root: ر-ج-و. Rajā — the edge or rim of a thing; it is used especially of the mouth of a well and of the slope of a valley. Its plural is أَرْجَاء.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here.

A note. From the same letters comes the word رَجَاء (rajāʾ — hope), and the lexicographers differ over whether the two are one root or two homonymous roots. I do not enter into this disagreement and I draw no meaning from the shared sound; I merely record it. The same note was entered for the root ح-م-ي in the section on al-Qāriʿa.

The sense at work in the verse is not in dispute: edges.

The image is this: the sky has been split, its fabric has gone slack, it is no longer a whole. And the angels stand at its edges. At the rim, that is, of a structure that is coming apart.

The pronoun hā (its) refers back to the sky — the subject of the preceding verse.

And one of the most discussed words in the sūra.

The verse gives a number and does not say what is numbered.

In Arabic, when a number occurs, the maʿdūd (the thing numbered) follows: thamāniyata ayyām (eight days — in the seventh verse of this sūra). Here there is no maʿdūd. Only ثَمَٰنِيَةٌ.

There is a grammatical clue. In Arabic numerals the rule of reversed gender agreement applies: numbers from three to ten come in the feminine form (with tāʾ) when what is numbered is masculine, and in the masculine form when it is feminine. Thamāniya has taken the tāʾ; the omitted maʿdūd is therefore masculine.

This points to the word's being malak (masculine) or some similar noun — and indeed al-malak has already occurred at the head of the same verse.

This is a verifiable grammatical datum. But it does not settle what the eight are.

The classical explanations:

The first view is the most widespread and fits the context best, since it is ordinary in Arabic for the maʿdūd to be understood from context, and the context lies within the verse itself.

But what really must be recorded is that the verse has not said the maʿdūd.

Here the sūra continues the stance of the third verse: "And what made you know what it is?" Information is given, but given incompletely. There is a number, and no thing numbered.

In the literature of reports details are transmitted about the shape, the size and the names of these angels. I do not relay them, because I cannot judge their soundness and they are not of the same degree of certainty as the text of the Qurʾān. This is the same note that was entered for Iram in the section on al-Fajr: "to relay them is, without one's noticing, to lend them a weight."

عَرْش — Root: ع-ر-ش. This root was treated in the section on al-Takwīr 81/20: its concrete sense is an arbour, a raised covered structure, a roof; and from there, a throne. ʿArīsh — a vine arbour; at al-Anʿām 6/141 maʿrūshāt (trellised gardens). I do not repeat it.

What was recorded in al-Takwīr was this: there the title ذِى ٱلْعَرْش (the Lord of the Throne) was chosen because the subject was a chain of authority.

Here it is not a title, but the construct is meaningful: ʿarsha rabbika — "the Throne of your Lord." A second person singular pronoun.

Here again the sūra turns to the one addressed (the fourth time, after the third, seventh and eighth verses). And the place of the turn looks deliberately chosen: at the most distant, least graspable point of the scene — while the bearing of the Throne is being described — the telling touches the shoulder of the one addressed: your Lord.

I record this as an observation about word order.

On the "bearing" of the Throne. This expression belongs to the same category as "your Lord comes" at al-Fajr 89/22: it is ambiguous (mutashābih). In the section on al-Fajr no theological side was taken on this matter, and the two main positions (tafwīḍ and taʾwīl) were given in a table. I keep the same stance here and do not repeat that table.

I record only this: both positions meet at al-Shūrā 42/11 ("There is nothing like Him"), and the verse's function within the sūra is the same on either position: to announce that the seat of judgement has been set up.

To whom does the pronoun hum refer? Two readings:

Both are possible in the language. The second reading connects more easily with the next verse: "On that day you are brought forward" — a seat above those who are brought forward.

I express no preference; neither reading runs against the text.

The table recorded at the eleventh verse is completed here:

• 69/11: God carried human beings (in the ark).
• 69/14: The earth and the mountains were carried (in order to be beaten).
• 69/17: Eight carry the Throne.

And in the third there is a reversal: in the first two carryings what was carried lay below; in the third what is carried is above.

I record this as my own reading.

Yawmaʾidhin tuʿraḍūna lā takhfā minkum khāfiya "On that day you are brought forward; nothing hidden of you stays hidden."

Root: ع-ر-ض. And this root carries the whole weight of the verse.

The concrete sense of the root is to set a thing crosswise, to spread it out before someone, to display it. ʿArḍ means "breadth" (the opposite of ṭūl, length). When you turn a thing broadside, its wide face comes towards you; it becomes visible.

Its derivatives show the field of the root:

• عَرْض ٱلْجَيْش — the review of an army. The soldiers drawn up in line and marched past the commander. It is one of the most concrete uses in Arabic and throws direct light on this verse.
• عَرَضَ عَلَيْهِ — he presented it to him, offered it, showed it.
• مَعْرِض — a place of exhibition. The idea of a "display".
• عَارِض — that which comes crosswise; a cloud stretching broadside across the horizon. It occurs in the Qurʾān: "When they saw it as a cloud coming broadside towards their valleys…" (al-Aḥqāf 46/24) — while the destruction of ʿĀd is being recounted.
• عَرَض — transient goods, the goods of this world. "You desire the transient goods of this world" (al-Anfāl 8/67); "the transient gain of the life of this world" (al-Nisāʾ 4/94).

Note the last item. The same root yields both being marched past in review and the goods of this world. The link the lexicographers make is this: ʿaraḍ is what does not last, what comes and goes — it passes before you, it does not stay in your hand.

In Arabic, that is, the goods of this world and being marched past come from the same root: both are transient. I record this as a linguistic datum; I issue no firm judgement on the historical development of the root.

The parallel uses in the Qurʾān make the scene of the verse clear:

• "And they are brought forward before your Lord in ranks: 'You have come to Us just as We created you the first time.'" (al-Kahf 18/48)
• "They are brought forward to the Fire, morning and evening." (Ghāfir 40/46)
• "On that day you are brought forward; nothing hidden of you stays hidden." (this verse)

The verb is passive. Tuʿraḍūna — "you are brought forward". The person does not show himself; he is shown. This is part of the sūra's series of passives and accords with the finding recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq: in these sūras there is little that man does with his own hand; in the scenes of the resurrection, it is done to him.

Root: خ-ف-ي. To hide, to cover, to conceal. And the sentence is of the ishtiqāq structure: verb and subject from the same root. "Nothing hidden stays hidden."

This is the same grammatical device as waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa in the fifteenth verse. The sūra uses this device twice, and both times at the densest moments of the scene of the resurrection.

مِنكُمْ — "of you". What is hidden, that is, is within you. The verse does not say "nothing stays hidden"; it says "nothing hidden of you stays hidden". The place of the hiddenness is specified: the person himself.

خَافِيَة is again on the fāʿila metre and can again be read in two ways: as a verbal noun ("a hiding") or as the attribute of an omitted noun ("a hidden thing"). Both come out at the same place.

A note on the variant readings. It is transmitted that the verb is also read in the يَخْفَىٰ (masculine) form. The sense does not change; the feminine of the word khāfiya is a matter of wording. Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I give no name.

This verse says the same thing as two verses treated earlier in this commentary — but all three say it with a different verb. Setting the three side by side shows how the reckoning is described:

In the sections on al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Ṭāriq these two verses were already compared, and this conclusion was recorded: "The one is separating, the other testing. Together they give two stages of a reckoning."

Al-Ḥāqqa adds a third stage, and that stage differs from the other two: here there is no operation.

In al-ʿĀdiyāt there is winnowing, in al-Ṭāriq wearing to the test. In al-Ḥāqqa nothing is done at all — the veil merely lifts. The verb is negative: "it does not stay hidden". What is conveyed, that is, is not an act but the impossibility of an act.

And this sets up a sequence among the three verses:

It is sifted out (al-ʿĀdiyāt) → it is tested (al-Ṭāriq) → it becomes visible (al-Ḥāqqa).

The first two are preparation, the third is the result. And what follows in al-Ḥāqqa shows what that result does: in the nineteenth verse people are divided in two.

I record this threefold comparison as my own reading. The link between al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Ṭāriq had already been made in the section on al-Ṭāriq; the third link is added by me. The wordings of the three verses and the senses of the roots are, for their part, data that can be verified.

One further observation, which I likewise record as my own reading.

In the twelfth verse the sūra had spoken of the ear: "a retaining ear." Now in the eighteenth it speaks of visibility.

The sūra sets up this sequence:

• In this world: the reminder comes, and an ear either retains it or does not. And this is an operation subject to choice — the verse says "an ear", after all, not "ears".
• On that day: everything is visible, and this is not subject to choice. The verb is passive, the verdict is a negation.

The distinction recorded in the section on al-Takāthur is exactly at work here: "Knowledge is a matter of choice; seeing is not. A person may choose not to know something… But he cannot choose not to see what is set before his eyes."

Al-Ḥāqqa frames the same distinction by way of two organs: the ear can choose, the eye cannot.

Fa-ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-yamīnihi fa-yaqūlu hāʾumu'qraʾū kitābiyah · Innī ẓanantu annī mulāqin ḥisābiyah "As for him who is given his book in his right hand, he says: 'Here, read my book! I did think that I would meet my reckoning.'"

