78. Sūrat al-Nabaʾ

Forty verses. It takes its name from the phrase ٱلنَّبَإِ ٱلْعَظِيمِ in the second verse. In the tradition it is also called ʿAmma (its first word) and al-Tasāʾul (the questioning of one another).

The sūra opens with a question — but it is not the text that asks it. The text reports a question others are asking: "About what are they questioning one another?" The sūra, that is, drops into the middle of a conversation; it hears a debate going on outside and intervenes in it.

And the form of the intervention is striking. The sūra does not answer the question. First it names the subject of the question (the great tidings), then it says twice "they shall know", and then it moves to something else entirely: to the earth, the mountains, sleep, the night, the sun, the cloud, the garden. For eleven verses the resurrection is not mentioned at all.

This is the sūra's method: before those who ask about the resurrection is set an inventory of the house they live in.

Then the house is dismantled. In the nineteenth verse the sky becomes doors, in the twentieth the mountains become a mirage — that is, the pegs of the tent pitched in the sixth and seventh verses are pulled out. The second half of the sūra is the striking of the scene set up in its first half.

And the sūra closes, in the fortieth verse, with a single sentence from the mouth of one of those who asked the question of the first verse: "Would that I were dust."

On its being Meccan there is something close to unanimity. The style supports this: short, single-note verse-endings, the dispute over resurrection, an addressee who denies, the absence of legal content.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without it.

ʿAmma yatasāʾalūn "About what are they questioning one another?"

The original of the word is عَنْ مَا (ʿan mā) — "about what, concerning what". Two words have merged, the nūn has been assimilated into the mīm, and the alif of مَا has dropped: عَمَّ.

This is a general rule at work in Arabic: the interrogative مَا loses its alif when a preposition is prefixed to it.

What is the ground of the rule? The lexicographers give two reasons, and both are worth recording:

One — distinguishing. In Arabic mā is both an interrogative and a relative pronoun ("that which"). When one says ʿan mā the two can be confused. Dropping the alif marks the interrogative: ʿamma is the question, ʿammā the relative. The elision, then, is a sign made in order to preserve the sense.

Two — lightening (takhfīf). Interrogative particles are heavily used elements; heavily used elements wear down in a language. This is not peculiar to Arabic: in English too "what are you doing" becomes "whatcha doin'".

An observation. The shortening of the question adds a tone to the question itself: the sentence has come down to two words and has become a fast, sharp question.

I record this as my own reading and I must also state its limit: this elision is not a choice peculiar to this verse but a general rule of Arabic. The text, that is, is not doing something here; it is using something the language already does. To draw from this a conclusion such as "the Qurʾān dropped the alif to show the haste of the question" would be to ignore the scope of the rule.

A note on pausal reading. It is transmitted that when one stops on this word a quiescent هـ is added and it is read "ʿammah". This is the same phenomenon as the هاء السكت (the hāʾ of pause) treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa: a letter added to preserve a sound that would otherwise be lost at a stop. In the codices the word is generally written عَمَّ. Since I cannot state with certainty which authority of the variant readings preferred this pause, I give no name; it does not change the sense.

Root: س-أ-ل. To ask, to request. The root has two wings in Arabic and both are at work in the Qurʾān:

• To ask for information: "They ask you about the spirit" (al-Isrāʾ 17/85).
• To ask for, to request: the uses meaning "ask forgiveness of your Lord"; sāʾil (a beggar) — "do not rebuff the beggar" (al-Ḍuḥā 93/10, treated in this commentary).

The root, then, is "to voice what is lacking"; what is lacking may be knowledge or may be property.

The verb is in Form تَفَاعُل. This form has been treated several times in this commentary — especially in the section on al-Takāthur, by way of the reciprocity conveyed by the word takāthur. The finding there holds here too and can be carried a step further.

Form tafāʿul has two basic functions:

Both readings have been defended for this verse.

The first reading — reciprocity. The question is not one put to someone who knows the answer; it is a question they put to one another. And this distinction carries the whole weight of the verse.

When a question about a matter is put to one who knows, the question has a direction and an end: the answer comes, the matter closes. When the same matter is put to one another, the question loses its direction: nobody knows the answer, everyone is collecting everyone else's guesses, and the conversation feeds itself.

English has a name for this: the matter has turned into gossip. What is being talked about is no longer a question whose answer is sought but a topic that is enjoyed for the talking.

And this must be noticed: it is not a failure to take the matter seriously. On the contrary, the volume of the talk shows the height of the interest. What the verse diagnoses is not indifference but interest that has taken the wrong form.

The second reading — insistence. Form tafāʿul sometimes conveys the continuity and the strain of the act. On this reading the sense is: they ask without stopping, over and over, without tiring. The question is not a request for information but a form of objection — it is asked not to get an answer but to show the impossibility of an answer.

The Qurʾān describes this attitude plainly elsewhere: "They ask you about the Hour: when will it drop anchor?" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/42 — the next sūra) and "When is this promise, if you are truthful?" (Yūnus 10/48; al-Anbiyāʾ 21/38 and in many other places). None of these questions is a request for information.

Both readings fit the text and they do not exclude one another. A matter can be both asked of one another and asked insistently; the two most often go together.

There is one more point on which the grammarians differ over this verse: who is asking the question?

The majority's preference is that the question is a question of astonishment and magnification. The principle recorded for the formula mā adrāka in the section on al-Qāriʿa applies here too: in the Qurʾān a question is most often asked not to seek an answer but to show the greatness of what is asked about.

The plainest proof of this is the next verse: no sooner is the question asked than the text itself gives the answer. There is no silence between the two verses.

ʿAni'l-nabaʾi'l-ʿaẓīm "About the great tidings."

The preceding verse asked "about what"; this verse says "about this". Question and answer come from the same text, one after the other.

The rhetoricians have a name for this technique and describe its working thus: the question is asked first so that the hearer's mind opens to await the answer; then the answer is given and lands the more heavily on a mind that has been waiting. In this commentary we saw a three-stage form of this technique in Sūrat al-Qāriʿa.

But there is a difference here. In al-Qāriʿa the question closed with "you cannot know". Here the question is answered at once — and the answer given is not a definition but a name: the great tidings. The matter is named, not described.

This distinction is the load the sūra's name carries, and it needs dwelling on.

Root: ن-ب-أ. Beneath the root lies the idea of coming from one place to another, arriving, being carried across. The lexicographers record the usage nabaʾa mina'l-makān — "he came out from a place". News, then, is what is carried: what breaks off from one place and arrives at another.

Its derivatives:

• نَبَّأَ / أَنْبَأَ — he gave news, he informed. "Inform them of their names" (al-Baqara 2/33).
• إِنْبَاء / تَنْبِئَة — informing.
• نَبِيّ — prophet.

The relation of the word نبي to this root. The lexicographers give two derivations and both have been defended in the classical sources:

The first derivation has a piece of evidence: it is transmitted that the word is also read in the form نَبِيء (with hamza), and the hamzated reading attaches the word directly to the root nabaʾ. The widespread reading without hamza is the form nabiyy.

The second derivation is also possible linguistically and is explained as "the prophet stands in a high position among his people".

I do not impose a preference. But this must be recorded: the name of this sūra is nabaʾ, and the subject of the sūra is a piece of news. That the word comes from the same root as prophethood is an instance of something met many times in this commentary: the Qurʾān's key concepts often come from the same root families.

Now to the real distinction.

Arabic has two words for news: خَبَر and نَبَأ. Both are rendered into English as "news"; in Arabic the two are not the same thing.

The definition recorded in al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī's al-Mufradāt and widely transmitted in the exegetical tradition runs thus: a nabaʾ is news that carries great benefit and by which knowledge or a strong conviction comes about; a report is not called nabaʾ unless it carries these three conditions.

The three conditions:

Khabar, on the other hand, requires none of these. A report may be true or false, important or trivial. In Arabic the grammatical term khabar (the predicate of a sentence) also comes from this root — that is, the word is as broad as "anything at all said about a subject".

The pair that best captures the difference in English is this: khabar — information; nabaʾ — notice, in the sense of a notice that is served on someone. One is passed on; the other is delivered.

But I must add a note to this definition. The Qurʾān itself uses the word nabaʾ for a false report as well:

"O you who believe! If a transgressor brings you a piece of news (نَبَأ), verify it." (al-Ḥujurāt 49/6)

Here, far from the news being true, the verse commands that it be verified. Nabaʾ, then, is not a word that guarantees truth.

This does not invalidate the definition but puts it in its right place: the condition of a nabaʾ is not that the news be true, but that it be of the kind that would carry weight if it were true. The news in al-Ḥujurāt is of that kind — news heavy enough to lead to an expedition against a community. The verse would not say "verify it" of a trivial piece of gossip.

What determines a nabaʾ, then, is its consequence. A nabaʾ is news such that when it is heard something has to change.

This is exactly the subject of this sūra. The news of the resurrection is, if true, news that requires the whole of life to be reordered. If false, nothing changes. There is no middle.

And when we join this to the sūra's first verse, the picture that emerges is this: the news of the highest weight has become the news most talked about and least acted on.

Root: ع-ظ-م. And the concrete sense of the root is bone: عَظْم (ʿaẓm) — bone.

This connection is one the lexicographers record: bone is the hardest and most enduring part of the body; it is a creature's skeleton, its bearer. ʿAẓīm — bony, big-boned, well-framed; and from there great, exalted.

The English expressions "big-boned" and "heavy-set" carry the same logic. And note: Arabic has more than one word for greatness (kabīr, ʿaẓīm, jasīm); the distinguishing side of ʿaẓīm is that the greatness belongs to a frame that is carried.

The choice of the word in this sūra is meaningful. The news is described not as "much" (kathīr) but as "great" (ʿaẓīm). The weight of the matter, then, lies not in number but in bulk.

The exegetes have differed over what this phrase corresponds to:

The majority's preference is the first and its ground is strong: the context is given over entirely to the resurrection.

But that the phrase in Ṣād 38/67 is word for word the same is a datum worth noting and should not be ignored. What emerges when the two verses are set side by side is this: the Qurʾān can use the expression "great tidings" both of itself and of the resurrection. This is not a contradiction — because the core of the news the Qurʾān carries is the resurrection in any case.

The views do not exclude one another: the Qurʾān is the carrier of this news, prophethood is the manner in which the news is delivered, and the resurrection is the content of the news.

The definite article. The word comes with al-: a particular piece of news. The addressees, that is, know what it is; the sūra is not introducing it to them but recalling it. The definite article presupposes a shared knowledge: the parties know what is being talked about.

This makes the question of the sūra's first verse more meaningful still. "About what are they questioning one another?" — the question does not come from ignorance; what is being asked about is what everyone knows.

Alladhī hum fīhi mukhtalifūn "That over which they are in disagreement."

Root: خ-ل-ف. The original sense of the root is to be behind, to come after. The derivatives show the concreteness of the root:

• خَلْف — the back, what is behind. "What is before them and what is behind them" (al-Baqara 2/255).
• خَلِيفَة — a caliph; one who comes after another and takes his place. This word was treated in detail at al-Baqara 2/30.
• خِلَاف — remaining behind; and being at variance.
• إِخْلَاف — to break one's word; to fall behind the promise one has given.
• اِسْتِخْلَاف — to put someone in another's place.

اِخْتِلَاف is in Form VIII and its sense is this: to go behind one another, that is, not to walk on the same road, each to follow a different track.

This is a little different from what the English word "disagreement" covers. In English a disagreement is a failure to agree; in Arabic the picture the root gives is a parting of ways: a group of people are walking and some turn one way and some another, and the distance between them opens.

This concrete side of the word matters, because the outcome of disagreement is not a debate but a dispersal. And as has been recorded several times in this commentary (in detail in the section on al-Bayyina), the Qurʾān's harshest finding about disagreement is this: division most often comes not before the proof arrives but after it.

The two questions must be taken separately.

First — what is the disagreement about?

The verse says "about it"; the pronoun refers back to the nabaʾ of the preceding verse. The subject of the disagreement, then, is the great tidings.

And the disagreement over resurrection really was many-sided in Mecca. The responses the Qurʾān records are not of one type:

• Flat denial: "There is nothing but our life in this world; we die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time" (al-Jāthiya 45/24).
• Regarding it as impossible: "When we have become bones and crumbled dust, shall we be raised in a new creation?" (al-Isrāʾ 17/49).
• Demanding it in mockery: "When is this promise?" (Yūnus 10/48).
• Waiting in doubt: attitudes of the kind "we only suppose; we are not certain" (al-Jāthiya 45/32).
• Accepting it but understanding it otherwise: in some reports it is transmitted that certain groups understood the resurrection as a spiritual return.

