إِنَّ نَاشِئَةَ ٱلَّيْلِ هِىَ أَشَدُّ وَطْـًٔا وَأَقْوَمُ قِيلًا
Inna nāshiʾata'l-layli hiya ashaddu waṭʾan wa aqwamu qīlā "Surely the rising of the night is stronger in tread and more upright in speech."
The densest verse in the sūra and the hardest to translate. There are three key words and all three must be taken separately.
- نَشَأَ (nashaʾa) — he grew, he was raised, he came forth.
- نَشْأَة (nashʾa) — coming into being, creation. In the Qurʾān: "You have known the first bringing into being; should you not then reflect?" (al-Wāqiʿa 56/62) — al-nashʾata'l-ūlā. And "then God will bring about the last bringing into being" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/20) — al-nashʾata'l-ākhira.
- أَنشَأَ (anshaʾa) — he brought into being, he built. "It is He who brought gardens into being" (al-Anʿām 6/141).
- نَاشِئ (nāshiʾ) — one who is growing up; a youth.
In Turkish the borrowed "neşet etmek" ("to arise out of somewhere") and "inşa" ("construction") come from this same root.
The word نَاشِئَة, in the form in which it occurs in this verse, is unique in the Qurʾān. And what exactly it means has been disputed.
| View | What it means | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| The rising of the night itself | The act of rising from sleep; the one who rises | The root conveys "to come forth, to straighten up"; an active participle in the feminine can also be ascribed to the act |
| The hours of the night | The advancing, "rising" hours of the night | The root's sense of "coming forth afterwards"; the parts of the night come in sequence |
| The night prayer itself | The prayer performed at night | The context: rising in the night was commanded in the preceding verses |
| What is recited at the rising of the night | The word uttered at that hour | The link with qīlā (speech) later in the verse |
These are not far from one another and in practice they come to the same place: rising from sleep during part of the night and making use of that time.
I do not impose a preference. But this needs recording: the root of the word is "to be born", and this is a strangely apt word for a person rising from sleep. The straightening up of a lying body is like something coming up out of the ground. This observation is my own reading; the lexicons do not explain the root by way of sleep.
- مَوْطِئ (mawṭiʾ) — a place trodden by the foot. In the Qurʾān: "…nor do they tread a place that enrages the disbelievers…" (al-Tawba 9/120) — mawṭiʾan yaghīẓu'l-kuffār.
- وِطَاء / مُوَاطَأَة (wiṭāʾ / muwāṭaʾa) — coinciding with one another, agreeing, matching. In the Qurʾān: "…so as to make the number match…" (al-Tawba 9/37) — li-yuwāṭiʾū ʿiddata mā ḥarrama'llāh.
- وَطِيء (waṭīʾ) — level ground, ground fit to tread on.
The centre of the word is in the contact of the foot with the ground. And the quality of that contact matters — is it firm, is it slippery, is it balanced?
It is hard to render into English, because English has no such idiom. But the picture is clear: the foot setting down firmly on the ground.
Several explanations are given in the classical commentaries, and all of them come out of this picture:
1. The firmness of the agreement. Heart and tongue, what is heard and what is said, sit exactly upon one another. This explanation rests on the root's sense of muwāṭaʾa (coinciding, matching) — and, as will be seen below, it is supported by a variant reading as well.
2. The weight of the difficulty. Rising at night comes hard to the self; "tread" here conveys the hardship. This explanation too comes out of the root: to tread on something is to bring weight down on it.
3. The force of the effect. The mark the work leaves on a person is deeper — like a foot that leaves a print where it treads.
All three occur in the classical sources and they do not exclude one another. I state no preference.
But I want to record one observation, as my own reading. The measure the word chooses is contact — the foot's relation to the ground. That a work is "firm" is measured here not by how much of it is done but by where it treads. This fits the sūra's general stance on measure: not quantity but seating.
| Reading | Pattern | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| وَطْئًا (waṭʾan) | faʿl — verbal noun | To tread, treading |
| وِطَاءً (wiṭāʾan) | fiʿāl — verbal noun of Form III | Coinciding, matching, agreeing |
With the second reading the meaning becomes: "…stronger with respect to agreement" — that is, heart and tongue, intention and speech, sitting more exactly upon one another.
The two readings do not contradict each other; they complete each other. The first conveys treading on the ground, the second inward agreement — and both come out of the idea of "sitting exactly" that the same root carries.
I do not give a definite list of which reading belongs to which imām. In the widely printed muṣḥaf (the transmission of Ḥafṣ) وَطْئًا is read.
Root: ق-و-م. As recorded above (73/2), this root was treated in al-Fātiḥa and al-Baqara: it conveys both straightness and standing upright.
أَقْوَم is the elative pattern: "more standing", "more upright", "more correct", "more to the point".
This word occurs in several places in the Qurʾān and in all of them it means "most sound, most firm":
The verse declares the rising of the night superior in two respects, and the two measures complete each other:
| Measure | Word | What it looks at | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tread | أَشَدُّ وَطْئًا | The act's seating on the ground | Downward — the foot, the ground |
| Speech | أَقْوَمُ قِيلًا | The uprightness, the correctness of the word | Upward — the tongue, straightening up |
And both words can be read at once bodily and inwardly: waṭʾ is both a real tread of the foot and an agreement; aqwam is both a real uprightness and a correctness.
This shows the sūra's choice of language. It describes inward states with bodily words: to tread, to stand upright, to rise, to wrap oneself, the back, the throat. As recorded in al-Inshirāḥ, this is a widespread method of the Qurʾān — and, as was also noted there, a general property of language.
There is a point of word order here: in the fifth verse qawlan thaqīlā (a heavy word), in the sixth verse aqwamu qīlā (more upright in speech). The same root, in two consecutive verses.
That is: a word that is heavy is coming; and the time is shown at which that word will be spoken in the most upright way. The word that comes and the word that is spoken are named with the same root.
The verse does not explain why the night is more suitable; it only states that it is. But there are a few observable things, and I write them not as a claim of "scientific miracle" but as the record of an experience everyone knows:
- The night is the time when external stimulus is least. No sound, no movement, no visual distraction.
- The night is the time when no one is watching. The work done cannot be displayed.
- The night is time a person gives out of his sleep. That is, it is time with a price.
Can all three of these be drawn from what the verse says? No. These are my own observations, not the ground the verse gives. The verse gives no ground; it gives a measure.
And I know that in modern sleep and attention research there is a literature on the cognitive effects of night wakefulness; but the findings of that literature are disputed and vary from person to person. I do not attach the verse to it. The rule in Method that "no hunting for scientific miracles is done" exists precisely to preserve this limit.