Let us look first at the form of the text, because here the sūra lets go of the sound it has kept for eighteen verses.

From the first verse to the eighteenth the verse-ending was -iya. In the nineteenth verse the sound changes: كِتَٰبِيَهْ — kitābiyah.

And the new sound is built by a letter added at the end: هَاء ٱلسَّكْت (the hāʾ of pause). This letter was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa, and this was recorded there: the letter has no meaning, it is there for the preservation of the sound; and its densest use in the Qurʾān is in Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa.

Now let us see that density. The hāʾ of pause occurs in five places in the sūra, and all of them are inside these two scenes:

And note: ḥisābiyah in the twentieth verse is of the same structure, but there it is the one on the right who is speaking. There are six occurrences in all, then; two in the mouth of the man on the right, four in that of the man on the left.

What they have in common is this: they all end with the first person singular yāʾ — kitāb-ī, ḥisāb-ī, māl-ī, sulṭān-ī. "My book", "my reckoning", "my wealth", "my authority."

The density of the hāʾ of pause in this sūra is therefore no accident: here the sūra makes two men speak, and both of them say "my".

The hāʾ of pause comes in order to preserve the yāʾ at the end of the word. The sound that the grammar gives the sūra is thus precisely the sound of the possessive pronoun. The rhythm of the text carries the "my" that comes out of the two men's mouths.

I record this as my own reading. The function of the hāʾ of pause and the wording of the six occurrences are data that can be verified; the interpretation that the emphasis on "my" passes into the rhythm is mine.

The two scenes of the book were treated in detail in this commentary in the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/7-12. I do not repeat what was recorded there; in summary it was this:

• The passive form of the verb أُوتِىَ and the non-naming of the agent.
• بِيَمِينِهِ and its root ي-م-ن (yumn, blessing), and the settling of the right/left association in the Qurʾān.
• حِسَابًا يَسِيرًا (an easy reckoning) and the distinction between being brought forward and being argued with.
• The right-hand man's "returning to his people rejoicing", and the contrast of fī ahlihi / ilā ahlihi.
• The left-hand man's book being given from behind him, and the relation of that to the left in al-Ḥāqqa. In the section on al-Inshiqāq three explanations were given in a table for this relation and no preference was expressed. I preserve that suspension of judgement here and do not repeat the table.
• This too was recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq: the book given from the right is "visible, readable, showable", and this verse was adduced as the evidence for it.

Now I shall open out that evidence — because in the section on al-Inshiqāq it was passed over in a sentence.

The most human moment in the sūra, and it is built in two words.

هَآؤُمُ — in Arabic this is an ism fiʿl: a word that carries the sense of a verb without being conjugated as one. Its sense is "take!", "here you are!", "here, hold this!"

The structure of the word: hāʾ plus an ending inflected for the one addressed. To a single man hāʾa, to a single woman hāʾi, to a plural هَاؤُمُ. The مُ at the end of the word, that is, shows that the one addressed is plural.

ٱقْرَءُوا۟ — an imperative, and it too is plural.

Two words, two plural imperatives. The man is calling out to a crowd.

This carries the whole meaning of the scene.

Consider: the man is saved. His book has been given in his right hand. There is nothing left for him to do. And the first thing he does is to show his book to others.

The verse records the first reflex of salvation, and that reflex is not sharing or thanksgiving — it is showing.

How this should be read needs pausing over, because it is open to being read wrongly.

It is not presented as a fault. The sūra does not reproach the man; on the contrary, the rest of the sentence vindicates him ("I did think so all along") and his reward is described over three verses. The showing stands, that is, within a positive scene.

What, then, does it describe? To my mind this: joy is a feeling that is not completed alone. When a person rejoices he wants to tell someone; a joy not told stays incomplete. The verse records this human fact in the most extreme scene of all — even at a moment when the person has no other need left.

And Sūrat al-Inshiqāq had said the same thing with another word: "he returns to his people rejoicing" (84/9). There too the joy went towards someone.

Two sūras describe the same moment with two different behaviours. In al-Inshiqāq the man goes; in al-Ḥāqqa the man calls out.

I record this comparison as my own reading; the wordings of the two verses can be verified.

The real key is the comparison of these two scenes, and it must be made now, because it will come back in the twenty-fifth:

The most striking row is the second: joy looks for someone to address, regret does not.

The man on the left speaks for five verses and not once calls out to anyone. All his sentences are about himself: would that it had not been given to me, would that I had not known, would that it had made an end of me, my wealth has not availed me, my authority has gone.

And the last row is meaningful too: regret speaks more. Joy is over in two verses; regret runs for five. When there is nothing left to say a person stops speaking; when what he has to say is not finished, he goes on.

I record this comparison as my own reading. The counts of verses, the kinds of mood and the presence of an addressee are, for their part, data that can be counted in the text.

The man ascribes the book to himself: "my book."

Yet he did not write it. As was recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq, at al-Isrāʾ 17/13-14 the record is described as something "fastened to the neck", and the one who reads it is the person himself.

The expression "my book", that is, conveys not ownership but belonging: this record is the record of my life.

And the same word will occur six verses later in the mouth of the man on the left: "Would that my book had not been given to me" (25). Both men use the same word. They agree that the book is theirs; where they part is in whether they want to see it.

ظَنَنتُ — Root: ظ-ن-ن. This root was treated in the section on al-Baqara 2/46 and its two poles were compared in a table in the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/14. I do not repeat it; the summary is this:

• In Arabic the root can carry both a doubtful supposition and a firm conviction; in linguistics this is called contronymy.
• What is meant at al-Baqara 2/46 is certain knowledge, because the verse says it in praise.
• What is meant at al-Inshiqāq 84/14 is a groundless assumption, because the verse says it in reproach.
• The measure drawn in the section on al-Inshiqāq: "The Qurʾān does not censure supposition in itself. What it censures is the putting of an unproven assumption in the place of certain knowledge."

The use here is at the same pole as al-Baqara 2/46 — and in fact closer to it, because the wording is almost identical:

The two verses are the same sentence at two times. Al-Baqara describes the state in this world: these people "suppose" that they will meet Him. Al-Ḥāqqa gives the sentence at the moment that supposition comes true: "I did think so all along."

And the mood of the verb has changed accordingly: in al-Baqara the imperfect (a continuing conviction), in al-Ḥāqqa the perfect (a closed file).

I record this comparison as my own reading; the wordings of the two verses can, for their part, be verified.

The man has entered the Garden. He now possesses certain knowledge. And still he says "I thought".

The classical explanations:

The second explanation fits the framework this commentary has already built. The degrees of certainty were treated in the section on al-Takāthur, and what was recorded there was this: ʿilm al-yaqīn is knowledge reached by report and by proof, ʿayn al-yaqīn is the certainty of seeing with the eye.

The believer in this world stands, as regards the reckoning, at the rank of ʿilm al-yaqīn; he has his proof, he has his report, his conviction is firm — but he has not seen. The man names this rightly: "I thought."

And now he sees. The sentence, that is, describes the passage between two ranks: "what I have seen is what I thought."

I record this reading as a possibility; the note recorded in the section on al-Takāthur holds here as well: the degrees of certainty were turned into a systematic order of ranks in later periods, and the Qurʾān does not present it as a defined doctrine.

Root: ل-ق-ي. Liqāʾ — to meet, to encounter. An active participle of the مُفَاعَلَة form: mulāqī — one who meets reciprocally.

That the mufāʿala form conveys reciprocity was treated in the section on al-Māʿūn (yurāʾūn). The same pattern here: the man meets his reckoning — and the reckoning meets him.

And this changes the idea of "settling accounts". The reckoning is not an operation applied to a person; it is something that comes to meet him. A coming face to face.

In the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/6 the same root was treated: "you shall meet your Lord" (fa-mulāqīh). There what is met is the Lord; here what is met is the reckoning.

Fa-huwa fī ʿīshatin rāḍiya · Fī jannatin ʿāliya · Quṭūfuhā dāniya · Kulū wa'shrabū hanīʾan bimā aslaftum fi'l-ayyāmi'l-khāliya "He is in a life well pleased — in a lofty garden, its clusters hanging low. 'Eat and drink with relish, for what you paid in advance in the days now gone.'"

This expression is word for word the same as al-Qāriʿa 101/7 and was treated in detail there. I do not repeat it; in summary:

• عِيشَة is on the fiʿla metre, and this metre conveys the manner of doing: jilsa (a manner of sitting), mīta (a manner of dying). Not "life", that is, but "a manner of living".
• For رَاضِيَة three grammatical explanations were given (an active participle in a passive sense / an adjective of relation / a figurative attribution); none was presented as certainly correct.
• The particle فِى conveys enclosure: the person does not possess the life, he is inside it.
• This verse was already mentioned in the section on al-Qāriʿa: "The same expression word for word… In al-Ḥāqqa this sentence is said of the man whose book is given in his right hand. Two sūras recount the same end in the same words."

What is to be added here is this: the two sūras arrive at the same sentence by different roads.