The disagreement, then, does not reduce to the pair "is there or isn't there". It is a cloud of opinion formed around a piece of news.

Second — who is disagreeing with whom?

The first view has support in the text: the verb in the first verse is تَسَاءَل — they ask one another. That the question circulates among themselves suggests that the disagreement too is among themselves.

The second view is possible as well and the two do not exclude one another: a community rejecting a piece of news can be divided both against the other side and within itself.

An observation, and my own reading. That those who reject a piece of news should be divided among themselves is a symptom of the groundlessness of the rejection. The truth of a thing is defended in one way; its falsity can be asserted in many, because there is no alternative in hand — only an objection.

I record this not as something the text says but as a reading I draw from the text.

ٱلَّذِى — a relative pronoun. It is in the genitive as an adjective of the al-nabaʾ of the preceding verse.

There is a striking choice of word order: the sentence is built not as مُخْتَلِفُونَ فِيهِ (those disagreeing about it) but as هُمْ فِيهِ مُخْتَلِفُونَ. That is, fīhi (about it) has been brought forward.

In Arabic an element brought forward from its normal place gains specification and emphasis. The emphasis here means: that is what they disagree about — and nothing else.

And that the sentence is a nominal sentence is meaningful too. A verbal sentence (yakhtalifūna fīhi) could have been built; it was not. As has been recorded several times in this commentary, a nominal sentence conveys continuity and settledness. The disagreement, then, is not a passing argument; it is a settled condition.

The first three verses prepare, in three steps, the ground on which the rest of the sūra will be built:

1. There is a conversation (yatasāʾalūn) — the matter is on the agenda. 2. What is being talked about is weighty (al-nabaʾu'l-ʿaẓīm) — the matter is serious. 3. But there is no settlement (mukhtalifūn) — the matter is unresolved.

This triad explains why the rest of the sūra is built as it is. Faced with a weighty and unresolved matter there are two things one can do: join the argument, or change the ground of the argument.

The sūra does the second. From the sixth verse on, the resurrection is not argued; something else is related.

And a link needs making. In the third verse there is ikhtilāf (parting); in the seventeenth will come يَوْمَ ٱلْفَصْلِ (the day of separation). The two words are from different roots, but their work runs in the same direction: the one names people's parting over a matter, the other the settling of that parting by a decision.

The sūra, that is, gives the day of separation as the answer to a matter over which people have parted. The resolution of a disagreement is not debate but a verdict.

I record this as a reading I draw from the places the two words occupy within the sūra.

Kallā sa-yaʿlamūn · Thumma kallā sa-yaʿlamūn "No indeed! They shall know. Then no indeed! They shall know."

This particle occurs in nearly thirty places in the Qurʾān and all of them are in the second half of the codex — that is, predominantly in short Meccan sūras. In this commentary we have met it before in the sections on al-Takāthur, al-Humaza, al-ʿAlaq and al-Balad.

The lexicographers divide over the particle's function:

Some lexicographers say the particle carries the first sense everywhere; others accept that it varies with the context.

In this verse the first sense looks the more fitting, because there is something before it to be rejected: the questioning and the disagreement. Kallā cuts the conversation off.

And this is exactly what the particle does: a cut that comes down into the middle of a conversation. For three verses the sūra reported their talk; in the fourth it breaks in and stops the talk.

Root: ع-ل-م. To know. And the سَ at the head of the verb is the particle of the future.

What has to be noticed here is that the verb is used as a threat.

In Arabic — and in English — the sentence "you will know" says two things according to the context: either a promise of information ("don't worry, you'll find out") or a threat ("you'll see"). What separates the two is how the knowledge will come.

The verse is in the second sense, and we know this from the following: the knowledge is promised not as an instruction but as an encounter. The rest of the sūra will relate how this knowledge will come — the trumpet will be blown, the sky will open, the mountains will become a mirage.

The full force of the sentence, then, is this: "You will find out — but not by asking; by seeing."

And this is the very distinction set up in the section on al-Takāthur: the difference between ʿilm al-yaqīn (the certainty that comes by report) and ʿayn al-yaqīn (the certainty that comes by sight). Sūrat al-Takāthur used the same formula: "No indeed! You shall come to know. Then no indeed! You shall come to know." (al-Takāthur 102/3-4).

These two verses of the two sūras are almost word for word the same. In al-Takāthur it is kallā sawfa taʿlamūn (second person, with sawfa), in al-Nabaʾ kallā sa-yaʿlamūn (third person, with sa-).

The differences are small but worth recording:

The difference between سَ and سَوْفَ. According to the majority of lexicographers sawfa conveys a more distant future and sa- a nearer one. Some lexicographers do not accept this distinction and count the two equivalent.

If the distinction is accepted, a meaningful conclusion follows here: in Sūrat al-Nabaʾ the coming of the knowledge is marked as near. And the last verse of the sūra will say this plainly: إِنَّآ أَنذَرْنَٰكُمْ عَذَابًا قَرِيبًا — "We have warned you of a punishment near at hand" (78/40).

The particle at the beginning of the sūra and the adjective at its end, then, say the same thing. I record this as an observation conditional on the acceptance of the distinction; I noted above that some of the lexicographers do not accept it.

The two verses are identical; the only difference is the ثُمَّ at the head of the second.

The exegetes' views on the repetition:

The fourth view is worth dwelling on, because this use of the particle thumma is recognised in Arabic and has a name: التراخي في الرتبة (distance in rank). The particle conveys not an interval of time between two things but an interval of value.

In English the counterpart is roughly: "You will know. And how you will know…"

If this reading is accepted, the repetition is not the saying of the same sentence twice; it is the second surpassing the first.

I state no preference. The second and fourth views are the ones that sit most easily with the text; both are defensible and neither excludes the other.

Now let us read the four verses together:

"About what are they questioning one another? About the great tidings — that over which they are in disagreement. No indeed! They shall know. Then no indeed! They shall know."

The question was asked, the subject was named, but no answer was given.

At first sight this may look like a gap. It is not; it is the sūra's method.

The answer to the question is not given because the question itself is not a request for information. That is what the tasāʾul form set up in the first verse: the matter had turned into talk. Adding information to a matter that has turned into talk lengthens the talk; it does not close it.

Instead the sūra does two things. First it cuts the talk off (kallā), then it starts from somewhere else: the earth, in the sixth verse.

A similar method was recorded in this commentary in the sections on al-Kawthar and al-Ḍuḥā: changing the measure without arguing the claim. Sūrat al-Nabaʾ does the same — it does not argue the resurrection; it sets before the addressee the ground the resurrection already stands on.

These eleven verses are a single sentence and hang on a single question: أَلَمْ نَجْعَلِ — "Did We not make?"

Before treating the verses one by one it is necessary to look at the tableau as a whole, because there is something that escapes a verse-by-verse reading.

أَ (the interrogative hamza) + لَمْ (the particle of negation) = the asking of a negative.

In Arabic this pattern is called istifhām taqrīrī: a question asked in order to make the addressee admit from his own mouth something he already knows and cannot deny.

The logic of the pattern is this: when a negative sentence is turned into a question, the answer must be affirmative. The only honest answer that can be given to "Did We not make?" is "You did."

English has the same structure and it does the same work: "Didn't I tell you?" does not ask for information; it extracts an admission.

Why has this pattern been chosen? Because the sūra's addressee is a denier and what he denies lies in the future. It is hard to bring proof about the future; it is easy about the past. The sūra pulls the argument from the future into the past.

And note: not one of the things asked about is in dispute. That the earth can be stood upon, that the mountains are there, that sleep rests, that the night covers, that the sun warms, that the rain falls — none of this was being argued in Mecca.

The sūra builds a bridge from the undisputed to the disputed.

Eleven verses count eleven items. Let us see them together:

Now look at the list a second time.

Cradle. Peg. Covering. Firm structure. Lamp. Water. Garden.

These are the inventory of a house.

To put it more narrowly still: of a tent. The peg is what fastens the tent to the ground; the covering is the tent's cloth; the lamp is what lights the inside; the bed is what one sleeps in; the water and the garden are the livelihood of the place where the tent is pitched. And the verb in the twelfth verse is بَنَيْنَا — we built.

The sūra, that is, describes the earth as a dwelling that has been set up. Not as nature but as housing.

I record this as my own reading. The individual senses of the words are not in dispute and will be treated separately below; that together they form a tableau of a dwelling is a conclusion I have drawn. Some of the classical exegetes gather these verses under the heading "the enumeration of favours"; the connection with a dwelling is a reading I have added.

But this reading has a confirmation within the text and it will come in the nineteenth and twentieth verses. There:

• The sky will become doors (19) — the building is opened up.
• The mountains will become a mirage (20) — the pegs are pulled out.

The tent that was pitched is struck. And in the striking, exactly the two items used in the pitching are named: the sky and the mountains.

This symmetry is in the text; my reading rests on it.

One more observation. Look at the verbs in the eleven verses:

The dominant verb is جَعَلَ and this verb's property in Arabic matters: khalaqa (to create) conveys bringing into being out of nothing; jaʿala conveys putting what exists into a state, assigning it to a task.

The tableau, then, relates not the bringing into being of things but their arrangement. It does not say the earth was created; it says we made the earth a cradle. The difference is this: the first is a question of existence, the second a question of design.

And this is precisely what the sūra's argument requires. The resurrection is not a repetition of creation out of nothing; it is an arrangement carried out a second time.

A-lam najʿali'l-arḍa mihādā "Did We not make the earth a cradle?"

Root: م-ه-د. The concrete sense of the root is to smooth, to spread, to prepare — especially to spread out a bed, to level and ready what lies beneath.

Its derivatives:

• مَهْد (mahd) — a cradle. In the Qurʾān it is used of Jesus (ʿĪsā): "He will speak to people in the cradle and in maturity" (Āl ʿImrān 3/46); "How shall we speak to a child in the cradle?" (Maryam 19/29).
• مِهَاد (mihād) — a spread-out bed, a mattress. It is also transmitted that it may be counted a plural of mahd.
• مَهَّدَ (mahhada) — he levelled, he prepared, he made the ground ready. "And I prepared for him ample means" (al-Muddaththir 74/14).
• تَمْهِيد — the preparing of the ground; the word is current in Turkish as well.

The word's two directions. Mihād occurs in the Qurʾān in both a favourable and an unfavourable context. It is used of the Fire as well: "For them there is a bed of Hellfire" (al-Aʿrāf 7/41); "What an evil bed!" (al-Baqara 2/206; Āl ʿImrān 3/12). The word, that is, is neither good nor bad in itself; it names what is spread beneath.

This is the same as the principle recorded for mabthūth in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the word names not a quality but a position.

At al-Baqara 2/22 the same thing was named with another word:

"He who made the earth a bed (فِرَاش) for you."

What was recorded there will not be repeated here; the finding there was this: firāsh is what is spread out, what the word says is not the shape of the earth but its function, and to draw from it a conclusion such as "the earth is flat" is to make the word say what it does not say.

The same note holds here. A cradle is not flat either — a cradle is a vessel whose sides are raised in order to hold what lies in it.

Now to the difference between the two words:

The two words say the same thing but take hold of it from different places. Firāsh looks at the ground: this has been spread out. Mihād looks at the one in it: this has been prepared for someone.

And the sense of mahd as cradle adds one thing more.

A cradle carries three properties at once:

1. Protection. A cradle has sides; what is in it does not fall out. 2. Movement. A cradle is not fixed; it rocks. And the rocking is not a discomfort but what puts one to sleep. 3. Impermanence. No one stays in a cradle. A cradle is where one stays until one grows.

The third item is meaningful for the sūra as a whole, and I record it as my own reading.

The subject of the sūra is the resurrection — that is, a passage from here to somewhere else. And the word chosen for the earth is precisely the name of a place one does not stay in. A cradle is not a final stop but a starting place.

Joined with the sūra's last verse this reading becomes plainer still. In the fortieth verse the denier will say "would that I were dust" — that is, he will want to return to the material of the cradle. This is the attitude of a child who does not want to leave the cradle.

I offer this as a reading; I do not claim it is what the verse intends. But both words are in the text: mihād in the sixth verse, turāb in the fortieth.

A literature has grown up in the modern period around this verse — and around the next: the earth's "rocking" like a cradle, plate movements, and connections of that kind.

This commentary does not go down that road and the ground for that is recorded in Method. The reason is this: the verse is not giving a piece of geology; it is reminding its addressee of something he already knows. For the argument to work, the addressee must be able to verify it. What a seventh-century Meccan could verify is that the ground he lives on is liveable — not plate movements.

