al-Ḥāqqa 69:7

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.