The same concluding sentence, two different criteria. Al-Qāriʿa sets up a balance, al-Ḥāqqa opens a ledger. In the section on al-Ṭāriq the difference between these two sūras was already recorded: "Sūrat al-Qāriʿa set up a balance; here there is no balance… There is no scene of a book as in Sūrat al-Inshiqāq and Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa."

The Qurʾān, that is, recounts the same end in three separate languages of measurement: the scale (al-Qāriʿa), the record (al-Ḥāqqa and al-Inshiqāq), the assay (al-Ṭāriq). Three languages, one verdict.

I record this as my own reading. The languages of measurement of the three sūras are, for their part, plain in the text.

جَنَّة — Root: ج-ن-ن. To cover, to conceal. This root was treated in the sections on al-Baqara 2/25 and al-Takwīr 81/22: janīn, jinn, majnūn, mijann (a shield), janna (a garden whose trees cover the ground). I do not repeat it.

عَالِيَة — Root: ع-ل-و. To be high. And the word is again on the fāʿila metre; it fits the sound-weave of the sūra.

The height has two readings, and both occur in the classical sources:

The two do not conflict. And at al-Ghāshiya 88/10 the same word occurs in the same context: "in a lofty garden" (fī jannatin ʿāliya) — the identical construction.

قُطُوف — Root: ق-ط-ف. Qaṭafa — to pluck fruit from its branch, to gather it in. قِطْف is the cluster to be plucked or the fruit gathered; its plural is quṭūf.

The word comes, that is, from the verb to pluck. The fruit is named as "the thing to be plucked".

دَانِيَة — Root: د-ن-و. Danā — to draw near, to be near. The word dunyā is from this root too and was treated in the section on al-Aʿlā 87/16: al-dunyā means "the nearest one".

And there is a fine link here. Dunyā and dāniya are from the same root: both convey nearness. In one sūra nearness is the name of an error of choice ("you prefer the life of this world", al-Aʿlā 87/16); here the same nearness is a reward.

I record this as an observation about the language; the shared root is not in dispute. I claim no wordplay.

What the expression describes. In a garden the fruit is above; to gather it one must reach, bend, climb the tree or use an implement. Gathering fruit is work that costs effort.

The verse removes that effort: the fruits are low down. There is no need to reach.

And join it with the preceding verse: the garden is lofty (ʿāliya), its fruits are near (dāniya). Two opposite words in the same place:

The place itself is high, its produce low. Height, that is, does not remove the person from his produce.

I record this as my own reading. The senses of the two words and their standing one after the other are in the text.

Parallels within the Qurʾān: "And the fruit of the two gardens to be gathered is near" (al-Raḥmān 55/54); "Its shades hanging close over them, its fruits made low to their hand" (al-Insān 76/14).

The telling changes once again here: the twenty-fourth verse is direct speech. Who says it is not stated; but it is addressed to those in the garden in the plural imperative.

Both imperatives are plural. The address, that is, is not to one person but to a company. And this pairs with the "take, read" of the nineteenth verse: there a man called out to a crowd; here a crowd is called out to.

Root: ه-ن-أ. Hanīʾ — food that is easily digested, harmless, whose end is good. The equivalent of the English "may it do you good".

The idea the word carries is not merely pleasantness: it is leaving no harm behind. In Arabic, food that is hanīʾ is food that is agreeable in the eating and causes no distress afterwards.

Another place where it occurs in the Qurʾān makes this clear: "If of their own good will they give up some of it to you, then consume it with relish" (al-Nisāʾ 4/4) — there the word conveys that what is taken is lawful and easy on the conscience.

Hanīʾan, that is, includes not only the taste of eating but its lawfulness. And the next clause explains exactly this.

One of the most striking words in the sūra.

Root: س-ل-ف. Salafa — to pass, to come before, to go ahead. Its derivatives:

• سَلَف — what is left in the past, the preceding generation. The Turkish selef (one's predecessor in an office) is a borrowing of this same word.
• أَسْلَفَ (Form IV) — to send ahead, to send on in advance.
• ٱلسَّلَف / ٱلسَّلَم — in law, a kind of sale: payment now, delivery later. The buyer pays today and receives the goods at a future date.

The third item frames the verse.

The verb is aslaftum — "you sent ahead". And its object is not named: bimā aslaftum — "for what you sent ahead". What was sent is not specified.

The scene, then, is this: the person made a payment in the past; now he is taking delivery of his goods.

And this changes the character of the garden's favours. What is given is not presented as a gift; it is presented as a return. The particle bāʾ says so plainly: bimā — "in return for…, because of…".

This is part of the Qurʾān's language on this subject and is seen elsewhere as well:

• "Whatever good you send ahead for yourselves, you will find it with God, better and greater in reward." (al-Muzzammil 73/20)
• "Whatever good you send ahead for yourselves, you will find it with God." (al-Baqara 2/110)
• "Every soul will know what it sent ahead and what it left behind." (al-Infiṭār 82/5)

These three verses and the aslaftum here carry the same idea: a deed is something sent ahead; the person comes after it.

And the framework of "payment in advance" says one thing more. In a contract of advance payment the payer pays without seeing the goods. At the moment he pays he has nothing in his hand; he has only a promise.

This is exactly the matter of ẓann in the twentieth verse: the man had said "I did think that I would meet my reckoning." He had paid, that is, without seeing.

Four verses apart, two sentences complete one another: "I did think so" (20) and "for what you paid in advance" (24). The supposition was the ground of the payment.

I record this as my own reading. The legal use of the root is recorded in the lexicons and in the literature of jurisprudence; the link I make between the two verses is mine.

Root: خ-ل-و. Khalā — to be emptied, to be empty; and from there, to pass away. Khalat al-ayyām — the days passed. Khalā bihi — he was left alone with him (the place emptied, the two remained).

Not "past days", that is, but exactly "emptied days": a stretch of time whose contents are spent, in which no one is left.

A note. In the seventh verse the sūra had used the word خَاوِيَة — and that too conveyed emptiness (hollow trunks of palm). The خَالِيَة here, however, is from a separate root (خ-و-ي / خ-ل-و). The two are akin in sense and both are on the fāʿila metre; but I make no claim of a shared root. I record only that in two places in the sūra two different roots of "emptying" occur on the same metre.

And there is a contrast worth recording: in the seventh verse it was bodies that were emptied, here it is time. In the one, destruction; in the other, a lifetime passing away.

Between the twenty-first and the twenty-fourth verses there is an order, and that order is worth recording:

1. 21 — state: in a life well pleased. 2. 22 — place: in a lofty garden. 3. 23 — detail: its fruits near. 4. 24 — address and ground: eat and drink, because you had paid.

The telling descends, that is, from the general to the particular (state → place → fruit) and then turns to speech.

And at the fourth step something happens: the scene closes with an explanation. The reward is given and its reason is stated.

This will take on meaning when compared with the next scene. For there too a ground will be given (33-34) — but the ground will come in the middle of the punishment, and from the mouth of the narrator rather than of the person.

Wa ammā man ūtiya kitābahu bi-shimālihi fa-yaqūlu yā laytanī lam ūta kitābiyah · Wa lam adri mā ḥisābiyah · Yā laytahā kānati'l-qāḍiya "But as for him who is given his book in his left hand, he says: 'Would that my book had not been given to me! Would that I had not known what my reckoning was! Would that it had been the one that made an end!'"

Root: ش-م-ل. Shimāl — the left side; and at the same time the north and the north wind. In Arabic the directions are named from the standpoint of one facing the qibla or the east; for one facing east, the left is the north.

From the same root: شَمِلَ — to comprise, to encompass (shāmil). Whether the lexicographers connect these two senses is disputed; I do not enter into the disagreement.

The right/left opposition is settled in the Qurʾān: أَصْحَٰبُ ٱلْيَمِين and أَصْحَٰبُ ٱلشِّمَال (al-Wāqiʿa 56/27, 41). This opposition was treated in the section on al-Inshiqāq; I do not repeat it.

And the difference between al-Inshiqāq and this verse was handled in a table in the section on al-Inshiqāq (there "from behind him", here "in his left hand"); three explanations were given and no preference was expressed. I preserve that suspension of judgement.

There is, however, a point not taken up in the section on al-Inshiqāq, and it needs recording: the two men of the two sūras say different things.

In al-Inshiqāq the man cries out; in al-Ḥāqqa the man thinks.

This difference shows that the two sūras stand in different places. Al-Inshiqāq gives the moment of punishment: the person is in no state to think anything, he only cries out. Al-Ḥāqqa, by contrast, makes the person frame sentences — and the sentences he frames are the taking of stock of his life.

I record this as my own reading. The wordings of the two verses can be verified.

لَيْتَ is in Arabic the particle of wishing, and the definition the grammarians give is critical: layta is the desiring of something whose coming about is impossible. When something possible is desired, laʿalla (perhaps) is used.

The particle itself, that is, announces that the wish is in vain.

And يَا (the vocative particle) has been prefixed. The vocative has no addressee; in Arabic this conveys the intensity of the cry. The person is calling out to no one, he is merely raising his voice.

The man says "would that" three times: 25, 26 (the continuation of the same sentence) and 27.