Dressing a verse in modern knowledge does not strengthen the argument; it changes its addressee.

Wa'l-jibāla awtādā "And the mountains pegs?"

It hangs on the verb of the preceding verse: "Did We not make the mountains pegs too?"

Root: و-ت-د. وَتِد (watid) — a peg, a nail, a pointed piece of wood or iron driven into the ground. Its plural is أَوْتَاد.

The word's principal use in Arab culture is for the tent peg. A tent stands by having its cloth fastened to the ground with pegs. Without the pegs the tent goes with the wind.

And this describes the peg's function exactly: a peg exists not for itself but for what it holds. The visible part of a peg is small; its work is done in the invisible part, inside the earth.

This word occurs in the Qurʾān once more, as an epithet of Pharaoh:

"…and Pharaoh, the lord of the pegs." (Ṣād 38/12)

"And with Pharaoh, the lord of the pegs [what did your Lord do]?" (al-Fajr 89/10)

Two views are transmitted about the sense of the expression:

The first view sits more easily linguistically; the second has also been transmitted.

Now let us set the two uses side by side — and I record this as my own reading:

In Sūrat al-Nabaʾ the mountains are God's pegs. In Sūrat al-Fajr and Sūrat Ṣād Pharaoh too has pegs. And the next sūra — al-Nāziʿāt — will show what became of Pharaoh's pegs: "So God seized him with the punishment of the hereafter and of this world" (79/25).

The difference between the two sets of pegs is this: one is still in place, the other has been pulled out. And the twentieth verse of the sūra will say a third thing: God's pegs too will be pulled out — but in their time and by His hand.

The data this reading rests on are in the text: the three occurrences of the word awtād, and al-Nāziʿāt's coming immediately after al-Nabaʾ. The one who makes the link is I.

This expression is one of the Qurʾānic expressions most strained in the modern period. The rule recorded in Method will be applied here: a verse is not forcibly dressed in modern knowledge.

First let us see what the verse says. The verse says nothing about the shape of mountains. It says nothing about their structure, their depth, their formation. The only thing it says is a function: mountains do for the earth what a peg does for a tent.

The Qurʾān states this function plainly elsewhere:

"And He placed firm mountains on the earth lest it shake with you." (al-Naḥl 16/15; a similar expression at al-Anbiyāʾ 21/31 and Luqmān 31/10)

The verb here is أَن تَمِيدَ بِكُمْ — mayd: to sway, to lurch (it is used of a ship's rolling at sea as well). The function of mountains, then, is related as stabilising.

Now let me say where the straining begins. To set out from these verses and say "the Qurʾān announced the underground roots of mountains and isostatic balance" carries three separate problems:

1. The verse does not say it. In the peg comparison, the peg's being sunk into the ground is already contained in the word; this is not a geological claim but the word's own picture. 2. It breaks the argument. As was recorded above, the function of verses six to sixteen is to enumerate things the addressee can verify. Something that cannot be verified cannot be used as a proof. 3. It makes the text dependent on science. If the truth of a verse is tied to today's scientific model, what becomes of the verse when the model changes? This method makes fragile the very thing it wants to defend.

Can no relation at all, then, be made between the verse and present knowledge?

The honest relation that can be made is this, and I write it with the note that it is one way of looking: that the distribution of the earth's mass has to do with the planet's rotation and balance is something known today. The "stabilising" function the verse states and this knowledge do not contradict one another.

But this is not to say "the verse announced this". The verse names a visible function; science investigates the mechanism of that function. The two are not speaking on the same plane.

Read the two verses together: the earth a cradle, the mountains pegs.

A cradle moves; a peg fixes. Set side by side, what comes out of the two is a balance: neither wholly fixed nor wholly in motion.

And this stands in the words themselves. The use of a cradle is in its rocking — but on condition that it does not tip over. The use of a tent is in its being pitchable — but on condition that it does not blow away.

I record this as my own reading; it rests on the two verses' coming one after the other.

Wa khalaqnākum azwājā "And We created you in pairs."

In the sixth and seventh verses the verb was جَعَلَ. Here it moves to خَلَقَ, and in the next verse it will return to jaʿala.

The distinction recorded above is at work here: jaʿala conveys the arranging of what exists, khalaqa the bringing into being. And for the human being the verb of creation is used.

The question form is left behind as well: the sixth verse was "did We not make?"; this verse is a plain declarative. The grammarians explain this by saying that the question form continues in sense (that is, it means "did We not create you in pairs?"); some accept that the pattern changes where the sentence begins.

Root: ز-و-ج.

There is a trap here for the English speaker and it has to be cleared first. In Arabic زَوْج is not "a pair" but "one of a pair". A person, that is, is the zawj of his or her spouse; the two together make zawjān (two singles).

English keeps this distinction in the word spouse, which names one person, while couple and pair cover the two together. When reading the Qurʾān this difference matters.

The word's original sense is this: that which is completed by being alongside another. One is not a zawj on one's own; to be a zawj a partner is needed. The word, that is, describes a being not by itself but by its relation.

Its derivatives:

• زَوَّجَ — to marry, to pair. And in the scene of the resurrection in the Qurʾān: "When the souls are paired" (al-Takwīr 81/7).
• زَوْجَيْنِ — two mates. "Of everything We created two mates" (al-Dhāriyāt 51/49); "Of every fruit He made two mates" (al-Raʿd 13/3).

Both readings have been defended in the classical sources. The first is the more widespread.

An observation. Of the eleven items counted in this tableau, only one is the human being himself — and even that is named with a word of relation.

The earth, the mountain, sleep, the night, the day, the sky, the sun, the cloud, the grain, the garden: all of these are things outside the human being. In the eighth verse the sūra turns for a moment from outside to inside and counts the human being himself. But it counts him not as a being on his own but as a paired being.

I record this as my own reading. And I draw this conclusion: the sūra counts the human being too as a part of the tableau — that is, the human being is not a spectator standing outside the house prepared for him but a part of the furnishing of the house.

The place of this verse within the sūra's argument is plain and the Qurʾān makes it explicit elsewhere:

"Does the human being suppose he will be left to himself? Was he not a drop of spilled fluid? Then he was a clot; then [God] created him and formed him. Then He made of him the two mates, the male and the female. Is He who does this not able to bring the dead to life?" (al-Qiyāma 75/36-40)

This sequence of verses is the plain form of the argument of Sūrat al-Nabaʾ: paired creation is the proof of a second creation.

And the four-stage proof recorded at al-Baqara 2/28 worked from the same place: "You were dead and He gave you life…" — the stage objected to is the repetition of a stage that has already taken place.

Wa jaʿalnā nawmakum subātā "And We made your sleep a cutting-off."

Root: س-ب-ت. And the original sense of this root is usually lost in English translations.

The concrete sense of the root: to cut, to sever, to bring to an end.

Its derivatives:

• سَبَتَ ٱلشَّعْرَ — he cut the hair.
• ٱلسَّبْت — cutting; and the name of Saturday. It bears this name because it is the day on which the Jews cut off work.
• سُبَات — sleep; the cutting off of movement, of work, of perception.
• مَسْبُوت — motionless, unconscious.

Its use in the Qurʾān confirms this sense:

"Ask them about the town by the sea: when they transgressed on the Sabbath; on the day they kept Sabbath their fish came to them in shoals, and on the day they did not keep Sabbath they did not come." (al-Aʿrāf 7/163)

The verb here is يَسْبِتُونَ and its sense is "to cut off work". The root, then, in the Qurʾān's own usage, carries the sense of "cutting".

Now back to the verse. The verse does not name sleep "rest" (rāḥa). Nor does it name it "ease". It names it "a cutting-off".

And this is an extremely sharp description of what sleep is. Sleep is not an activity; it is the stopping of activity. In sleep you do nothing; you cease doing.

The second reading is especially meaningful in the context of this sūra, and it is supported by the Qurʾān itself:

"God takes the souls at the moment of their death, and those that have not died [He takes] in their sleep. Then He holds back the one for which He has decreed death and releases the other until a stated term." (al-Zumar 39/42)

"It is He who takes you by night and knows what you have done by day, then raises you up in it so that a stated term may be fulfilled." (al-Anʿām 6/60)

The verbs in this second verse are decisive: يَتَوَفَّاكُم (He takes you in death) and يَبْعَثُكُمْ (He raises you up). The Qurʾān uses the verbs of death and resurrection for sleeping and waking.

And the sūra's argument builds itself once again.

The sūra's addressee finds the resurrection impossible. The sūra reminds him that he dies once every night and is raised once every morning — and that, because he calls it "sleep", he does not notice.

I record this as a reading I have drawn by joining the verse's own word (subāt = a cutting-off) with the Qurʾān's other verses about sleep. Some of the classical exegetes make this link; not all do.

There is one more thing to record and it concerns what comes later in the sūra.

In the twenty-fourth verse it will be said that the people of the Fire will taste no بَرْدًا (coolness). And on one view the word bard there means sleep — because the Arabs called sleep bard, since sleep cools the body.

If that view is accepted, a link is made between the two ends of the sūra: the sleep counted as a favour in the ninth verse becomes, in the twenty-fourth, the thing withdrawn.

Since I do not rely on the certainty of that view I record the link as a possibility; I shall give the disagreement separately in its place.

Wa jaʿalna'l-layla libāsā · Wa jaʿalna'l-nahāra maʿāshā "And We made the night a garment. And We made the day a [time of] livelihood."

Root: ل-ب-س. And beneath this root lie two senses; both occur in the Qurʾān and both come out of the same idea.

1. To wear, to cover. لِبَاس — a garment, clothing. لَبِسَ — he wore.

2. To mix, to render indistinct. لَبَسَ عَلَيْهِ — he confused the matter for him, he clouded his mind. اِلْتِبَاس — confusion, indistinctness.

The Qurʾān uses the second sense as well:

"Those who did not mix their faith with wrongdoing…" (al-Anʿām 6/82 — the verb here is yalbisū)

"Had We sent [the Prophet] as a man, We would have confused for them what they are confusing." (al-Anʿām 6/9 — wa la-labasnā ʿalayhim mā yalbisūn)

"Do not mix the truth with falsehood." (al-Baqara 2/42 — wa lā talbisū'l-ḥaqqa bi'l-bāṭil)

The idea that unites the two senses is this: covering a thing over makes it invisible or indistinguishable. A garment covers the body; mixing covers the truth. In English too the expression "to cover up" covers both.

Now back to the night. The night does both at once:

• It covers. It hides what is visible; it conceals a person from eyes.
• It renders indistinct. In darkness the boundaries of things are lost; distinguishing becomes hard.

The choice of the word is apt for this reason. "Darkness" (ẓulma) could have been said; "covering" (ghiṭāʾ) could have been said. Garment was said.

A garment differs from a covering in this: a garment is what is worn, not what is thrown over. A covering is cast over you; a garment moves with you, takes the shape of your body.

And the Qurʾān uses this word in one other place, of a very close relation:

"They are a garment for you, and you are a garment for them." (al-Baqara 2/187 — of spouses)

What libās relates there is not merely covering; it is closeness, protection and fitting one another. There is no gap between a garment and the body.

The choosing of this word for the night relates the night's enclosing of a person. The night is not something outside; it is a state one is inside.

The Qurʾān sets up this pair elsewhere too:

"It is He who made the night a covering for you, and sleep a rest, and the day a rising and dispersing." (al-Furqān 25/47)

This verse counts nearly the same triad as al-Nabaʾ 78/9-11: night, sleep, day. The words differ (libās for libās, subāt for subāt, nushūr for maʿāsh), but the order is the same.

And the last word in al-Furqān is striking: نُشُور — dispersing and spreading out. The same word is used in the Qurʾān for the resurrection as well: "and to Him is the raising (nushūr)" (al-Mulk 67/15).

The Qurʾān, that is, names waking and dispersing in the day and rising and dispersing from the graves with the same word. This is a repetition, in another word, of the sleep–death link recorded at the ninth verse — and this time the link stands in the Qurʾān's own choice of word, not in my inference.

Root: ع-ي-ش. To live. This root was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the word عِيشَة (ʿīsha) was taken up there and it was recorded that the fiʿla pattern conveys "the manner of doing".

مَعَاش, on the other hand, is a verbal noun with mīm or a noun of time/place. It can therefore bear three senses:

All three have been defended in the classical sources and they make no great difference to the sense: the day is the time in which living is done.

Now set the two verses side by side:

Two favours, named with words of two different kinds. The night is a thing; the day is a doing.

And this accords with what each does to a person: by night one enters into something; by day one does something.

I record this as my own reading; that the two words differ in grammatical kind, however, is a datum of the language.

