al-Jinn 72:8

Wa annā lamasna's-samāʾa fa-wajadnāhā muliʾat ḥarasan shadīdan wa shuhubā

"And that: we felt out the heaven, and found it filled with strong guards and with flames."

These two verses are among the passages of the Qurʾān most strained in the modern period. Attempts have been made to match them with notions such as meteorites, meteors, cosmic radiation.

In this text I do not take that road, and I write the ground for it plainly:

The verse does not describe a heavenly body. It does not relate a physical event. It gives no astronomical information. The verse's sentence is a statement of experience and its subject is access to knowledge: "we tried to go, we found it closed."

To say that the Qurʾān is not giving astronomical information here does not lower the verse's value; it sets in place what the verse says. To look for a scientific counterpart is to lose the subject of the sentence — the speaking party is the jinn, and what they relate is what befell them.

Root ل-م-س: to touch with the hand, to search by groping. What distinguishes it from seeing is that it requires contact. In the Qurʾān: "Even if We had sent down to you a book written on parchment and they had touched it with their hands…" (al-Anʿām 6/7).

The second direction of the root is searching: iltimās, to try to find something by groping for it. The word iltimas in Turkish — looking into someone's business and favouring it — comes from here too.

The choice of the verb is very meaningful here. The jinn do not say "we ascended to the heaven", do not say "we observed the heaven" — they say "we felt out the heaven". The word conveys a movement of groping: the movement of someone sweeping a surface with his hand in the dark.

This choice gives the sentence from the start a tone of uncertainty and search. One who gropes does not know what he will find. And what they found is not what they were looking for.

Root و-ج-د: to find. The verb states the result of the search.

Lamasnā → wajadnā: we felt out → we found. There is no interval of time between the two verbs; the result emerged in the contact itself.

Root م-ل-أ: to fill. And the verb is passive: muliʾat — it was filled.

The passive is doing work here: the heaven did not fill of itself, it was filled. The agent is not stated but is known. What is related, that is, is not a state of nature but a measure taken.

And the tense is past. So what the jinn relate is a new situation they met with at that moment — and therefore presupposes an earlier situation as well. This will be said plainly in verse 9: we used to sit.

Root ح-ر-س: to protect, to keep watch, to guard. Ḥāris — a guard. Ḥarasa — he protected.

Ḥaras is not a singular word; in Arabic it is a collective noun — "guards, a body of watchmen". This is why its adjective (shadīdan) comes in the singular; collective nouns can take a singular adjective.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān only here.

شَدِيدًا — root ش-د-د: to bind, to tighten, to make firm. Shadd is to tie a knot tight. So what is meant by "strong" is not brute force but tightness: an order that leaves no gap.

Root ش-ه-ب: the brightness of fire; the grizzled colour born of the mixing of white and black (ashhab — a grizzled horse). Shihāb is a piece of kindled fire, an ember.

The places where the word occurs in the Qurʾān fall into two groups:

• In the sense of fire: to Moses, "that I may bring you a burning brand" (al-Naml 27/7 — bi-shihābin qabas).
• In accounts concerning the heaven: "If any steals a hearing, a clear flame pursues him" (al-Ḥijr 15/18); "a piercing flame" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/10).

That is, the word itself is not the name of a heavenly body; it means flame. It can be rendered "a ball of flame", "an ember".

This subject occurs in several other places in the Qurʾān, and in all of them the same frame is set up:

• "We have set constellations in the heaven and made it beautiful for beholders. And We have guarded it from every accursed satan. But if any steals a hearing, a clear flame pursues him." (al-Ḥijr 15/16-18)
• "We adorned the nearest heaven with an adornment, the stars; and guarded it from every rebellious satan. They cannot give ear to the highest assembly; they are pelted from every side… But if any snatches a word, a piercing flame pursues him." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/6-10)
• "We adorned the nearest heaven with lamps and made them missiles for the satans." (al-Mulk 67/5)
• "The satans did not bring it down… They are kept far from hearing." (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/210-212)

The last passage shows plainly why the matter is mentioned in the Qurʾān at all: an answer to the claim that the source of the Qurʾān is the jinn or the satans. One of the charges levelled at the Prophet in Mecca was that what he said came from a jinni. Sūrat al-Takwīr denies this directly: "It is not the word of an accursed satan" (al-Takwīr 81/25).

That is, this group of verses is part not of a lesson in cosmology but of a dispute over sources. The question is: is what Muḥammad says knowledge of the kind the soothsayers speak? The answer: no — because that channel is closed, and it is the channel itself that says it is closed.

In the classical commentaries these passages have widely been read as the cutting off of divination: with the beginning of the revelation, the road by which the soothsayers gathered knowledge was closed.

This reading accords with the text: verse 9 plainly sets up a before and after ("we used to sit… now whoever gives ear"). What is related, that is, is the change of a situation, and the time of the change is near the moment when the jinn heard the Qurʾān.

I transmit this as the general tendency of the classical exegetes. On when exactly the change began, whether it never happened before at all, and whether it was partial or complete, there are differing statements in the sources, and I am not in a position to classify them.