And the order of the three wishes carries a logic:

1. "Would that my book had not been given" — he wishes not to see the record. 2. "Would that I had not known my reckoning" — he wishes not to know the content of the record. 3. "Would that it had been the one that made an end" — he wishes never to have been.

He moves backward in three steps: not to see → not to know → not to be. At every step the demand grows, and at every step it becomes more impossible.

I record this as my own reading. The order of the three wishes is in the text.

There is something to notice here, and it is one of the sūra's hardest points.

The man does not ask to be forgiven.

He speaks for five verses and does not once say "forgive", does not say "send me back", does not say "give me one more chance". The Qurʾān records such requests elsewhere: "Our Lord! Bring us out of here" (al-Muʾminūn 23/107); "Send me back, that I may do righteous work" (al-Muʾminūn 23/99-100).

Here those requests are absent. The man wishes only not to know and not to be.

His demand, that is, is not a remedy but an escape. And what he wants to escape is not even the punishment; it is the record. Both of the first two wishes concern the book.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the content of the five-verse speech.

Root: د-ر-ي. And this root had occurred in the third verse of the sūra: wa mā adrāka — "what made you know?"

The sūra uses the root twice and both times it conveys not knowing — but in opposite directions:

In the third verse not knowing was a deficiency; in the twenty-sixth not knowing is a wish. The same root, once at the beginning and once at the end, with two different values.

I record this as my own reading. The two occurrences can be counted in the text.

And it says one thing more. As was recorded in the sections on al-Humaza and al-Qāriʿa, the pattern mā adrāka announces, before any information is given, that knowledge will not suffice. The man now possesses that knowledge. And the moment he possesses it, he wants to be rid of it.

The measure recorded in the section on al-Takāthur is exactly at work here: "certainty will come, but it will come at the moment when it is of no more use."

ٱلْقَاضِيَة — Root: ق-ض-ي. And this root has a wide field in Arabic:

• قَضَىٰ — he judged, he decided, he finished the matter. Qāḍī (a judge) and qaḍāʾ (a judgement) come from here.
• قَضَىٰ عَلَيْهِ — he finished him off, he killed him. A settled expression for death in Arabic.
• قَضَىٰ ٱلدَّيْنَ — he paid the debt, he settled it.
• قَضَىٰ حَاجَتَهُ — he met his need, he completed his business.

The shared core is to finish, to close, to complete. To leave no matter hanging.

ٱلْقَاضِيَة is again on the fāʿila metre: that which finishes, that which brings to an end.

To what does the pronoun refer? Layta-hā — feminine. The classical explanations:

The first view is the most widespread and has a strong support within the Qurʾān:

"They call: 'O Mālik! Let your Lord make an end of us!' He says: 'You are to remain.'" (al-Zukhruf 43/77)

The verb there is لِيَقْضِ — the same root. And the request is the same: to be finished. The Qurʾān, that is, records the same wish plainly in another sūra.

Also: "Death is not decreed for them that they might die, nor is their punishment lightened for them" (Fāṭir 35/36).

The idea the expression carries. The man wants death to be the thing that makes an end. That is, he wants it to be a finish that leaves nothing after it.

And this is the reverse of the whole logic of the sūra. The sūra opened as al-Ḥāqqa: that which comes true. The whole claim of the sūra is that something continues and at some point finds its requital. The man's wish is the rejection of that claim: would that it had not continued.

And this was exactly the supposition of the man recorded at al-Inshiqāq 84/14: "He supposed that he would never return." Two sūras record the same idea at two different times: the one in this world as a supposition, the other in the hereafter as a wish.

What the man wrongly supposed in this world, he wishes for in the hereafter.

I record this as my own reading; the wordings of the two verses and the finding in the section on al-Inshiqāq are data that can be verified.

Mā aghnā ʿannī māliyah · Halaka ʿannī sulṭāniyah "My wealth has availed me nothing. My authority has gone from me."

The mood of the speech changes here. The twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh verses were wishes (would that). The twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth are declarative sentences: a statement of fact.

The man stops asking for what cannot be, that is, and begins to say what is. And the two things he says are the two pillars of a life: wealth and power.

Root: غ-ن-ي. This root was treated in detail in the section on ʿAbasa 80/5 and 80/37, and a table was set up there: istaghnā (to count oneself self-sufficient — an illusion) and yughnīh (the affliction that makes him do without — a fact). What was recorded in ʿAbasa: "self-sufficiency is given to whoever asks for it." I do not repeat it.

The أَغْنَىٰ عَنْ pattern is particular: "to stand in someone's place, to make someone do without a thing, to be of use." Not "my wealth did not make me rich", that is, but "my wealth was of no use on my behalf".

And this sentence occurs in the Qurʾān in almost identical wording in three places:

The first two verses were treated in the sections on al-Layl and al-Tabbat. What is to be added here is the difference of the third:

In al-Layl and al-Masad it is the narrator who gives the verdict: "his wealth will not avail him." In al-Ḥāqqa it is the man himself who gives it: "my wealth has availed me nothing."

The same sentence, that is, is a warning in two sūras and a confession in one. And the confession is the confirmation of the warning.

I record this as my own reading. The wordings of the three verses are data that can be verified.

And the pronoun is again "my": māl-ī-yah. The man speaks on the assumption that the wealth still belongs to him. The wealth was of no use, but it is still "my wealth".

هَلَكَ — Root: ه-ل-ك. To perish, to be destroyed. The same root occurred in the fifth and sixth verses of the sūra: uhlikū — "they were destroyed."

The sūra uses the root twice: peoples were destroyed (5-6), and the man's authority perished (29). The one collective, the other individual; the one passive, the other active.

عَنِّى — "from me [going away]". The particle ʿan conveys separation (mujāwaza, going away from); the function of this particle was treated in detail in the section on al-Māʿūn 107/5.

The sentence, that is, is not "my authority perished" but exactly "my authority perished by parting from me". The particle gives the direction of the parting: it is what goes, the person is what stays.

And the same particle stands in both verses: aghnā ʿannī, halaka ʿannī. The man says "from me" twice. Both of the two things he possessed have broken away from him.

Root: س-ل-ط. Salaṭa — to prevail, to dominate, to be set over. Tasalluṭ — to be set over someone.

And the Qurʾān uses this word in two different senses:

The link the lexicographers make is this: a proof too is a kind of prevailing — it puts down the other side in a dispute. In Arabic "to have a proof" and "to have power" are expressed by the same word.

Which is the use here? Both have been maintained in the classical sources:

Both fit the text and both are found in the sources. I do not impose a preference. But the picture the two readings give together is worth recording:

In two sentences the man loses two things: what was in his hand (wealth) and what he had to say (proof, or power). Both his material and his verbal support go.

And the measure recorded in the section on al-Ṭāriq is at work again here: "There are two ways for a person to get out of a difficulty: either by his own strength or by someone's help. The verse closes both doors separately." Al-Ḥāqqa does the same work by way of wealth and authority.

The five-verse speech ends here. And note how it ends: not with the sentence unfinished but with it complete. The man says what he has to say.

And everything he says is about himself: my book, my reckoning, my wealth, my authority. In five verses, "my" four times.

Then the thirtieth verse begins, and the subject changes there: "Seize him." Everything the man called "mine" has been taken from him; now he himself becomes an object.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the distribution of the pronouns, and that can be counted in the text.

Khudhūhu fa-ghullūh · Thumma'l-jaḥīma ṣallūh · Thumma fī silsilatin dharʿuhā sabʿūna dhirāʿan fa'slukūh "Seize him and shackle him! Then roast him in the blazing fire! Then thread him into a chain whose length is seventy cubits!"

Three verses, three plural imperatives: khudhūhu, ghullūh, ṣallūh, uslukūh — four verbs counting the fourth.

And the one addressed is not named. To whom is the command given? The verse does not say.

This is the settled form of such scenes in the Qurʾān: "Seize him and drag him into the midst of the blaze!" (al-Dukhān 44/47). There too the one addressed is nameless.

The non-naming of the addressee depersonalises the scene. The command is given not to a person but to a working order.

خُذُوا۟ — Root: أ-خ-ذ. The same root occurred in the tenth verse: fa-akhadhahum akhdhatan rābiya — "He seized them with a mounting seizure."

The sūra uses the root twice: once for the peoples that were destroyed (10), once for this man (30). What was done to whole peoples is done to a single man.

غُلُّوهُ — Root: غ-ل-ل. Ghull — the iron ring put on the neck or the hand, a collar, a fetter. Its plural is aghlāl.

Its occurrences in the Qurʾān:

• "Those are they with fetters on their necks." (al-Raʿd 13/5)
• "We have put fetters on their necks, reaching to their chins." (Yā-Sīn 36/8)
• "He removes from them their heavy burdens and the fetters that were upon them." (al-Aʿrāf 7/157) — here in a negative sense, as the thing removed.

An interesting branch of the same root: غُلُول (ghulūl) — to filch goods secretly from the spoils. "Whoever defrauds will come on the Day of Resurrection with what he took" (Āl ʿImrān 3/161).