A note. This pair was treated in detail in this commentary in the sections on al-Layl and al-Shams. There it was taken up how night and day form a pair in the Qurʾān, with what verbs they are named, and how their order changes. That is not repeated here; the difference in this sūra is that both are counted as favours — not as objects of an oath.

Wa banaynā fawqakum sabʿan shidādā · Wa jaʿalnā sirājan wahhājā "And We built above you seven firm [heavens]. And We made a blazing lamp."

Root: ب-ن-ي. To build, to construct. بِنَاء — a building. بَنَّاء — a mason, a builder.

This verb was used of the sky at al-Baqara 2/22: "and the sky a building" (wa'l-samāʾa bināʾ). What was recorded there was this: the sky is named not "void" but a structure that has been built.

Here the same root comes as a verb. And it adds one more thing to the tableau: this is the plainest proof of the dwelling reading recorded above. After the cradle, the peg and the covering, the verb that comes is "we built".

فَوْقَكُمْ — "above you". An adverb, and it states position. This word completes the tableau: below, a cradle; at the sides, pegs; above, a building.

سَبْعًا — a number; the noun it qualifies (samāwāt) has been elided and the adjective left standing. This is a common abbreviation in Arabic.

The number seven was treated at al-Baqara 2/29. What was recorded there was this: there are two readings — seven as a number, or a seven that conveys multiplicity — and which is meant is not certain. It was also stated there that to produce a modern list of the kind "the seven heavens are such and such layers" is not exegesis but forcing.

The same note holds here; it is not repeated.

شِدَاد — firm.

Root: ش-د-د. The concrete sense of the root is to bind, to bind tightly. شَدَّ — he bound, he tightened. شِدَّة — tightness, hardness, severity. أَشَدّ — firmer, stronger.

And the root's sense of "binding" fits the dwelling tableau: a tent is pitched by being tied, fastened with pegs, its ropes drawn taut. Shidād means that which does not slacken.

A link with the next sūra. At al-Nāziʿāt 79/27 the same root will come again in connection with the sky:

"Are you harder to create, or the sky? He built it." (al-Nāziʿāt 79/27)

The word there is أَشَدُّ خَلْقًا — the same root. And the verb that follows is بَنَاهَا — the same root as the banaynā of this verse.

Two neighbouring sūras use the same two roots for the sky: ب-ن-ي and ش-د-د. This is a verifiable datum and one of the most concrete signs of the kinship of the two sūras. This link will be returned to in the section on al-Nāziʿāt.

سِرَاج — Root: س-ر-ج. A lamp, a torch, an oil lamp. An instrument that burns and gives light.

The word is used of the sun in several places in the Qurʾān:

"And He set among them a lamp and an illuminating moon." (al-Furqān 25/61)

"And He made the sun a lamp." (Nūḥ 71/16)

"And [We sent you] as an illuminating lamp." (al-Aḥzāb 33/46 — of the Prophet)

Now an observation about the language, and a note to be attached to it.

In the Qurʾān the sun is named سِرَاج (a lamp); the moon is named نُور (light) or مُنِير (illuminating). Al-Furqān 25/61 uses both in one sentence: sirāj for the sun, munīr for the moon. Yūnus 10/5 makes the distinction as well: "He made the sun a radiance (ḍiyāʾ) and the moon a light (nūr)."

In Arabic a sirāj is an instrument that is kindled: it burns, it is consumed, it gives heat. Nūr is light itself and requires no burning.

I record this distinction, but I do not offer it as a claim of a scientific miracle — and I must write the ground for that:

That the sun burns and the moon does not is something known to the naked eye. One cannot look at the sun; one can look at the moon. The sun gives heat; the moon does not. A seventh-century Meccan knew this, and Arabic's having two separate words amounts to no more than that observation being recorded in the language.

The fit here, that is, is the apt use of words — which does say something about the quality of a text. But to say "the Qurʾān announced that the sun burns by nuclear fusion" is to make the verse say what it does not say, and it is forbidden in Method.

وَهَّاج — Root: و-ه-ج. The blazing of a flame, giving a hot light. وَهَج — the heat and light of a flame together.

The word is on the فَعَّال pattern; in Arabic this pattern conveys intensity: doing much, doing continually.

And what the word relates is the togetherness of light and heat. Wahhāj is used not when a thing merely shines but when it burns.

This accords with the sun's function in the sūra: in the eleventh verse the day was named "livelihood"; livelihood wants heat and light. In the fifteenth verse grain and plants will come forth; both need the sun.

The word appears to occur only here in the Qurʾān. I do not offer this finding as the result of an exhaustive search; what I record is that the word is rare.

Wa anzalnā mina'l-muʿṣirāti māʾan thajjājā · Li-nukhrija bihī ḥabban wa nabātā · Wa jannātin alfāfā "And We sent down from the pressing ones water pouring down — that with it We might bring forth grain and plants, and gardens thickly entwined."

Root: ع-ص-ر. This root was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAṣr; it will not be repeated here, and the finding there will be relied on.

What was recorded there was this: the concrete sense of the root is to press — to squeeze a thing and bring out the liquid inside. ʿAṣīr (fruit juice), miʿṣara (a press), iʿṣār (a whirling storm) are all from this root. And in the section on al-ʿAṣr this verse was already named: muʿṣirāt are "those that have come to the point of releasing their load".

The word is a plural active participle (the plural of muʿṣira) and it is in Form IV: أَعْصَرَ — to come to the time of pressing, to reach the state of being pressed.

This pattern is important. The word does not mean "those that press" but "those that have come to the point of pressing" — like the pattern used in saying the tree has come to the age of bearing fruit. The cloud, that is, has not yet let go of its rain but is about to; it is too full to carry its load.

The majority's preference is "clouds" and the most natural sense of the particle مِنْ (place of origin) supports it.

But the second view is meaningful too and has a striking side: it is the wind that presses the cloud. Since the original sense of the root is "to press", using the active participle of the one that presses is linguistically the more direct.

I do not impose a preference. Both views preserve the sense of the root; the difference is whether the presser or the pressed is meant.

Root: ث-ج-ج. ثَجَّ ٱلْمَاءَ — he made water pour, he poured it out. Thajj is pouring that is copious and loud; not seeping, not dripping.

The word is again on the فَعَّال pattern — like wahhāj, conveying intensity: pouring much and hard.

A note on a hadith. In the hadith literature, in a well-known saying transmitted about the pilgrimage, two words come side by side: العج والثج — ʿajj (raising the voice in the talbiya) and thajj (making the blood of the sacrifice flow). Since I cannot give certain information about the source in which this report occurs or the wording in which it occurs, I write no source; what I record is that the word is used in Arabic in the sense of "copious pouring".

Two intensive patterns side by side. In the thirteenth verse wahhāj (blazing), in the fourteenth thajjāj (pouring). Two consecutive verses, two faʿʿāl patterns, and both fire and water — two elements opposed to one another.

I record this as an observation. That the verse-endings rhyme as well (wahhājā / thajjājā) supports the pairing by sound too.

حَبّ — Root: ح-ب-ب. A grain, a seed, a kernel. Cereal grain.

نَبَات — Root: ن-ب-ت. To sprout, to grow green. Everything that grows in the soil.

The order is meaningful. First ḥabb (grain), then nabāt (plant). And some of the exegetes distinguish the two thus: ḥabb is the cereal a human being eats, nabāt the fodder an animal eats.

This distinction is not certain; both words can be used more broadly. But the later part of the sūra supports it: in the next sūra, where the same tableau is set up, it will be said "an enjoyment for you and for your livestock" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/33).

لِنُخْرِجَ — that We might bring forth. The lām here conveys purpose: this is the reason the water was sent down.

And the verb is striking: إِخْرَاج — to bring out. To bring out from inside the earth.

This verb stands at the very centre of the sūra's argument. For the Qurʾān relates the resurrection with the same verb:

"…and God caused you to grow from the earth like a plant. Then He will return you to it and bring you out with a bringing forth." (Nūḥ 71/17-18)

"We drive it to a dead land, and with it We give life to the earth after its death. Such too is the resurrection." (Fāṭir 35/9)

"He brings the living out of the dead and the dead out of the living, and gives life to the earth after its death. And thus shall you be brought out." (al-Rūm 30/19)

All three verses say the same thing: bringing a plant out of the soil and bringing a human being out of the soil are the same operation.

And Sūrat al-Nabaʾ never states this proof — it merely counts the soil, the water and the plant that comes out. It leaves the making of the link to the reader.

This is what the sūra has been doing from the start: it does not argue; it enumerates.

جَنَّة — Root: ج-ن-ن. To cover, to conceal. جَنَّة — a garden whose trees are interlaced and which covers what is beneath it. From the same root come jinn (the unseen being), janīn (the one covered in the womb), majnūn (one whose mind is covered over), junna (a shield).

That is, a garden, as a word, means "that which covers". A garden bears this name because it covers the ground with the shade of its trees.

أَلْفَاف — Root: ل-ف-ف. To wrap, to wind, to interlace. لَفَّ — he wrapped, he wound. لَفِيف — a mixed, intermingled company.

On the word's singular the lexicographers differ: some say laff, some lafīf, some laffāʾ; and some say the singular is not used, that the word comes directly in the plural.

On the sense, however, there is no disagreement: dense gardens whose branches are interlaced, growing into one another.

Now look back over the road from the sixth verse to the sixteenth:

Bare ground (cradle) → fixed ground (peg) → paired human being → sleep → night → day → sky → sun → water → grain → thickly entwined garden.

The tableau begins from bare ground and arrives at a forest. The density increases continuously: first the ground is levelled, then fixed, then covered over, then light comes, then water comes, then a single grain appears, and at the end gardens grown into one another.

And the last word is أَلْفَاف — wound into one another. The tableau, that is, begins with eleven items counted separately and closes with a whole interlaced with itself.

I record this as my own reading; what it rests on is the order of the verses and the sense of the last word.

Eleven verses have been counted. And now the question has to be asked: what have these to do with the resurrection?

The sūra does not ask this question and does not answer it. In the seventeenth verse it moves straight to the last day. But the link stands in the text and it works on three separate levels.

This is the most superficial and the most widespread reading: He who did these can do that too.

The Qurʾān sets up this proof plainly elsewhere:

"Is He who created the heavens and the earth not able to create the like of them?" (Yā-Sīn 36/81)

"The creation of the heavens and the earth is greater than the creation of human beings." (Ghāfir 40/57)

This proof is valid but it is the weakest, because the addressee's objection was mostly not about power. The Meccans did not deny that God is the creator (the Qurʾān records this in many places: al-ʿAnkabūt 29/61, al-Zukhruf 43/9). What they denied was that decayed bones could be gathered together again.

This is the stronger one, and it was recorded at al-Baqara 2/28: the stage objected to is the repetition of a stage that has already taken place.

Most of the things counted in the tableau are repeated things:

• Sleep is cut every night and reattached every morning.
• The night covers every evening and lifts every morning.
• Rain falls, grain comes up, it is harvested, the rain falls again.

The tableau, then, does more than display power: it displays a cycle. And an objection to the resurrection is an objection to the last link of a cycle.

This is the reading I set up above and I record it as my own reading.

The tableau describes a house: bed, peg, covering, building, lamp, water, garden. And a house is by definition set up for someone. No one builds a house nobody will live in.

The sūra's addressee accepts that he lives in this house. The question the sūra asks — while not asking it — is this: for whom was this house built, and what happens after the occupant leaves?

The denial of resurrection in fact requires the assumption that the house came about by itself. For if a house that has been built has an owner, that owner also has an expectation of the one who lives in it.

The Qurʾān says this plainly elsewhere:

"Did you suppose that We created you in vain and that you would not be returned to Us?" (al-Muʾminūn 23/115)

The word here is عَبَثًا — in vain, purposelessly, for play. And the verse ties two things together: purposelessness and there being no return. If the one is accepted the other is accepted; if the one is rejected the other is rejected.

The tableau of Sūrat al-Nabaʾ makes the first alternative impossible. Of the things counted across eleven verses not one is in vain; every one serves a purpose, and every one serves the human being's purpose.

And note: the sūra does not say this. It only counts. The conclusion is drawn by the reader — and for him to draw it the sūra leaves a silence at the seventeenth verse.

Inna yawma'l-faṣli kāna mīqātā "The day of separation is an appointed time."

The eleven-verse tableau has ended and the sūra moves to the last day without using any connective. There is no وَ, no فَ, no ثُمَّ. The sentence begins with إِنَّ.

In Arabic the dropping of a connective between two sentences is called فَصْل (faṣl) and it was treated in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ: the dropping of the connective shows that the second sentence is the explanation or the consequence of the first.

