al-Ḥāqqa 69:16

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.