The link the lexicographers make: ghulūl is the slipping of something in secretly — and a ring, too, is slipped onto the neck. The shared core is slipping in, threading through. I transmit this explanation; I do not present it as a settled etymological judgement.

The particle fāʾ joins the two commands: khudhūhu fa-ghullūh — "seize him, [and immediately] shackle him." Fāʾ conveys connection without interval. There is no gap between the seizing and the shackling.

ثُمَّ — unlike fāʾ, this puts an interval between. There is a gap, that is, between the shackling and the casting into the fire. The sūra repeats it at the second and third commands too: thumma… thumma…

The sequence itself is meaningful: seize → shackle → (pause) → cast into the fire → (pause) → thread into the chain. The pauses show that the operation is not being hurried.

ٱلْجَحِيمَ has been brought forward. The normal order would be ṣallūhu'l-jaḥīma (verb, then object). Here the object has come before the verb.

In Arabic this conveys specification and concern: "into no other place, but into the blazing fire." The same grammatical phenomenon was recorded for ʿala'l-ghaybi in the section on al-Takwīr.

ٱلْجَحِيم — Root: ج-ح-م. It was treated in the section on al-Takāthur 102/6: jaḥmatu'n-nār — the fierce blazing of fire, the flaring of embers. What was recorded there: among the names of the Fire, jaḥīm brings forward the fierceness of the flame. I do not repeat it.

صَلُّوهُ — Root: ص-ل-ي. It was treated in the section on al-Inshiqāq 84/12: to enter the fire, to be scorched in it, and especially to be laid against the fire; iṣlāʾ — to put a thing into the fire. I do not repeat it.

But I need to enter a note here, because in this commentary the next sūra is al-Maʿārij, and there ٱلْمُصَلِّين (those who pray) will occur.

ص-ل-ي (to enter the fire) and ص-ل-و (prayer) are separate roots. This distinction was recorded plainly in the section on al-Aʿlā 87/12 and 87/15, and this note was entered there: "it is not the same root; no meaning was drawn from the resemblance of sound."

I enter the same note here. Between ṣallūh (cast him into the fire) in al-Ḥāqqa and muṣallīn (those who pray) in al-Maʿārij there is no shared root, and I draw no meaning from this closeness of sound. I content myself with recording that two similar sounds occur in two neighbouring sūras.

سِلْسِلَة — Root: س-ل-س-ل. A chain. The word is again on a doubled pattern (sil-sil), just like ṣarṣar in the sixth verse.

And here the pattern carries the sense: a chain is made of links fitted into one another; the word itself is made of syllables fitted into one another. From the same root come سَلْسَبِيل (in the Qurʾān for a spring of the garden, al-Insān 76/18) and سَلِس (flowing, easily running); the shared idea is coming in succession, following one another.

There are two doubled words in the sūra: ṣarṣar (6) and silsila (32). Both are words that repeat their own sound, and both are instruments of punishment.

ذَرْع and ذِرَاع — Root: ذ-ر-ع. Dhirāʿ is the length from the elbow to the fingertip: a cubit. The length of a man's arm, turned into a unit of measure. Dharʿ is the act of measuring, or the length measured.

The unit of measure, that is, is the human body. The length of the chain is counted by a man's arm.

This is the only exact measure the sūra gives.

Up to now the sūra has not given: the number of the peoples, the height of ʿĀd, the names of the cities, the kind of the angels. In the eighth verse it asked "how many were left" and gave no answer. In the seventeenth it gave a number (eight) but did not say what was numbered.

Now it gives an exact measure: seventy cubits.

On the number. In Arabic seventy (and seven, and seven hundred) mostly conveys an indefinite multitude; it is not an exact count but means "very many". The Qurʾān itself uses this plainly in one place:

"Even if you ask forgiveness for them seventy times, God will not forgive them." (al-Tawba 9/80)

The seventy there is not a limit; the following verse shows as much. The number, that is, is an expression of multitude.

Some classical exegetes read the seventy here in the same way; others count it a real measure. I do not impose a preference.

A note per the method (Method): I draw no reckoning from this number. Claims of the number-and-letter-reckoning kind are not used in this commentary.

But that a measure has been given is worth recording, and it suggests the following — which I record as my own reading:

Two verses earlier the man had spoken of two things: his wealth and his authority. No measure was given for either. How much wealth he had, how wide his authority was — the sūra does not say.

The only thing whose measure is given is the chain.

The only object in the scene that can be counted, that is, is not the things the man possessed; it is the thing that holds him.

Root: س-ل-ك. And the choice of this verb completes the image.

Salaka — to enter upon a road, to travel a road (sulūk, maslak — a road); and to pass a thing through something: to thread a thread through a needle, to force a body through a narrow gap.

Its occurrences in the Qurʾān show both branches:

• "…that He causes it to flow as springs in the earth…" (al-Zumar 39/21) — passing water through.
• "Thus do We make it enter the hearts of the guilty." (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/200) — to pass into.
• "He will drive him into a mounting punishment." (al-Jinn 72/17)
• The uses of sulūk in the sense of "whichever road they take…".

The sense here is from the second branch: to pass through the chain.

And the image is this: the chain is described not as a bond but as a channel. The man is not tied to the chain; he is passed through it — as a thread is passed through a needle.

I record this as an observation about the language. The verb's sense of "passing through" is recorded in the lexicons; the comparison with a needle is among the concrete examples the lexicographers give.

And there is a contrast. The same root also carries the sense sulūk (to take a road, to walk in a way) — a movement a person makes by his own choice. Here the verb has turned into a passive operation: the man does not take a road, he is passed through.

I record this as my own reading; the two senses of the root are recorded in the lexicon, the contrast I draw between them is mine.

Innahu kāna lā yuʾminu bi'llāhi'l-ʿaẓīm · Wa lā yaḥuḍḍu ʿalā ṭaʿāmi'l-miskīn "For he did not believe in God the Mighty, and did not urge the feeding of the needy."

Three verses were commands: seize, cast, thread. Now a ground comes with إِنَّ.

In the section on al-Inshiqāq the function of this particle was recorded: "a particle of emphasis; its function here is to set up a chain of grounds; its English equivalent is 'for'."

And the direction of the chain is the same: from the consequence to the cause. The punishment is described first, and its cause is stated afterwards.

And the cause is two items. Only two.

These two verses are among the most frequently cited places in this commentary, and there is a reason for that.

In the section on al-Māʿūn 107/3 these verses were mentioned and this was recorded: "Two clauses, joined by 'and'. Faith and urging, side by side in the same list. The whole claim of the sūra rests on that conjunction."

They were mentioned in the section on al-Fajr 89/18 as well, and there the link between al-Māʿūn and al-Fajr had already been made.

Three sūras, then, set up the same measure, and this was recorded in two separate places in this commentary. Let us see the three together:

The same sentence in three sūras, in three different positions.

Al-Māʿūn sets it as a diagnosis: this is what one who denies the religion is like. Al-Fajr sets it as an accusation: this is what you are like. Al-Ḥāqqa sets it as a ground: this is why he was threaded into the chain.

The measure is the same, that is, and it works in three stages: diagnosis, warning, verdict.

I record this as the completion of two links this commentary has already made (al-Māʿūn–al-Ḥāqqa and al-Māʿūn–al-Fajr). The wordings of the three verses can be verified; the reading in three stages is mine.

What distinguishes al-Ḥāqqa among the three sūras is the first item.

In al-Māʿūn and al-Fajr the first item is the orphan — that is, a behaviour. In al-Ḥāqqa the first item is faith — that is, a belief.

This difference matters and shows that the two sūras are doing different work.

The whole argument of al-Māʿūn was this (it was treated in detail in that section): to the question "How can you tell that a person really denies the religion?" the answer was given from the field not of belief but of behaviour. Al-Māʿūn looked at behaviour in order to make faith visible.

Al-Ḥāqqa has no such need, because the scene is the hereafter. There faith is visible; no evidence is needed any longer. This is why al-Ḥāqqa can set the two items side by side: faith and urging.

And the consequence of this is: what al-Māʿūn used as evidence is counted in al-Ḥāqqa as a separate item. Not to urge the feeding of the needy, that is, is as much a responsibility in itself as it is a symptom of unbelief.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is that the two sūras stand in different scenes.

The grammar is critical. The verse does not say "lam yuʾmin" (he did not believe), nor "lā yuʾminu" (he does not believe). It says كَانَ لَا يُؤْمِنُ.

The structure kāna + imperfect conveys in Arabic a condition that continued in the past: "he did not use to believe", "he went on not believing."

What is charged, that is, is not a moment but a span. And the span is over; kāna is in the perfect.

This makes a contrast with the sentence of the right-hand man in the nineteenth verse: he too used the perfect (ẓanantu — "I thought"). Both men use the past tense; the one tells of a conviction now closed, the other of a denial now closed.

And here the cleanest frame of the sūra is set.

The verse does not say "he did not believe in God"; it says "in God the Mighty". An attribute has been added.

Root: ع-ظ-م. ʿAẓm — a bone. And the lexicographers' explanation: bone is the hardest and most enduring part of the body; ʿaẓīm means one whose greatness comes from his solidity. I transmit this explanation; I issue no firm judgement on the historical development of the root.

