بَلْ يُرِيدُ ٱلْإِنسَٰنُ لِيَفْجُرَ أَمَامَهُۥ
بَلْ in Arabic is the particle of iḍrāb: leaving what has been said and passing to something else. It works in two ways — either it cancels the previous judgement, or it drops it and moves to what is more important.
Here the second is at work. The third verse had described an opinion: the man supposes the bones cannot be gathered. The fifth verse strikes out that opinion and says what lies beneath it: the real matter is not what he supposes but what he wants.
This is the sharpest move in the sūra. Denial is described not as a lack of knowledge but as a choice of the will. The man does not reject because he can find no proof; he does not look for proof because he wants to reject.
The finding recorded for the root of kufr in the discussion of al-Baqara 2/6 sits exactly here: the root means to cover, not to be ignorant; kufr is covering over what one knows. Al-Qiyāma 75/5 states the motive of that act of covering.
Root: ر-و-د. Its concrete sense is interesting: to go back and forth in search of a place, to scout. The rāʾid is the scout who goes ahead of the tribe looking for pasture and water. From the same root come irāda (willing) and ruwayd (gently).
So at the root of the verb "to want" there is a movement of searching: the one who wants tests out the road to what he wants.
This suits the verse: the man wants something and is looking for a road that suits that want. The road he is looking for will appear in the sixth verse — a question.
Root: ف-ج-ر. This root was treated in detail in two places in this commentary and I do not repeat them:
- In the sections on al-Shams and al-Infiṭār: its concrete sense is to split, to split and make flow, to burst out in a gush. Fajr — the moment when the night is split and the light gushes out. Tafjīr — making water burst out by splitting. And in the moral branch: fujūr — the tearing of the limit that holds a person; the fājir is the one who splits the covering over him and comes out, who breaches the boundary that holds him in. The finding recorded there was this: fujūr is not a deficiency but an overflow — like water that will not fit its vessel breaking the dam.
- In the section on al-Fajr: the comparison of the root with falq.
The verse does not say "he wants to sin". The verb yafjura has no object; in its place there is an adverbial: أَمَامَهُ — "what is ahead of him". So what is split is not a prohibition, a limit or a rule — it is time.
Root: أ-م-م. And the family of this root is striking: umm (mother), umma (a community), imām (the one standing in front, the one who goes ahead), amām (the space in front).
The shared idea: priority, being in front, being at the source. The mother is the one who comes first; the imam is the one who stands in front; amām is the place that is in front.
| Reading | Explanation | Ground | Weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filling the time ahead with sin | "He wants to commit fujūr throughout the life ahead of him" — the reason he rejects the resurrection is to keep his front clear | The moral sense of fujūr; the context is looking for the motive of denial | The verb's coming without an object is not fully accounted for on this reading |
| Keeping his front open, deferring the reckoning | By pushing the resurrection further off he wants to leave an empty space ahead of him; "splitting" here is getting past an obstacle | The verb's lack of an object; the word amām denoting time; verse 6 showing this directly | It lightens the settled moral weight of fujūr |
| Lying, slandering | One branch of fujūr is lying too; "to throw a lie out ahead of him" | This branch of the root really does exist | Weak link with the context; the adverbial amām is left unexplained |
The second reading is the most consistent when read together with the sixth verse, and its ground is in the text itself: the fifth verse says "he wants to break open what lies ahead of him", and the sixth shows immediately afterwards how that want comes to speech — "and when is that Day of Rising?" That is, the concrete form of breaking open one's front is to make the date uncertain. I state my preference; it is not binding, and the first reading is the most widespread in the classical sources.
Let us describe the picture. There is a wall in front of a person: the reckoning. The verb fajara speaks of splitting that wall, of piercing it and passing through, of leaving an open space in front of oneself. What is split is neither a rock nor a sky; it is the person's own future. The man wants to pierce what he knows stands ahead of him and make an open road beyond it.
And the root's real sense works exactly here: fajr is the splitting of the night and the gushing of light — that is, the opening of what was closed. The man too wants an opening, but what he opens gives on to emptiness, not light.
I record this as my own reading; the semantic field of the root and the function of the adverbial are data of the language.
وَيَذَرُونَ وَرَآءَهُمْ يَوْمًا ثَقِيلًا — "And they leave a heavy day behind them." (al-Insān 76/27)
There what is left is placed behind (warāʾ); here what is split stands in front (amām). The two verses tell the same movement from two directions: piercing the reckoning from the front and throwing it behind are two names for the same act.
And the two sūras meet not only in this picture but in a word: in both, this life is called al-ʿājila. I return to this at verse 20.