What this means here is plain: the seventeenth verse is the answer to the eleven-verse tableau. The tableau caused a question to be asked; this verse answers it.

And it is no coincidence: the name given to the dropping of the connective is itself faṣl, and the subject of the verse is yawm al-faṣl. This is not a claim of wordplay — only a coincidence worth recording.

Root: ف-ص-ل. The concrete sense of the root is to separate two things, to cut between them.

Its derivatives show the breadth of the root:

• فَصْل — separation; and the chapter of a book (parts separated from one another).
• فَاصِلَة — a separator; and the stop at the end of a verse. This is what is called the fāṣila in every sūra of this commentary.
• فِصَال — weaning. "His weaning is within two years" (Luqmān 31/14).
• تَفْصِيل — setting out in detail; separating a whole into parts and explaining it. "A book whose verses have been set out in detail" (Fuṣṣilat 41/3).
• فَيْصَل — one who gives a decisive judgement.

The root has two directions and both come out of the same idea:

1. Physical separation — dividing a thing in two. 2. Giving judgement — deciding definitively between two parties.

The connection is plain: to give judgement is to separate the true from the false. English does the same thing: to decide a matter is, by the Latin behind the word, to cut it off; and a clear-cut decision carries exactly this idea — cut, separated.

The Qurʾān makes this link plainly:

"It is surely a decisive word (قَوْلٌ فَصْلٌ); it is no jest." (al-Ṭāriq 86/13-14)

"He is the one who judges (فَصَلَ) between them." (similarly al-Zumar 39/3, 46; al-Ḥajj 22/17)

Now go back to the third verse: ٱلَّذِى هُمْ فِيهِ مُخْتَلِفُونَ — "that over which they are in disagreement."

Ikhtilāf — to part from one another, to turn onto different roads. Faṣl — to separate, to give a decisive judgement.

People have parted over a matter; that matter will be decided on a "day of separation".

The two words come from different roots (خ-ل-ف and ف-ص-ل) and I claim no etymological kinship between them. What I record is that the two words do the same work in opposite directions: the one names the dispersal, the other the decision.

And the practical meaning of this is: the resolution of a disagreement is not debate. From the beginning the sūra did not enter the debate; now it becomes clear why it did not. The matter under dispute has an arbiter, and that arbiter will come one day.

What does the "day of separation" separate? The exegetes count several directions and all are supported from the text:

The structure of the sūra supports the second in particular: from the twenty-first verse on, the text divides in two.

مِيقَات — Root: و-ق-ت. Time. مِيقَات is on the mifʿāl pattern.

This pattern was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa: for the word مِيزَان it was recorded that mifʿāl is a noun of instrument (its original form miwzān, the wāw having turned into yāʾ). The same phonetic change is present here: the original of mīqāt is مِوْقَات.

The mifʿāl pattern forms nouns of instrument, but it can also form nouns of time and place. Mīqāt is of the second kind: an appointed time — and, in the context of the pilgrimage, an appointed place (the mīqāt stations).

What the word relates is that the time has been fixed. For an ordinary time one says waqt; a mīqāt is like an appointment: a meeting point determined not by the parties but by the one who appoints.

The function of كَانَ. The sentence does not say "it will be"; it says "it has been/was" — the perfect.

This is a recognised usage in Arabic and it is explained in two ways:

Both have been defended and they do not exclude one another.

An observation: the distribution of كان in the sūra. This verb comes several times in the sūra and always doing the same work:

• 17: kāna mīqātā — the day of separation was an appointed time.
• 21: kānat mirṣādā — Hell was a place of watch.
• 27: kānū lā yarjūna ḥisābā — they were not expecting a reckoning.

In all three the verb conveys the standingness of a condition. The first two relate God's appointing, the third the settled attitude of human beings. The sūra, that is, says with the same verb that neither the verdict nor the denial is new.

I record this as an observation.

Yawma yunfakhu fi'l-ṣūri fa-taʾtūna afwājā "The day when the trumpet is blown and you come in throngs."

Root: ن-ف-خ. To blow, to give air, to inflate. نَفْخ — blowing. مِنْفَاخ — a bellows.

The verb is passive. That is, who blows is not said.

This is a choice the Qurʾān often makes in its scenes of the last day, and it was recorded in this commentary in the section on al-Qāriʿa as well: there the mountains were "cast" and people were "scattered" — both passive.

The work the passive does is this: the act remains and the agent stays off the stage. The addressee's eye is turned to the event, not to the doer of the event. And the event's irresistibility is increased by this — because no agent to be resisted is visible.

In the tradition it is widely transmitted that the blowing is given to an angel. In the text of the Qurʾān there is no name in this verse.

There are two views on what the word is:

The majority's preference is the first and its ground is strong: the particle فِى means "into"; the blowing into a form is a forced reading, whereas the blowing into a horn is direct.

How many times is it blown? In one place the Qurʾān relates two blowings:

"And the trumpet is blown, and whoever is in the heavens and the earth falls dead, except whom God wills. Then it is blown again, and there they are, standing and looking on." (al-Zumar 39/68)

This verse separates two blowings: one that kills and one that raises. The blowing in this sūra is the second, because "you come" follows it.

And the next sūra will relate the same event as two convulsions: "On the day when the shaker shakes, and the follower follows" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/6-7). Two neighbouring sūras give the same pair with two different words. This link will be returned to in the section on al-Nāziʿāt.

A note on words. The Qurʾān uses another word for this event too: زَجْرَةٌ وَاحِدَةٌ — "a single cry" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/13); and صَيْحَة — "a single shout" (Yā-Sīn 36/29, 53). The event, then, is sometimes related by the sound of the horn and sometimes by a shout. What is common is sound: the last day begins by being heard.

The word أَفْوَاج was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Naṣr, and this verse was already named there. The findings there are not repeated; in summary: a fawj is a company that moves together; because the word comes in the plural and indefinite it gives the sense "an indefinite number of companies coming one after another"; and being in the accusative it is a circumstantial qualifier — it relates how the coming happens.

But the difference between the two sūras matters here and is worth recording:

The last row is critical. In al-Naṣr it was "they enter"; here it is "you come".

Up to the seventeenth verse the sūra was speaking in the third person ("they question one another", "they shall know"). From the sixth verse it had moved to the second person ("the earth for you…"). And now, in the scene of the last day, the second person continues: "you come."

The addressee, that is, is drawn into the scene as he was drawn into the tableau. The one called "you" while the favours were counted is called "you" while the reckoning is related.

An observation: what a throng is is not said. Who is in which throng, and by what the throngs are divided, is not stated. This indefiniteness accords with the principle recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the sūra gives the criterion, not the list.

Wa futiḥati'l-samāʾu fa-kānat abwābā · Wa suyyirati'l-jibālu fa-kānat sarābā "And the sky was opened and became doors. And the mountains were set moving and became a mirage."

The two verses are identical in grammar:

وَ + passive verb + definite subject + فَ + كَانَتْ + indefinite predicate.

And both verbs are passive: futiḥat (was opened), suyyirat (was set moving). Like the yunfakhu of the preceding verse — the agent again off the stage.

The verbs' coming in the perfect. The perfect is used for things that will happen in the future. This is an idiom the Qurʾān resorts to very often in its scenes of the last day: what is certain to happen is related as though it had happened. The same idiom is seen in Sūrat al-Zilzāl and Sūrat al-Takwīr.

But there is a fine point: the kāna of the seventeenth verse and the kānat here are the same verb. The sūra, that is, uses the perfect kāna three times in three verses. The scene is set up not as something that will happen but as something that has happened.

This expression needs attention, because English translations often soften it.

The verse does not say "the doors of the sky were opened". It says "the sky was opened and became doors".

The difference is great. In the first expression the sky stays in place and the doors on it are opened. In the second the sky turns into doors — that is, nothing is left of the sky but doors.

Another verse of the Qurʾān for comparison:

"So We opened the gates of the sky with water pouring down." (al-Qamar 54/11 — the flood of Noah)

There it says أَبْوَابَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ: "the gates of the sky". There is a construct; the sky stays in place.

Here there is no construct. Sky = doors.

And this directly contradicts the twelfth verse — deliberately:

• 78/12: "We built above you seven firm ones."
• 78/19: "The sky was opened and became doors."

What was firm is riddled through. What was tightly bound (shidād, root "to bind") is opened.

This is the confirmation in the text of the dwelling reading I set up above. What was built is dismantled; and the dismantling is related with the exact opposite of the word used in the building.

Root: س-ي-ر. To walk, to go, to travel. سَيْر — a walking. سَيَّرَ (Form II) — he made walk, he set in motion. سَيَّارَة — a caravan; in Arabic today, a motor car.

That the verb is in Form II is meaningful: the mountains do not walk of themselves, they are made to walk.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the Qurʾān's descriptions of mountains at the last day were given in a table. Al-Ṭūr 52/10 was named there: تَسِيرُ ٱلْجِبَالُ سَيْرًا — "the mountains walk with a walking". There the verb is active; here it is passive.

This difference is worth recording. In al-Ṭūr the mountains walk; in al-Nabaʾ they are made to walk. The two do not contradict — the Qurʾān sometimes relates the same event showing its agent and sometimes without showing it.

سَرَاب — Root: س-ر-ب. The concrete sense of the root is to flow, to go, to take a path.

Its derivatives:

• سَرَب — an underground passage, a tunnel, a hollow. In the Qurʾān: "He took his way in the sea like a tunnel" (al-Kahf 18/61).
• سَارِب — one who goes openly. "He who hides by night and he who goes openly by day" (al-Raʿd 13/10).
• سِرْب — a herd, a rush; and ease of heart.
• سَرَاب — a mirage: the appearance that looks like water from afar in the heat and vanishes when approached.

That the mirage comes from this root is meaningful: a mirage is what appears to be flowing. Seen from a distance it ripples like water; approached, it is not there.

The Qurʾān uses the mirage once more, in a very sharp place:

"The deeds of those who deny are like a mirage on flat ground: the thirsty man thinks it water; when he comes to it he finds nothing. And he finds God there, and He settles his account in full." (al-Nūr 24/39)

The link made between this verse and al-Nabaʾ 78/20 is something to be recorded as my own reading, but its ground is firm:

In al-Nūr it is deeds that are a mirage. In al-Nabaʾ it is mountains that become a mirage.

What emerges when the two verses are read together is this: on that day both the firmest work a human being does and the firmest body on earth come to the same state — present from afar, absent from close by.

And now to the sūra's harshest transformation.

• 78/7: The mountains are أَوْتَاد — pegs. Driven into the ground, holding, fixing.
• 78/20: The mountains are سَرَاب — a mirage. Visible from afar, not there when approached.

The most solid thing on earth becomes the most deceptive.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the mountains had become "carded wool"; there the transformation was from weight to lightness. Here the transformation is on another axis: from being to appearance.

Wool is light but it exists; a mirage does not. Al-Nabaʾ, then, goes a step beyond al-Qāriʿa.

And this attaches to the sūra's argument. The sūra's addressee denies the resurrection because to him this world seems the real one and the hereafter the imaginary one. The twentieth verse reverses this distinction: the most solid body of this world will turn into a mirage.

I record this as a reading. Its ground is the opposition between the two words in the seventh and the twentieth verses — and that opposition is in the text.

Inna jahannama kānat mirṣādā · Li'l-ṭāghīna maʾābā · Lābithīna fīhā aḥqābā "Hell is a place of watch — a place of return for the transgressors. They will remain in it for ages."

Root: ر-ص-د. رَصَدَ — he watched, he waited, he lay in ambush. رَاصِد — a watchman. رَصَد — a watching company.

The uses in the Qurʾān fix the sense of the root:

"Sit for them at every place of watch (كُلَّ مَرْصَدٍ)." (al-Tawba 9/5)

"Whoever now seeks to listen finds a flame watching for him." (al-Jinn 72/9 — raṣadā)

"He sends watchers before him and behind him." (al-Jinn 72/27 — raṣadā)

The word is again on the mifʿāl pattern — like the mīqāt of the seventeenth verse, and like the mīzān of al-Qāriʿa. The pattern forms nouns of instrument or of place: a place of watch, the point where an ambush is laid.

Here the exegetes divide in two:

Both views fit the sense of the word and in practice they converge.

The picture the word chooses is worth noting. Hell is not named "a place of punishment" or "a place of penalty". It is named a place that waits.

And a thing that waits knows what is coming. An ambush is not laid by chance; it is laid on a road that is known to be travelled.