Now look at the last verse of the sūra:

فَسَبِّحْ بِٱسْمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلْعَظِيمِ — "So glorify the name of your Lord, the Mighty." (69/52)

The same word. The attribute the man did not believe in in the thirty-third verse is the attribute the one addressed is made to glorify in the fifty-second.

The sūra closes itself between these two verses: one man did not believe, and you are to glorify.

I record this as a verifiable verbal link within the sūra; the two occurrences are in the text. The interpretation that the link constitutes a frame is mine.

Root: ح-ض-ض. This root was treated in detail in the section on al-Māʿūn 107/3 and taken up again in the section on al-Fajr 89/18 (there taḥāḍḍūna — the reciprocal form). I do not repeat it. In summary:

• Its sense: to urge insistently, to incite, to try to set in motion. There is a pressing, a prodding, in it.
• What was recorded in al-Māʿūn: "The verse does not say 'you do not give'; it says 'you do not even want it to be given.' The threshold has been drawn as low as it can go. Because urging costs nothing."
• And: "The alms one person gives feed one person; a widely held conviction that they ought to be given changes the system."

The construction طَعَامِ ٱلْمِسْكِينِ was likewise treated in detail in the section on al-Māʿūn: two readings were given (a verbal-noun construct / a possessive construct) and the possessive reading was supported by al-Maʿārij 70/24-25. I shall return to that analysis in the section on al-Maʿārij.

What is to be added here is the fate of this construction within the sūra.

Fa-laysa lahu'l-yawma hāhunā ḥamīm · Wa lā ṭaʿāmun illā min ghislīn · Lā yaʾkuluhu illa'l-khāṭiʾūn "So today, here, he has no friend. Nor any food except from the washings. None but those who offend eat it."

The فَ at the head is critical: "so", "therefore." The thirty-fifth verse, that is, is the consequence of the thirty-third and thirty-fourth.

And the consequence is the exact counterpart of the ground. I shall show this now.

One of the tightest internal links in the sūra is here, and it rests on a single word: طَعَام.

The same word, two verses apart, on two different sides.

The man did not urge that a meal be given; now he has no meal. And this is no chance proximity: between the two verses there is only one clause (fa-laysa lahu ḥamīm), and that clause too is built on the same logic.

In fact the matching is twofold. The two verses counted two things, and two verses give the counterpart of both:

The second row is beyond dispute: the same word, two verses apart.

The first row is a reading, and I record it as my own: faith is a bond (as was recorded in the section on al-Baqara 2/3, the centre of the root is trust and security, and faith is "not a one-sided acceptance but a bond of mutual trust"), and ḥamīm is a bond too. He who forms no bond has no bond left.

My reason for recording this match is that it accords with the sūra's general method. The same method was at work in the fifth and sixth verses: peoples that overstepped were destroyed by things that overstep. The sūra names the punishment with the word of the offence.

Root: ح-م-م. And this root carries a striking double sense in Arabic:

The same word means both the boiling water of Hell and an intimate friend.

The explanation the lexicographers give: beneath the root there is heat. Water that is ḥamīm is hot; a friend who is ḥamīm is one whose concern is warm. English has the same metaphor: "a warm friendship", "to behave coldly".

I transmit this explanation; I issue no firm judgement on whether the two senses historically come from a single root. But which is meant in the context of the verse is plain: a friend. For the verse says "he has none", and food is named next — that is, what is enumerated are things a person may possess.

Fuṣṣilat 41/34 is especially important, because there ḥamīm occurs as the result of a transformation: "Repel evil with what is better; then the one between whom and you there was enmity becomes as though he were an intimate friend." Ḥamīm, that is, is not something that exists of itself — it is something built.

And the man in al-Ḥāqqa had not built it.

This word occurs again in the next sūra in the arrangement of the codex — and there twice in one sentence:

"No friend will ask after a friend." (al-Maʿārij 70/10)

When you set the two sūras side by side, a completion emerges:

Al-Ḥāqqa says that one man has no friend; al-Maʿārij says that friendship does not work on that day.

The two sūras give two stages, that is: in the first there is no friend, in the second a friend is of no avail even if there is one. I shall return to this link in the section on al-Maʿārij.

Two adverbs side by side: time and place.

And both look unnecessary — had the sentence said "he has no friend", the sense would not have suffered. Their addition must have a function.

To my mind it is this: the two adverbs limit the verdict, and that limitation makes the sentence harder.

To say "today, here" is to say "at another time and in another place he had one." The man had friends; he had wealth, he had authority, he had a circle. The sūra does not deny this. It only states the field of validity.

And this ties to the twenty-eighth verse: "My wealth has availed me nothing." There was wealth — it did not avail. There were friends — they are not here.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the presence of the two adverbs despite their looking unnecessary.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here. This is the reason for the disagreement over its sense: there is no possibility of comparison within the Qurʾān.

Root: غ-س-ل. Ghasala — to wash. Ghusl is washing; ghusāla is wash-water, washings — the dirty water that runs off when a thing is washed.

غِسْلِين is on the fiʿlīn metre. The majority of the lexicographers read the word in the same field as ghusāla: what runs off a thing that is washed.

The views on its sense:

The first view is the strongest because it follows directly from the root of the word and requires no further assumption. I prefer it; it is not binding.

And here there is a comparison of patterns that ties directly to a sūra treated earlier in this commentary:

Two sūras, the same grammatical pattern, two different hapax words.

The Qurʾān, that is, uses the same sentence structure twice and each time puts into it a word that occurs nowhere else. Both are undefined, both incomparable.

This may have a function, and I record it as my own reading: if the word is not known, the description cannot be completed. The hearer hears the word, cannot fully construct its sense, and is left with a gap in his hands. As was recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa: "a description is not a definition but a pointing."

And there is a difference too: ḍarīʿ is dry, ghislīn is liquid. Two sūras fill the same gap with two different textures.

إِلَّا (except, other than) is the particle of exception, and its function here is striking.

The sentence might have been framed: "His food is of washings." That would have been a plain statement.

Instead: "He has no food, except of washings." First an absence is set up, and then the exception comes.

The effect is this: the washings are not presented as a food; they are presented as an exception falling inside the absence of food. The verse refuses, that is, even to call it "food", and it refuses by the structure of the sentence.

I record this as an observation about word order.

And the third verse comes with a second exception: "None but those who offend eat it."

ٱلْخَٰطِـُٔونَ — Root: خ-ط-أ. The same root occurred in the ninth verse: bi'l-khāṭiʾa — "they brought that offence."

The sūra uses the root twice:

What was brought in the ninth verse thus returns in the thirty-seventh to those who brought it. The sūra names the offence and the offender with the same root, and puts twenty-eight verses between them.

I record this as a verbal link within the sūra; the two occurrences can be verified.

The kind of the word. As was recorded at the ninth verse, Arabic distinguishes khaṭaʾ (an unintended mistake) from khiṭʾ/khaṭīʾa (a deliberate swerve). Khāṭiʾūn is from the second branch: those who take the wrong road knowingly.

Another occurrence confirms this: "a lying, sinful forelock" (al-ʿAlaq 96/16) — there kādhiba khāṭiʾa come side by side and both convey a deliberate act. This construction was treated in the section on al-ʿAlaq.

A third sentence of exception. And note: all three of the thirty-fifth, thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh verses are built on negation:

• "…he has no friend." (35)
• "…there is no food, except…" (36)
• "None but… eat it." (37)

Three verses, three negative sentences. The scene of the man on the right (21-24), by contrast, was built with four positive sentences: in a life well pleased, in a lofty garden, its fruits near, eat and drink.

The two scenes are contrary in their grammar as well, then: the one is built of "there is", the other of "there is not".

I record this as my own reading. The mood of the sentences can be counted in the text.

Fa-lā uqsimu bimā tubṣirūn · Wa mā lā tubṣirūn "No! I swear by what you see, and by what you do not see."

The thirty-eighth verse is the sharpest turn in the sūra. For thirty-seven verses there was something being recounted: history, the resurrection, the reckoning. Now the telling turns to the teller.

From here on the sūra will not speak of the resurrection. Its subject will be: what is this speech that tells you all this?

This transition explains the whole structure of the sūra. For the sūra recounted a claim — that which will come true. And the last question about a claim is always the same: who is saying it?

This pattern was tabulated in four views in the section on al-Balad 90/1 and was mentioned in the sections on al-Inshiqāq 84/16 and al-Takwīr 81/15 as well. I do not repeat it. In summary, the main views on the function of lā are these: that it is redundant (for emphasis), that it rejects something the addressee has said and then passes to the oath, or that the pattern as a whole means "I swear".

What is to be added here is the pattern's place in this sūra.

The pattern occurs in several places in the Qurʾān and has a striking distribution: it occurs at al-Maʿārij 70/40 as well. Two sūras standing one after the other in the arrangement of the codex, that is, use the same pattern:

I shall return to this link in the section on al-Maʿārij.

Root: ب-ص-ر. To see. Baṣar — the eye, the sense of sight; baṣīra — the eye of the heart, discernment; al-Baṣīr — a name of God.

