al-Qiyāma 75:30

Ilā Rabbika yawmaʾidhini'l-masāq "That day the driving is to your Lord alone."

Root: س-و-ق. And the concrete sense of this root is a herdsman's work: to drive, to put before oneself and take along — especially to drive animals.

Its derivatives show where the root opens out:

• سَائِق (sāʾiq) — one who drives, who puts before himself. At Qāf 50/21 it is stated that on the Day of Rising every soul has with it a sāʾiq and a shahīd.
• سُوق (sūq) — a market. The place to which goods are driven and brought. The English souk is this word.
• سِيَاق (siyāq) — context, the flow of speech, its driving. The sub-heading "Context" used at every verse in this commentary is from this root: the meaning that a word drags along from in front of it and from behind it.
• مَسَاق (masāq) — the driving, or the place to which one is driven.

Masāq can be read in two ways — as a verbal noun with mīm ("the act of being driven") or as a noun of place ("the place to which one will be driven"). Both are possible and produce no great difference in meaning.

Here the sūra repeats its own sentence:

إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ يَوْمَئِذٍ ٱلْمُسْتَقَرُّ (75/12) إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ يَوْمَئِذٍ ٱلْمَسَاقُ (75/30)

The three elements are the same, in the same order. The only word that changes is the last.

The two verses together build one sentence: the place you are going to is settled (12) and you are not going there on your own feet (30).

And the position of the two verses in the sūra is meaningful. The first was answering the search for escape — it came immediately after the question "where is the place of escape?" The second comes immediately after the moment of death. That is, both when the question is asked and when there is no longer any state in which to ask it, the answer is the same.

And the language of herding will appear once more in the sūra. In the thirty-sixth verse the word sudā will come: an animal let loose without a herdsman. The two words are from the same field:

The sūra gives both possibilities in the language of herding and eliminates one. I record this as my own reading; the semantic field of the two words is lexical data.