al-Ḥāqqa 69:6

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.