I record this as my own reading: what the word conveys is Hell's having been prepared — just as the tableau of verses six to sixteen conveyed the earth's having been prepared. Two preparations, in one sūra, for two different places.

Root: ط-غ-ي. This root was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAlaq and what was recorded there is not repeated here.

In summary the finding there was: the concrete sense of the root is water overflowing its bed; transgression is a being's crossing of its own limit; and being a transgressor is not to possess something bad but to carry something good past its limit.

What is to be added here is this: the verse does not say "for the unbelievers", it says "for the transgressors". This is the counterpart in the text of the principle recorded in Method: what the verses describe are attributes.

And the next sūra will use this attribute twice more:

• al-Nāziʿāt 79/17: "Go to Pharaoh; he has transgressed."
• al-Nāziʿāt 79/37: "As for him who transgressed and preferred the life of this world…"

Al-Nāziʿāt, that is, will first show the attribute in a person (Pharaoh) and then generalise the attribute. Al-Nabaʾ speaks directly with the attribute. Two sūras use the same word from two different directions.

Root: أ-و-ب. To return, to come back. آبَ — he returned. أَوَّاب — one who returns often, one who repents. In the Qurʾān it is used of David (Dāwūd): "He was one who turned back often (awwāb)" (Ṣād 38/17; also 38/19, 44).

مَـَٔاب is a noun of place: the place to which one returns.

And this word is the sūra's most striking repetition. The word occurs twice in the sūra and points to two different addresses:

The same word, two destinations.

This is another form of the expression "his mother is the Abyss" treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa. What was recorded there was this: the person is not thrown somewhere; he arrives where he belongs.

Al-Nabaʾ sets up the same idea more plainly: everyone has a maʾāb; the question is which maʾāb. And the thirty-ninth verse will say that the maʾāb can be chosen: "let him who wills take one."

That the word means "return" is meaningful in itself. The place arrived at is not a new place; it is a place returned to. This accords with what the Qurʾān says about where the human being comes from: "We belong to God and to Him we are returning" (al-Baqara 2/156).

Root: ح-ق-ب. حُقْب / حُقُب — a long span of time. Its plural is أَحْقَاب.

On the length of the span the lexicographers differ: eighty years, seventy years, an indefinitely long period. None of these figures is certain and the transmissions behind them are weak; for that reason I give no number.

The word's other occurrence in the Qurʾān: "Or I shall go on for ages (حُقُبًا)" (al-Kahf 18/60 — the words of Moses (Mūsā)). There too the sense is "a long time" and it gives no particular figure.

لَابِثِينَ — Root: ل-ب-ث. To remain, to stay somewhere, to linger.

This root will come back in the last verse of the next sūra:

"On the day they see it, it will be as though they had remained no more than an evening or its forenoon." (al-Nāziʿāt 79/46)

Two neighbouring sūras use the same root in exactly opposite directions:

This is one of the most concrete verbal links between the two sūras and it is a verifiable datum. What the link sets up is this: the ratio between the time spent in this world and the time to be spent there is inverted.

A lifetime looks long while it is being lived; looked at from there it is half a day. A punishment looks abstract when looked at from a distance; there it is ages.

This verse is one of the most debated verses in the history of theology, because the word أَحْقَابًا conveys a term; and what has a term has an end.

The views:

The datum on the other side: the Qurʾān uses plain expressions elsewhere for the unbelievers:

"For them is the fire of Hell; they abide in it for ever." (al-Jinn 72/23)

"…except the road of Hell, in which they abide for ever." (al-Nisāʾ 4/169)

The word here is أَبَدًا and it means "for ever".

In this commentary no side is taken in this dispute, and the ground for that is recorded in Method: this is a matter of theology, and each of the parties rests on different verses of the Qurʾān. Moreover this is not a matter this sūra can settle — the sūra states a term; it does not establish a ruling.

What can be recorded is this: the verse states the length of the term; it does not state its end or its endlessness. The conclusions loaded onto the word come from outside the word.

Lā yadhūqūna fīhā bardan wa lā sharābā · Illā ḥamīman wa ghassāqā · Jazāʾan wifāqā "They taste in it neither coolness nor drink — except scalding water and pus. As a fitting recompense."

Root: ذ-و-ق. To taste. ذَوْق — the taking of a taste; and from it the Turkish zevk (pleasure).

The choice of verb is striking. "They will not find" or "it will not be given" could have been said. "They will not taste" was said.

Tasting is the nearest of the senses: seeing happens at a distance, hearing happens at a distance, touching requires contact, but tasting requires taking inside.

And the Qurʾān uses this verb for punishment very often: "Taste!" (al-Nabaʾ 78/30; al-Anfāl 8/14; al-Dukhān 44/49 and in many other places). This choice shows that the punishment is related not as something that comes from outside but as something taken inside.

I record this as an observation about the language.

Root: ب-ر-د. Coldness, coolness. بَارِد — cold. بَرَد — hail (ice falling from the sky).

There are two readings:

The second view is worth dwelling on, because the ninth verse of this sūra counted sleep as a favour: وَجَعَلْنَا نَوْمَكُمْ سُبَاتًا.

If bard here means sleep, the sūra will have said this: the favour given in the ninth verse is taken back in the twenty-fourth.

This link is striking and worth recording. But since I do not rely on the certainty of the second view I offer the link as a possibility. The first view is the more widespread and the sounder linguistically.

This too must be added: the two views do not exclude one another. Where there is no coolness there is no sleep either.

Root: ح-م-م. To grow hot, to boil. حَمِيم — boiling water. حَمَّام — a bathhouse; a place where one is warmed.

A note. The word حَامِيَة (scorching) in the last verse of Sūrat al-Qāriʿa is from the root ح-م-ي — which is different from this root. The two roots are neighbours in sense (both convey heat) and the classical lexicons sometimes treat them side by side; but I do not count them one root and I claim no derivation from one to the other.

The word's second sense is striking. In Arabic حَمِيم also means a close friend:

"We have no intercessor and no devoted friend (صَدِيقٍ حَمِيمٍ)." (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/100-101)

"No friend will ask after a friend." (al-Maʿārij 70/10 — lā yasʾalu ḥamīmun ḥamīmā)

"…as though he were a devoted friend." (Fuṣṣilat 41/34)

The same word is both the drink of Hell and the closest friend.

The explanation the lexicographers give for this common ground is: ḥamīm is "the hot one"; heat conveys both scalding and closeness. In English too expressions like "a warm friend" and "warmth" carry the same logic.

I record this as an observation about the language and I draw no meaning from it. Both uses are established in Arabic; I do not claim that the choosing of the word in this sūra carries any hint about friendship.

This word was already named in the section on Sūrat al-Falaq, while غَاسِق (ghāsiq) was being treated, and the finding there will be relied on.

What was recorded there was this: the root غ-س-ق has two wings of meaning — dense darkness and a thick, heavy, flowing thing — and the place where the two meet is a density that flows, seeps, spreads. Darkness, in the conception behind this Arabic root, is not something that "is" but something that flows.

Now let us apply this here.

Ghassāq is on the فَعَّال pattern — the intensive pattern we meet for the third time in this sūra (wahhāj, thajjāj, ghassāq).

The renderings given in the commentaries: pus, the fluid that runs from the wounds of the people of the Fire, an extremely cold and foul drink. All of these renderings come out of the root's sense of "a thick flowing thing".

And the finding from the section on al-Falaq says one thing more here. The root's other wing is darkness. This drink, then, carries darkness inside its name: what is drunk is something that flows like darkness itself.

I record this as an observation arising from reading the two cognates together.

A note on a variant reading. It is transmitted that this word is also read without the doubling, as غَسَاق. The difference of sense between the two readings is not great (the doubled reading adds intensity). Since I cannot state with certainty which authority of the variant readings held which preference, I give no name.

إِلَّا حَمِيمًا وَغَسَّاقًا — "except scalding water and pus."

The grammarians differ over the kind of this exception:

The second view is the sharper and it fits the tone of the verse: the verse does not say "a bad drink is given"; it says "there is no drink" and then names something.

This is a form of mockery and severity in Arabic. Its counterpart in English is roughly: "There is nothing to eat — nothing but stones."

Both views have been defended in the classical sources; I do not impose a preference.

جَزَاء — Root: ج-ز-ي. To give in return, to repay. The word is used for both reward and punishment — it conveys not the kind of the return but its being a return.

وِفَاق — Root: و-ف-ق. Fittingness, equivalence, matching one another. وَفَّقَ — he made fitting. مُوَافَقَة — agreement. تَوْفِيق — bringing into accord.

The word is a verbal noun and is used here as an adjective. In Arabic a verbal noun standing in place of an adjective conveys intensity: not "a fitting recompense" but "a recompense that is fittingness itself."

The principle the verse establishes: the punishment is to the measure of the offence. Neither more nor less.

The Qurʾān states this principle plainly in many places:

"The recompense of an evil is an evil like it." (al-Shūrā 42/40)

"Whoever does an evil is recompensed only with its like." (al-Anʿām 6/160; Ghāfir 40/40)

And the other half of the principle stands in the same verses:

"Whoever brings a good deed shall have ten like it." (al-Anʿām 6/160)

The balance the Qurʾān sets up, that is, is not symmetrical: the punishment is equal, the reward is multiplied.

This sūra sets up the same asymmetry within itself and it is one of the sūra's most notable structural features:

The same word is used on both sides, but their qualifications differ.

On the side of punishment the return is equal and it is not said from whom it comes. On the side of reward the return is a gift and it is said plainly from whom it comes: from your Lord.

I record this as my own reading; but the words of the two verses are in the text and the comparison can be made directly.

Its sense is this: punishment is deserved, reward is not. Punishment is the outcome of a reckoning; reward is a bestowal. A person earns his own punishment; he cannot earn his own reward.

Innahum kānū lā yarjūna ḥisābā · Wa kadhdhabū bi-āyātinā kidhdhābā "For they were not expecting a reckoning. And they denied Our signs with a denying."

The twenty-sixth verse had said "a fitting recompense". And now it is explained on what the fittingness is built.

إِنَّ here conveys a ground: "for". These two verses, that is, are the cause of the whole preceding scene.

And two things are named as the cause:

1. Not expecting a reckoning (27) — inward. 2. Denying the signs (28) — outward.

The order is meaningful: first the inward attitude, then the outward behaviour. Denial is the consequence of not expecting a reckoning — not its cause.

This is the repetition of a pattern recorded several times in this commentary: in al-Humaza "he supposed" (inward) came after "he gathered and counted" (outward) and made the diagnosis. Here the inward attitude comes first.

Root: ر-ج-و. And the choice of this word is the sūra's finest.

The original sense of the root: to hope, to expect, to look forward to. رَجَاء — hope. يَرْجُو — he hopes.

Its positive uses in the Qurʾān:

"Whoever hopes for the meeting with his Lord, let him do righteous work." (al-Kahf 18/110)

"They hope for the mercy of God." (al-Baqara 2/218)

"For those who hope for God and the last day…" (al-Aḥzāb 33/21)

Now back to the verse. The verse does not say "they did not fear a reckoning". Nor does it say "they did not believe in a reckoning". It says "they were not expecting a reckoning".

This says three separate things at once:

One — a reckoning is something to be hoped for. The verb's positive resonance stands in the word. The verse, that is, positions the reckoning not as a threat but as an object of expectation. A reckoning is something to be wanted — because if no reckoning is held, injustice becomes permanent.

This accords with the Qurʾān's understanding of justice: for the wronged, the reckoning is a hope.

Two — denial is not a matter of belief but a matter of expectation. The verse does not speak of a mental assent; it speaks of an orientation. When a person does not expect a thing, he lives without taking it into account.

And this distinction is decisive in practice. A person can accept the existence of the reckoning theoretically and live never expecting it at all. The verse's diagnosis covers this too.

Three — the second sense of the verb رَجَا. The lexicographers record that in negative sentences this verb sometimes means to fear, to take into account, to treat as serious. The Qurʾān confirms this:

"What is the matter with you, that you do not expect any gravity for God?" (Nūḥ 71/13 — mā lakum lā tarjūna li'llāhi waqārā)

The "you do not expect" there plainly means "you are not taking it into account, you are not treating it seriously".

The fullest rendering of the verse, then, is this: "They were not reckoning with there being a reckoning."

As has been recorded several times in this commentary (especially at al-Baqara 2/6), unbelief is not a failure to know; it is the covering over of what one knows.

This verse adds a layer to that finding: the mechanism of the covering is the cancelling of an expectation.

What orders a person's life is not the list of propositions he believes but the things he expects. The person who expects to go to work tomorrow behaves accordingly this evening. And the person who expects no reckoning at all behaves accordingly too.