And this oath is unique in the Qurʾān for its scope.

The Qurʾān's oaths are generally sworn by particular things: by the dawn, by the star, by the fig, by the olive, by time, by the pen, by the city, by the horses. Most of the sūras treated in this commentary open with an oath of that kind.

Here, however, what is sworn by is everything. And it becomes everything by a division being made:

What you see + what you do not see = everything that exists.

This division is of the kind called in logic an exhaustive division: the two categories exclude one another and together cover the whole. There is no third option.

The sūra, that is, leaves nothing outside its oath.

And here is the finest point of the verse.

The Qurʾān has a settled pair for dividing what exists: ٱلْغَيْبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ — the unseen and the seen. "Knower of the unseen and the seen" (al-Anʿām 6/73, al-Raʿd 13/9, al-Ḥashr 59/22 and elsewhere).

This verse does not use that pair. It uses a verb instead: "what you see and what you do not see."

The difference is this: the ghayb/shahāda division is made according to the character of the object — a thing either is visible or is not. The tubṣirūn / lā tubṣirūn division is made according to your eye.

The boundary, that is, lies not in being but in the one addressed.

And the consequence of this is that the boundary is mobile. What you do not see today you may see tomorrow; what another sees you may not. The division does not set up an absolute ontology; it describes a position.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is that the verse does not use the ghayb/shahāda pair but a verb; the difference between the two expressions is plain in the text.

The root غ-ي-ب was treated in detail in the section on al-Baqara 2/3. The findings there:

• "The unseen is not what does not exist but what is not seen. This distinction is critical and is often confused."
• "knowledge resting on the unseen is nothing irrational; most human knowledge is of this kind."
• And four examples were given: the electron, the earth's core, the past, another person's consciousness — none of them directly seen, all known from their effects.
• A note: "I do not write this in the sense that the Qurʾān is doing science; I say only that the principle of 'trusting the unseen' is not out of keeping with the way human knowledge generally works."

I do not repeat it. What is to be added here is this: al-Baqara 2/3 took as its subject faith in the unseen — an attitude asked of the one addressed. Al-Ḥāqqa 69/39, by contrast, makes the unseen the subject of an oath.

The difference is this: for something to be sworn by presupposes that it exists and is of worth. Before asking that the unseen be believed in, that is, the verse has counted the unseen.

And it does this in the addressee's own language: "what you do not see." The one addressed cannot deny that there is something beyond what he sees — because he knows that his own sight is limited.

I record this as my own reading.

In the Qurʾān oaths are generally related to the subject: as when the coming of morning after night is sworn by and then the raising of the dead is spoken of.

What is the relation here?

The answer to the oath is this: "It is surely the speech of a noble messenger." The subject, that is, is the source of a speech.

And the relation is made here: the source of a speech is not seen. You hear the speech; you do not see where it came from. What is heard is in the visible field (tubṣirūn), its source in the invisible one (lā tubṣirūn).

The oath, that is, points to exactly where the dispute lies: on the boundary between the seen and the unseen.

I record this as my own reading. Its ground is that the oath and its answer come one after the other, and that the answer is a matter of transmission.

Innahu la-qawlu rasūlin karīm "It is surely the speech of a noble messenger."

This sentence was treated in detail in the section on al-Takwīr 81/19 and was compared there with this verse. I do not repeat what was recorded in al-Takwīr; in summary it was this:

• A threefold emphasis: inna + lām + a nominal sentence. And its ground: "there is a threefold denial on the other side."
• The sense of the construction قَوْلُ رَسُول: "the speech the messenger carries", not the speech the messenger composed. The ground lies in the logic of the word itself: "The definition of a messenger is that he carries a speech that is not his own. Were the speech his, he would not be a messenger."
• A table of the same expression, two different messengers: what is meant in al-Takwīr is an angel, in al-Ḥāqqa the Prophet. And what makes the distinction is not the sentence itself but what comes after it.
• The rule drawn in al-Takwīr: "the meaning of an expression lies not inside the expression but in the place where it stands."
• The argument from a chain of transmission with six qualities (karīm, dhū quwwa, makīn, muṭāʿ, amīn, ghayru ḍanīn) and the likeness drawn with the conditions for a transmitter in the science of hadith (exactness, probity, continuity) — recorded as an inference.

What is to be added here is how the arguments of the two sūras complete one another. This comparison was not made in the section on al-Takwīr.

Al-Takwīr and al-Ḥāqqa frame the same sentence and then go in opposite directions. Thus:

Two sūras defend two different links of the same chain.

There are two places at which a piece of news may be false: the source and the carrier.

• The source may be false: the speech may come not from God but from somewhere else. Al-Takwīr closes this off: "it is not the speech of a satan", and it describes the carrier's position in the presence of the Throne.
• The carrier may be false: the speech may come from no one at all, and the one carrying it may be inventing it. Al-Ḥāqqa closes this off: "it is not the speech of a poet, not the speech of a soothsayer", and in the forty-fourth verse it sets out the possibility of invention explicitly as a scenario.

Al-Takwīr closes from above, that is, and al-Ḥāqqa from below. Read together, both ends of the chain are made fast.

I record this as my own reading. The findings in al-Takwīr are recorded in that section; the interpretation of the division of labour between the two sūras is mine.

The accusation rejected in al-Takwīr was that of being the speech of a satan — that is, a source above the human but evil.

The accusations rejected in al-Ḥāqqa are poet and soothsayer — that is, human sources.

And this is the subject of the verses that follow.

Root: ك-ر-م. This root was treated in the sections on ʿAbasa 80/13 and 80/16 and on al-Fajr 89/15-17 (ikrām, akramani). I do not repeat it.

The link recorded in the section on al-Takwīr is important: at ʿAbasa 80/13-16 the pages of the revelation are mukarrama and their carriers kirām; at al-Takwīr 81/19 the messenger is karīm. The conclusion: "Two sūras describe the carrier of the revelation with the same root."

Al-Ḥāqqa adds a third link. And note: in al-Ḥāqqa the one who is karīm is the human messenger. The same root is now used, that is, at the lowest link of the chain as well.

And the finding recorded in the section on al-Fajr should be recalled: ikrām is "the whole behaviour of according worth"; and there a man, saying "my Lord has honoured me", took wealth for a certificate of worth.

Here there is a person who is karīm, and what makes him karīm is not his wealth but the trust he carries.

I record this as an observation about the language.

Wa mā huwa bi-qawli shāʿir; qalīlan mā tuʾminūn · Wa lā bi-qawli kāhin; qalīlan mā tadhakkarūn · Tanzīlun min rabbi'l-ʿālamīn "It is not the speech of a poet — how little you believe! Nor the speech of a soothsayer — how little you reflect! It is a sending down from the Lord of all the worlds."

The accusations levelled at the Qurʾān are recorded in the Qurʾān itself and fall under four headings: siḥr (sorcery), shiʿr (poetry), kihāna (soothsaying), junūn (madness). In the sections on al-Takwīr and al-Inshirāḥ it was recorded that this is a method of categorisation: "they are the standard ways, in that culture, of invalidating a person's speech — instead of disputing what is said, classifying the one who says it."

Al-Ḥāqqa takes up two of them: poet and soothsayer.

Root: ش-ع-ر. And the concrete sense of the root is not to write poetry: shaʿara — to feel, to sense, to arrive at a fine awareness.

• شُعُور — feeling, sensation, awareness. "They do not realise" (lā yashʿurūn) is an expression the Qurʾān uses often.
• شَعْر — a hair. The lexicographers' explanation: a hair is the extreme of fineness; and shuʿūr is the finest state of perception. I transmit this explanation; I do not present it as a settled etymological judgement.
• شَاعِر — a poet. The exact sense of the word: one who feels, one who senses.

In Arabic, that is, a poet is one who notices what others do not notice. Mastery of speech comes second; the first quality is perception.

And this changes the character of the accusation.

In pre-Islamic Arabia the poet was not an entertainer who spoke ornate words. He was the spokesman of the tribe, its memory, an instrument of war. And it was commonly held that a poet had a jinn companion: the poetry was said to him by that being.

The accusation "poet", that is, said two things: (a) the speech is beautiful but comes out of the man himself (the fruit of intuition, of inspiration); (b) behind it there is an unseen being.

The Qurʾān records and rejects this accusation elsewhere as well:

• "No, they said: 'A jumble of dreams; no, he has invented it; no, he is a poet.'" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/5)
• "We did not teach him poetry, nor would it befit him. It is only a reminder and a clear Qurʾān." (Yā-Sīn 36/69)

Yā-Sīn 36/69 is especially important, because the rejection there is twofold: "We did not teach" (a rejection of the source) and "it would not befit" (a rejection of the quality).

Root: ك-ه-ن. Kihāna — the claim to bring news from the unseen.

The historical background of this notion was treated in detail in the section on al-Takwīr 81/25. What was recorded there:

• It was held that the pre-Islamic soothsayer had a jinn or satan companion, that he brought what it had overheard from the sky, and that he conveyed this in rhymed, cadenced, obscure speech.
• "the hearer had ready to hand a category in which he could place the Qurʾān. Someone who speaks in rhyme and brings news from the unseen — that is a soothsayer."
• Al-Takwīr's method: "it does not deny the category, it enumerates the qualities of the channel."

