al-Muzzammil 73:7

Inna laka fi'l-nahāri sabḥan ṭawīlā "Surely in the day you have a long swim."

The most pictorial sentence in the sūra, and the complement of the verse before it.

Root: س-ب-ح. The concrete sense of the root — to swim in water or in air, to flow onward, to move swiftly through a medium — and its link with tasbīḥ were treated in al-Naṣr. The note recorded there holds here too: the link between swimming and tanzīh is a relation the lexicographers make, not a settled judgement in etymology.

And the evidence from within the Qurʾān given there showed that the concrete sense of the root is preserved: "Each swims in an orbit" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/33; Yāsīn 36/40).

Here the word is entirely in its concrete sense and has nothing to do with tasbīḥ: سَبْح — swimming, flowing onward.

This is one of the most concrete uses of the root in the Qurʾān, and it is striking for exactly that reason.

In describing the day, the verse sets up a picture of water.

And to see what the comparison says, one has to look at what it does not say. The verse does not say:

• "In the day you have much work." — that would be a statement of quantity.
• "In the day you are busy." — that would be a statement of state.
• "In the day you have no time." — that would be a statement of absence.

It says: in the day you have a long swim.

Swimming says three things at once:

1. It requires continuous movement. Whoever stands still in water sinks. When the swimmer stops he not only ceases to advance, he loses the possibility of staying up. The work of the day is like this too: when it is let go, it does not stay where it was.

2. The medium carries and drags the person. Water is not under the swimmer's control. There is current, there is wave, there is direction. While the person tries to go where he wants, the medium takes him somewhere else.

3. There is no ground. The swimmer treads on nothing. And this stands in direct contrast with the word of the preceding verse.

This is the finest point of word order in the sūra, and without it both verses remain incomplete.

Two words describe two separate relations of the human being to ground: one the ground that is trodden, the other the medium that cannot be trodden.

And the last row is especially important: the night is qualified by quality, the day by duration. The measure of the night is how firm it is; the measure of the day is how long it lasts.

I record this reading as my own inference. The concrete senses of the two roots are beyond dispute; the contrast drawn between them is interpretation.

There are two readings in the classical commentaries:

1. The reading as ground. "You are busy in the day, so rise at night." That is, the verse supports the command of the night: you have no time in the day, you have it at night.

2. The reading as easing. "You are already occupied at length in the day; the whole of the night is not being asked for." That is, the verse supports the exception illā qalīlā in the second verse.

Both fit the text and they do not exclude each other. But the second looks more consistent with the general flow of the sūra — a flow that constantly sets limits and constantly lightens. This is a preference, and it is not binding.

And a third reading is possible too, which I record as my own reading: the verse may also be a warning. To describe the day as a "swim" is not neutral — the swimmer is dragged. That is, the sentence may also be saying that the day catches a person up in its current. On this reading the command of the night is not an excuse but an antidote: the one being dragged is given ground to set his foot on.

The text says none of this openly.

طَوِيل — long. Its root is ط-و-ل.

The day is not in fact longer than the night; for most of the year the two are close to each other. So "long" here does not convey a measure of hours.

It conveys the length of the occupation. How long a day lasts changes according to what is done inside it — this is an experience everyone knows.

It sets up an interesting contrast with the principle recorded in al-Qadr: there it was said that "the value of a stretch of time is measured not by its length but by its content". Here the same principle works in the opposite direction: the length of a stretch of time is also measured by its content. I make this link as my own reading.