And note: this may not be something a person knows about himself. Expectations are not conscious decisions; they settle into behaviour.

This is why the verse diagnoses not the behaviour but the expectation.

The link within the sūra. The word حِسَاب in this verse will come back in the thirty-sixth:

• 78/27: lā yarjūna حِسَابًا — they were not expecting a reckoning.
• 78/36: ʿaṭāʾan حِسَابًا — a reckoned/sufficient gift.

The same word, in the ends of the two groups. This link will be returned to at the thirty-sixth verse below; for now I record it: the one who does not expect a reckoning meets a reckoning, the one who expects a reckoning receives a reckoned gift.

Root: ك-ذ-ب. To lie. كَذَّبَ (Form II) — he denied, he called something a lie.

Note here: كَذَبَ (he lied) and كَذَّبَ (he called a lie) are different. The first tells a lie himself; the second calls what another says a lie. The verse has the second.

كِذَّابًا — a point of grammar.

The normal verbal noun of the verb kadhdhaba is تَكْذِيب (takdhīb). But the verse has كِذَّاب — a verbal noun on the fiʿʿāl pattern.

The lexicographers explain this thus: in the dialect of Yemen the verbal noun of Form II most often comes on the fiʿʿāl pattern. Kadhdhaba → kidhdhāb, kallama → killām, and the like. This is one of the instances of Arabic's dialectal variety visible in the Qurʾān.

The word's function here is that of an absolute object: reinforcing the verb with its own verbal noun. The nearest counterpart in English is a doubling: "they denied and denied", "they denied with a denying."

And this word occurs twice in the sūra — which, like maʾāb and ḥisāb, is part of the paired structure the sūra sets up:

What is done in this world becomes what is not heard there.

This is a verifiable repetition of a word. There is a separate disagreement over the sense of the word in the thirty-fifth verse (lie, or denying) and it will be taken up there.

آيَة — a sign, a mark, a proof. In the Qurʾān the word covers three things at once: (1) the sentences of the Qurʾān, (2) the signs in nature, (3) the miracles given to prophets.

Which is meant here? The context supports both:

• The verses of the Qurʾān: the addressees were denying the revelation.
• The signs in nature: those counted in verses six to sixteen. If the sūra, after counting them, says "they denied Our signs", it is understood that what was counted is also a sign.

The second reading accords especially with the structure of the sūra and is worth recording: for eleven verses the sūra counted the earth. And now it says: these they denied.

What is denied, that is, is not only a text; it is the world standing in front of them.

I record this as my own reading; but that the signs in nature are called āya in the Qurʾān is beyond dispute: "In the creation of the heavens and the earth… there are signs for those of understanding" (Āl ʿImrān 3/190).

Wa kulla shayʾin aḥṣaynāhu kitābā · Fa-dhūqū fa-lan nazīdakum illā ʿadhābā "And everything We have counted down in writing. So taste! We shall increase you in nothing but punishment."

Root: ح-ص-ي. And the concrete sense of the root is striking: حَصَى (ḥaṣā) — a pebble.

The link the lexicographers record is this: the Arabs used pebbles when counting. A stone was set down for each thing and at the end the stones were counted. From this comes أَحْصَى — to count, to fix by number, to count exhaustively.

Beneath the word, that is, stands a concrete counting technique: one object for each unit. This is not "estimating" or "calculating"; it is setting down one counter for each item.

Its uses in the Qurʾān confirm this:

"He has indeed encompassed them and counted them one by one." (Maryam 19/94 — laqad aḥṣāhum wa ʿaddahum ʿaddā)

"…and He has encompassed everything in number." (al-Jinn 72/28 — wa aḥṣā kulla shayʾin ʿadadā)

"If you were to count God's favour you could not number it." (Ibrāhīm 14/34; al-Naḥl 16/18 — lā tuḥṣūhā)

The last verse is striking: the human being cannot count; God counts. The same verb, with two subjects, to two different outcomes.

This root completes a pattern treated in this commentary.

The finding recorded in the section on al-Humaza was this: "to count" and "to suppose" are from the same root (ح-س-ب), and the one counting was making a false reckoning. In the section on al-Takāthur it was recorded that counting is a comparative and unending operation.

Al-Nabaʾ reverses this tableau. The human being could count some part of it; here the counting party changes and the object becomes "everything".

And note: كُلَّ شَىْءٍ — "everything", without exception. The word is indefinite and general.

The grammarians differ over the place of this word in the sentence:

It makes no great difference to the sense. What is common is this: counting and writing have been joined.

And this joining is meaningful. Counting is an operation; writing is permanence. What is counted may be forgotten; what is written stays.

The Qurʾān joins these two elsewhere as well:

"The book is set down, and you see the guilty in terror of what is in it. They say: 'Woe to us! What kind of book is this — it has left out nothing small or great but has counted it!'" (al-Kahf 18/49)

This verse is the expanded form of al-Nabaʾ 78/29 and uses the same two concepts: book and counting (lā yughādiru ṣaghīratan wa lā kabīratan illā aḥṣāhā).

This verse has an association easily made today: we live in a world where everything is recorded, where no datum is lost. The traces we leave, the records that cannot be recalled, the archives that are not erased.

I record this resemblance as an analogy, not as exegesis — and I must write its boundary too:

The verse is not announcing a technology. What the verse says is something its addressee in the seventh century could also understand: writing prevents a word from being forgotten. In a world with scribes, ledgers and promissory notes this was a familiar notion.

The honest relation that can be made between today's recording technology and the verse is this: the idea of "a record of everything", which once looked like a fantasy, is more easily imagined today. This does not verify the verse — the verse does not await verification on this plane in any case. It only brings the notion closer to us.

The sūra suddenly moves to the imperative and addresses them directly.

This is iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address) and it has been treated many times in this commentary. But the iltifāt here is in a special place: the people related in the third person in the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth verses ("they", "they denied") are addressed directly in the thirtieth.

The narration stops, that is, and a scene is set up: the people being talked about become the ones being talked to.

The function of the imperative. This is not a real command — no permission is being given by saying "taste". In Arabic the imperative is sometimes used for rebuke, mockery or the carrying out of a sentence. Its like in the Qurʾān: "Enter it! Whether you bear it patiently or not, it is the same for you" (al-Ṭūr 52/16).

The structure of the sentence is worth noting: لَنْ (never) + إِلَّا (except).

Rendered word for word: "We shall never increase you — except in punishment."

The sentence, that is, begins with a negation and closes with an exception. The result is this: there is an increase, but in one direction only.

This may look as though it sets up a tension with the sūra's twenty-sixth verse: there the punishment was called fitting (wifāq); here it is being increased.

The ways the exegetes resolve this tension:

The third explanation sits the most easily linguistically and says this: the work of the sentence is not to make a reckoning but to cut off hope.

And this joins with the sūra's twenty-seventh verse. There it was said "they were not expecting a reckoning" — the word was from the root of رَجَاء (hope). Here nothing is left to hope for.

The end of the one who does not hope is that there is nothing left to hope for. I record this as my own reading; the words of the two verses are in the text.

Inna li'l-muttaqīna mafāzā · Ḥadāʾiqa wa aʿnābā · Wa kawāʿiba atrābā · Wa kaʾsan dihāqā "For those who guard themselves there is a triumph: walled gardens and vines, young companions of equal age, and a brimming cup."

The twenty-first verse had begun with إِنَّ جَهَنَّمَ كَانَتْ مِرْصَادًا. This verse begins with إِنَّ لِلْمُتَّقِينَ مَفَازًا.

The two sections open with the same particle and are of the same length: ten verses from 21 to 30, six verses from 31 to 36. The symmetry is not exact but the pattern is the same.

And one difference shows at once: the section on the transgressors began with "Hell" — that is, with a place. The section on those who guard themselves begins with "for those who guard themselves" — that is, with persons.

I record this as an observation.

Root: و-ق-ي. This word was treated in detail at al-Baqara 2/2 and what was recorded there is not repeated.

In summary: the sense of the root is to protect oneself, to be on guard, to put something between oneself and a thing. Wiqāya — a protector. اِتَّقَىٰ (Form VIII) — he guarded himself, he was on his guard.

What is to be added here is the word's position in this sūra.

The sūra had named the transgressors طَاغِين (78/22) — those who cross their limit. Those who guard themselves it names the protected.

The two words are exact opposites and the opposition stands in the logic of the roots:

The two groups are named not "believing/unbelieving" but "guarding their limit / crossing it". This is an instance in the text of the principle recorded in Method: the verses describe attributes.

Root: ف-و-ز. To be saved, to attain what one sought, to win. فَازَ — he was saved, he won. فَوْز — salvation.

Its use in the Qurʾān:

"Whoever is drawn away from the Fire and admitted to the Garden, he has triumphed." (Āl ʿImrān 3/185)

"That is the great triumph." (ٱلْفَوْزُ ٱلْعَظِيم — al-Tawba 9/72, 111; al-Ṣāffāt 37/60 and in many other places)

مَفَاز may be a verbal noun with mīm or a noun of place: triumph, or the place of triumph.

A note on the word's second sense. In Arabic مَفَازَة also means a desert — waterless, dangerous, hard country. The lexicographers explain this odd overlap in two ways:

1. Taking a good omen: the Arabs named the dangerous thing with a good name; hoping to be saved from the desert, they called it "the place of salvation". 2. The word comes from another root meaning "place of destruction" and the resemblance is coincidental.

I draw no meaning from this overlap; I only record it. The use in the verse is beyond dispute "triumph".

A structural observation. In the section on the transgressors Hell was named مَـَٔاب (a place of return). Here for those who guard themselves it says مَفَاز (triumph).

Maʾāb is a place; mafāz is an outcome. On the side of punishment, that is, the place arrived at is named; on the side of reward, the state arrived at.

I record this as an observation. And since the word maʾāb will be used on the believers' side too in the thirty-ninth verse, it must be added that this distinction is not a fixed rule.

Root: ح-د-ق. To encompass, to surround. حَدِيقَة — a garden with a wall round it; its plural is ḥadāʾiq.

From the same root comes حَدَقَة (ḥadaqa) — the pupil of the eye. The pupil too is what is encompassed: it is surrounded by the iris.

The lexicographers describe a ḥadīqa thus: not every garden is called a ḥadīqa; the name is given to a garden enclosed by a wall or a fence.

Now let us compare this word with the sixteenth verse:

Two gardens, named with two different words. The garden of this world is described by its density, the garden there by its enclosure.

I record this as my own reading. But the root senses of the two words are beyond dispute and the comparison can be made directly.

أَعْنَاب — vines. The plural of عِنَب. Grapes occur often in the Qurʾān's descriptions of the Garden, and are counted among the favours of this world as well: "From the fruits of the date palms and the vines…" (al-Naḥl 16/67).

The naming of the vine in particular has to do with the agriculture of the Arabian peninsula: dates and grapes are the two most valuable crops of that country.

This verse requires careful and measured handling.

كَوَاعِب — Root: ك-ع-ب. The concrete sense of the root is to rise, to protrude.

Its derivatives:

• كَعْب — the ankle bone, the protruding bone. It occurs in the Qurʾān in the verse on ablution: "your feet up to the ankles (ٱلْكَعْبَيْن)" (al-Māʾida 5/6).
• ٱلْكَعْبَة — the Kaʿba. It takes its name from its raised, cube-shaped structure.
• كَاعِب — a young girl whose breast has budded; the beginning of the passage out of childhood.

The word, that is, names a stage of life: the moment when youth begins.

أَتْرَاب — Root: ت-ر-ب. And the original sense of this root is تُرَاب — dust, earth.

تِرْب — of the same age, a coeval. Its plural is atrāb.

How is the connection made? The explanation the lexicographers give is this: children of the same age play together in the dust; or they touched the earth at the same time. The word names those who grew up together.

And here is one of the sūra's most striking repetitions of a word.

The last word of the sūra is تُرَابًا (78/40) — "dust". And the أَتْرَابًا of the thirty-third verse is from the same root.

The same root, in the two pans of the scale. On one side "those who grew up together in the dust", on the other "one who wishes to be dust".

I record this as an observation. The shared root is a verifiable datum of the language; I do not claim that there is a deliberate link between the two verses.

This verse is among the most disputed and most abused of the Qurʾān's descriptions of the Garden. Both false exaltation and false criticism are produced from it.

First let us see what the verse says. There are two words: kawāʿib (companions at the age of youth) and atrāb (coevals). The verse says nothing else.