I do not repeat it.

What is to be added here is why these two accusations in particular.

The subject of the sūra is the verification of a piece of news. And the hearer has ready to hand two categories with which to account for someone who brings news from the unseen:

The two categories cover the two directions from which the speech might be accounted for: either it came out of the man, or it came from outside him but through an illegitimate channel.

By rejecting both, the sūra opens a third place, and it names that place in the forty-third verse: tanzīl.

I record this as my own reading. The historical content of the two categories is recorded in the sources; the dividing of the two as "inner/outer" is mine.

Grammar. Qalīlan is in the accusative, and the grammarians count it either as the attribute of an omitted verbal noun (īmānan qalīlan — a little faith) or as an adverb of time (zamanan qalīlan — a little time). مَا is redundant, for emphasis.

Sense. In Arabic the pattern "qalīlan mā" conveys absence more than fewness. It is like the English "little do you believe" or "you do not believe at all". In linguistics this is called understatement: little is said and much is meant.

Both readings are transmitted in the classical sources: that they really do believe a little, or that they do not believe at all. It makes no practical difference to the sense.

And here is the real question: the two accusations are answered with two different verbs.

This pairing may not be arbitrary, and I shall attempt a reading of it — as my own reading and without presenting it as certain.

That the accusation of poetry is answered with "faith": the distinguishing feature of poetry is that it makes no claim to be true. Poetry may be beautiful, may be moving, may even be profound; but a poet gives you no report, he offers a description. One does not "believe" a poet's words — one admires them.

To count the speech poetry, that is, is to remove the obligation of faith towards it. And the verse recalls precisely that obligation: "how little you believe."

That the accusation of soothsaying is answered with "reflection": the soothsayer's speech is obscure, cadenced, many-meaninged. One does not reflect on a soothsayer's words; one interprets them, and generally after the event. The worth of a soothsayer's word is known when it comes true.

To count the speech soothsaying, that is, is to make it something that is not to be thought about. And the verse recalls precisely thinking: "how little you reflect."

I record this reading as an attempt; I ascribe it to no classical exegete and do not present it as certain. The datum I record, which is beyond dispute, is that two different verbs are used in the two verses.

The root ذ-ك-ر occurs three times in this sūra, and the three fall one in each of the sūra's three parts:

The sūra gives a reminder (12), says that it is not remembered (42), and repeats that it is a reminder all the same (48).

And the two tadhkiras explain one another: the first is a historical event, the second a text. By naming the two with the same word, the sūra says that they do the same work.

I record this as a weave of words within the sūra; the three occurrences can be counted in the text.

تَنزِيل — Root: ن-ز-ل. Nazala — to come down. تَنزِيل is the verbal noun of Form II.

And the pattern carries meaning. Arabic has two verbal nouns from the same root, and a distinction between them is recorded in the classical sources:

This distinction is widely transmitted in the classical sources; whether it holds absolutely everywhere is disputed, and I do not present it as a rule. But that the pattern chosen here is tanzīl accords with the Qurʾān's own manner of descent: the text came down not at one time but according to events, over years.

A verbal noun in place of a passive participle. The verse does not say "munazzalun" (sent down); it makes the verbal noun itself the predicate: "it is a sending down." In Arabic this use of the verbal noun conveys intensification — as though the object had become the act itself.

مِّن رَّبِّ ٱلْعَٰلَمِينَ. The particle min conveys a point of origin: where it came from is stated.

And the choice of title is meaningful. As was recorded in the section on al-Takwīr, ذِى ٱلْعَرْش (the Lord of the Throne) was chosen there because the subject was a chain of authority.

Here رَبِّ ٱلْعَٰلَمِينَ is chosen. This construction was treated in detail in the section on al-Fātiḥa; I do not repeat it. What must be recorded is that the construction conveys scope: the Lord of all the worlds.

And this pairs with the oath of the thirty-eighth verse: the oath was by everything you see and do not see — that is, by all the worlds. The verse now gives the Lord of those worlds as the source.

What is sworn by and what is given as the source are of the same scope.

I record this as my own reading. The comprehensiveness of the two expressions is, for its part, plain in the text.

And Sūrat al-Takwīr ended with the same construction: "unless God, the Lord of all the worlds, wills…" (81/29). In the section on al-Takwīr this was recorded as a closing link made with al-Fātiḥa. Two sūras end the same defence with the same title.

Wa law taqawwala ʿalaynā baʿḍa'l-aqāwīl · La-akhadhnā minhu bi'l-yamīn · Thumma la-qaṭaʿnā minhu'l-watīn · Fa-mā minkum min aḥadin ʿanhu ḥājizīn "And had he invented against Us some sayings, We would surely have seized him by force; then We would surely have cut his life-vein. And not one of you could have held Us off from him."

These four verses do something with few parallels in the Qurʾān: they frame a hypothesis, and the protagonist of the hypothesis is the Prophet himself.

The expected defence would have been: "he would not invent this, because he is a trustworthy man." Evidence from character, that is. Sūrat al-Takwīr did this to a degree (ṣāḥibukum — "your companion").

Here no evidence from character is offered. Instead a scenario is framed: what would have happened had he invented it?

And the outcome of the scenario is the killing of the inventor.

This shifts the ground of the defence. The sentence does not say "he does not invent"; it says "had he invented, he would not have lived." That the text is still going on, that is, is itself offered as evidence.

The structure of this argument must be recorded, because it is out of the ordinary: the truth of the claim is tied to the claimant's still being alive.

I record this as my own reading; the steps of the argument are in the text.

Root: ق-و-ل. To say. And the pattern here is Form V (تَفَعُّل).

One of this form's functions in Arabic is affectation (takalluf): to do a thing by forcing it, straining out of oneself, to make it appear that one is doing what one is not. Taṣabbara (he forced himself to be patient), tajāhala (he feigned ignorance).

تَقَوَّلَ is on this pattern: to make a word appear to have been said that was not said, to ascribe to someone a speech that is not his.

The verb is not ordinary "lying", then. There is an ascription inside the verb: taqawwala ʿalaynā — "had he invented against Us." That is, had he laid it to Our charge.

And the particle ʿalā here conveys harm: "against Us". Inventing is positioned as an act committed to the detriment of the one it is fathered upon.

ٱلْأَقَاوِيل is a striking word: it is the plural of a plural.

Qawl (a saying) → aqwāl (sayings) → aqāwīl (sayings of sayings).

In Arabic this is called jamʿ al-jamʿ. And what is recorded in the classical sources is this: the pattern generally conveys belittlement and scatteredness. Aqāwīl carries a tone like "talk said here and there", "odds and ends of speech".

And when it is joined with بَعْضَ (some), the tone drops further still: "a few remarks."

The verse, that is, deliberately makes the hypothetical offence small.

The sentence might have been framed: "Had he invented a lie against Us…" A grave offence. Instead: "had he invented a few remarks."

And the requital is death.

The disproportion is deliberate, and the force of the argument lies there: the smallest addition earns the heaviest penalty. Not the text as a whole, that is, but even one of its sentences cannot belong to the man.

I record this as my own reading. The belittling tone of aqāwīl is recorded in the classical sources; the interpretation of the disproportion is mine.

And here there is one of the finest internal links in the sūra.

The expression بِٱلْيَمِين has three readings, and all three occur in the classical sources:

There is no practical difference in sense: all three convey a decisive and irresistible seizure.

But the word's other occurrence in the sūra is worth recording:

The same word, two scenes. In the one, receiving; in the other, being seized. In the one a hand is held out; in the other a hand is held fast.

I record this as a verbal link within the sūra; the two occurrences are in the text. I do not claim that the link is deliberate — yamīn is an ordinary word in Arabic and is in place in both contexts.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here.

وَتِين, as the lexicographers describe it, is the main vessel attached to the heart; when it is cut death is instantaneous. The English equivalent is "the aorta".

Some lexicographers describe it as "the vessel from which the heart hangs". I make no firm determination about the anatomical detail; the common point given in the sources is this: the vessel whose cutting brings instant death.

Two things about the choice of the word are worth recording.

One — the manner of execution. The verse does not say "We would have killed him", nor "We would have destroyed him". It names a particular vessel.

And this makes the penalty instantaneous. When the life-vein is cut a man cannot speak; the speech ends. The penalty, that is, prevents the invention from continuing: the man cannot frame a second sentence.

Two — its attachment to the heart. The vessel is the one that feeds the heart. And what is charged is speech.

The Qurʾān ties the source of the speech to the heart: "He brought it down upon your heart" (al-Baqara 2/97); "He brought it down upon your heart, that you might be of the warners" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/193-194).

The place chosen in the penalty, that is, is what feeds the place where the revelation came down. If the speech comes from the heart, the penalty comes down on the heart's vessel.

I record this as my own reading and enter a note of caution: I do not claim that the verse intends this link. Watīn is the ordinary Arabic word for describing instantaneous death, and its choice may be explained by that alone.

There is a point of grammar here, and it has been much discussed in the classical sources.