The exegetes' readings:

The second view has a ground from the Qurʾān:

"Whenever they are given a fruit as provision they say, 'this is what we were provided with before'. And it is given to them in resemblance." (al-Baqara 2/25)

This verse says that the favours of the Garden are like those of this world but not the same. The descriptions, that is, are made with recognisable words, but their counterparts are not identical.

And there is a saying widely transmitted in the literature of reports: that in the Garden there are things "which no eye has seen, which no ear has heard, and which have never crossed the mind of any human being". This expression accords with the Qurʾān's verse at al-Sajda 32/17 as well: "No soul knows what comfort of the eyes has been hidden away for them, as a recompense for what they used to do."

I do not impose a preference between the two views. What has to be recorded is this: the Qurʾān itself says that its descriptions are not exact counterparts.

Three points must also be stated:

One. The Qurʾān's promise of the Garden does not belong to one sex. The Qurʾān says this plainly: "Whoever does righteous work, male or female, being a believer, We shall give him a good life" (al-Naḥl 16/97); "Whoever does an evil is recompensed only with its like; and whoever does righteous work, male or female, being a believer — those enter the Garden and are provided for in it without reckoning" (Ghāfir 40/40).

Two. This is one of the shortest strokes of the description in this sūra: one verse, two words. In the same section garden, vine, cup and speech are counted. To tear the verse out of the whole and place it in the foreground disturbs the sūra's own balance.

Three. The real weight in this section falls on the thirty-fifth verse, and what is given there is not material: the quality of the speech that is spoken. It will be seen below.

كَأْس — Root: ك-أ-س. A cup.

There is a fine point the lexicographers record: in Arabic kaʾs is used only when the vessel is full. An empty vessel is called a qadaḥ (قَدَح); for it to be a kaʾs there must be drink in it.

The word, that is, is the name of a vessel already full in itself. And to this the verse adds the adjective دِهَاق.

دِهَاق — Root: د-ه-ق. Three views are transmitted about the sense of the word:

The first is the most widespread. The second is meaningful too: the fullness is not momentary but continuous.

Joined with the fine point above, what emerges is this: the word itself conveys fullness, and its adjective conveys fullness. The expression, that is, carries a double fullness.

This is like the two-stage structure recorded for "carded wool" in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the word says one thing, the adjective takes it one stage further.

A note: the drink of the Garden. The Qurʾān states elsewhere how the drink there differs from that of this world: "There is no corruption in it, nor do they become intoxicated by it" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/47); "From it they get neither headache nor loss of reason" (al-Wāqiʿa 56/19).

And this sūra makes its own note in the next verse: what comes after the cup is the absence of idle speech. The sūra, that is, immediately after naming the drink, rules out that drink's effect in this world (a loosened tongue, foolish talk).

I record this as my own reading; it rests on the two verses' coming one after the other.

Lā yasmaʿūna fīhā laghwan wa lā kidhdhābā "They hear in it neither idle speech nor lying."

Verses thirty-two to thirty-four counted material things: garden, vine, companion, cup. This verse counts something of another kind: what is not heard.

And this is a choice to be noticed. The favour is related not as something given but as something absent.

This is like the method recorded in the section on Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: there what God is was described by saying what He is not. Here what kind of place the Garden is is described by saying what is not found in it.

Root: ل-غ-و. لَغَا — it came to nothing, it was void, it did not count.

لَغْو is speech with no force: spoken, but not taken into account, producing no consequence.

Its uses in the Qurʾān draw the word's boundary:

"God will not hold you responsible for the laghw in your oaths (the unintended word)." (al-Baqara 2/225; similarly al-Māʾida 5/89)

The laghw here is an oath-word that comes out of the mouth unintended — it has been said but has no force.

"They turn away from idle speech." (al-Muʾminūn 23/3)

"When they pass by idle speech they pass by with dignity." (al-Furqān 25/72)

"They hear in it neither idle speech nor sinful talk; only 'peace, peace'." (al-Wāqiʿa 56/25-26)

The last verse is almost identical with this one and gives a positive counterpart as well: it says what stands in the place of idle speech.

A note on the language, and a reservation. In Arabic the lexicographers differ over the relation of the word لُغَة (lugha — language, tongue) to this root. Some count it from the same root, some keep it apart. I do not enter this disagreement and I draw no meaning from this similarity of sound; I only record it.

The same word occurred in the twenty-eighth verse and there it meant "denying" (the verbal noun of kadhdhaba).

Here there is disagreement over its sense:

A variant reading is transmitted: the word is read with the doubling (كِذَّابًا) or without it (كِذَابًا). The doubled reading is the verbal noun of kadhdhaba (denying); the undoubled reading is counted another form of kidhb (a lie). Since I cannot state with certainty which authority of the variant readings held which preference, I give no name.

The second view looks more consistent with the context of the sūra, because the verse pairs it with laghw: both are faults of speech. Laghw is empty speech, kidhāb is false speech.

But the first view is meaningful too and sets up a link within the sūra: those who denied in this world (78/28) hear no denying there.

I do not impose a preference.

The counting of the two words together points to two distinct ways in which speech breaks down:

Speech can break down in two ways: by saying nothing, or by saying the wrong thing. The verse removes both.

And now go back to the beginning of the sūra.

How did the sūra open? عَمَّ يَتَسَآءَلُونَ — they question one another; the matter has turned into talk; there is disagreement (78/3).

At the opening of the sūra, that is, there was a problem of speech: a conversation that had lost its weight, that went round and round and arrived nowhere.

And at the centre of the sūra's promise to those who guard themselves stands the disappearance of the problem of speech.

I record this as my own reading. But the words of the two ends are in the text: tasāʾul in the first verse and ikhtilāf in the third; laghw and kidhāb in the thirty-fifth.

One more observation. Coming after the four material favours counted in this section, this verse is the longest sentence in the section and its only negative sentence. Garden, vine, companion, cup — all were passed over in a single word. The quality of speech took a whole verse.

Jazāʾan min rabbika ʿaṭāʾan ḥisābā "A recompense from your Lord, a gift sufficient."

The verse gathers everything counted in the preceding five verses into a single sentence and qualifies it with three words.

جَزَآءً — recompense. The same word occurred in the twenty-sixth verse: jazāʾan wifāqā. The sūra, that is, names the ends of both groups "recompense".

مِّن رَّبِّكَ — from your Lord. And here two things happen at once.

One — the source is stated. On the side of punishment this note was absent. As was recorded above, this is an asymmetry: the reward is given with the giver named.

Two — the address changes. Up to this point the sūra was saying "you" (plural) or "they". Here it suddenly says "your Lord" — that is, to a single addressee, to the Prophet.

This is iltifāt and it was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa. Its function here is this: in the middle of a long scene the narration stops and turns directly to one person. The scene is thereby confirmed through that person's eyes.

The choosing of the name رَبّ is meaningful too. As was recorded in the section on al-Fātiḥa, Rabb carries ownership and nurture together. What is given, that is, is presented not as a prize but as the outcome of a relation of care.

Root: ع-ط-و. To give. أَعْطَىٰ — he gave. عَطَاء — a giving, a gift, a bestowal.

The choice of the word is critical. It had said jazāʾ (recompense); now the same thing is named ʿaṭāʾ (gift).

These two words are normally opposites:

The verse sets the two side by side. The same thing, that is, is both a recompense and a gift.

The way the exegetes explain this joining is: the deed earns a share of the recompense, but what is given is far above what is earned. It begins, that is, as a recompense and ends as a gift.

And this is the same equation set up at al-Anʿām 6/160: "Whoever brings a good deed shall have ten like it; and whoever brings an evil deed is recompensed only with its like."

The two ends of the sūra are thereby completed:

• 78/26: jazāʾan wifāqā — an equal recompense. Punishment only.
• 78/36: jazāʾan … ʿaṭāʾan — recompense and gift.

One word on the side of punishment, two on the side of reward. Justice works on both sides; bounty on one only.

There is a disagreement over this word and it arises from the breadth of the root ح-س-ب.

In the section on al-Humaza it was recorded that this root carries two verbs: ḥasaba (he counted) and ḥasiba (he supposed). Now a third wing is added:

حَسْب — to suffice, to be enough. Ḥasbuka — "it is enough for you". It is widespread in the Qurʾān:

"God is enough for us; what an excellent guardian." (Āl ʿImrān 3/173 — ḥasbunā'llāh)

"Whoever puts his trust in God, He is enough for him." (al-Ṭalāq 65/3 — fa-huwa ḥasbuh)

"God is enough for you." (al-Anfāl 8/62, 64 — ḥasbuka'llāh)

Now to the two readings in the verse:

The first and second views deserve to be taken seriously, and what is interesting is this: they are exact opposites of one another. One says "measured out", the other "amply, in plenty".

I do not impose a preference. But I record this: since the verse sets two words side by side (jazāʾ and ʿaṭāʾ), that the third word too should be able to carry both directions at once fits the balance of the text. The recompense side requires reckoning, the gift side sufficiency.

And now to one of the sharpest links in the sūra.

The same word, in the description of the two groups.

The return for the one who does not expect the reckoning is the reckoning he did not expect. The return for the one who does expect it is a gift that goes beyond reckoning.

I record this as an observation; the repetition of the word is a verifiable datum. The meaning the link sets up, however, is my own reading.

Rabbi'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍi wa mā baynahuma'l-Raḥmān · Lā yamlikūna minhu khiṭābā "The Lord of the heavens and the earth and what is between them — al-Raḥmān. They have no power to address Him."

رَّبِّ is in the genitive and is an adjective or an appositive of the word رَّبِّكَ in the preceding verse. That is: "from your Lord — from the Lord of the heavens and the earth."

A variant reading is transmitted: when the word is read in the nominative the sentence begins anew ("He is the Lord of the heavens and the earth"). No essential change of sense follows. I give no name of an authority.

In the preceding verse it said "your Lord" — that is, in relation to a single person. This verse takes the same name and opens its scope: the Lord of the heavens, the earth and what is between them.

This is another form of the finding recorded for رَبِّ ٱلْعَٰلَمِين in the section on al-Fātiḥa. It was stated there: the expression "Rabb al-ʿālamīn" is a claim of wholeness against a fragmented picture of lordship; and this claim has a political side — Pharaoh had declared himself "your highest lord" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/24).

In Sūrat al-Nabaʾ the function of this widening is different and depends on the context: everything counted through the sūra (the earth, the mountain, the night, the day, the sky, the sun, the cloud) falls inside this construct. The expression "of the heavens, the earth and what is between them" gathers the whole tableau of verses six to sixteen into a single phrase.

The verse, that is, attaches the sūra's inventory to a single owner.

This name was treated in detail in the section on al-Fātiḥa; the findings there are not repeated.

But there is something that must be recorded here: that this name has been chosen in this sūra.

Sūrat al-Nabaʾ contains one of the harshest scenes of punishment in the Qurʾān: scalding water, pus, remaining for ages, "We shall increase you in nothing but punishment."

And towards the end of the sūra, when the owner of the verdict is named, the name used is al-Raḥmān. And twice over: in the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth verses.

In the Qurʾān this is a frequent choice and it says something: the authority that gives the verdict is the same authority as the source of mercy. Punishment does not come from an attribute opposed to mercy.

The order recorded in the section on al-Fātiḥa showed this as well: immediately after the names al-Raḥmān, al-Raḥīm came Māliki yawmi'l-dīn (the master of the day of judgement). The same arrangement is repeated here.

An observation: this name occurs in the sūra for the first time in the thirty-seventh verse — that is, after the ends of both groups have been related. In the whole of the sūra God's name does not occur; there is only the pronoun "We" (jaʿalnā, khalaqnā, banaynā, anzalnā, aḥṣaynā) and, in the last section, Rabb and al-Raḥmān.

I record this as an observation.

مِلْك — Root: م-ل-ك. To own, to have power over. لَا يَمْلِكُونَ — "they do not own, they have not the power".

In Arabic this verb conveys having authority over something. It is widespread in the Qurʾān: "They have no power to harm or benefit themselves" (al-Furqān 25/3).

خِطَاب — Root: خ-ط-ب. خَاطَبَ — he addressed, he spoke face to face. خُطْبَة — a sermon. خِطْبَة — the seeking of a marriage.

The idea beneath the root: to speak by turning towards someone. Not ordinary talk; talk that turns to an addressee and calls out to him.

Who cannot address? The exegetes differ:

The third view is the most consistent with the context: the next verse will name the angels and the Spirit and say that they too cannot speak.

On the particle مِنْهُ. There are two readings:

• "[They have no power to obtain] an address from Him" — that is, they cannot make Him speak to them.
• "[They have no power to make] an address to Him" — that is, they cannot speak a word to Him.

Both have been defended. The second reading is the more widespread and is more consistent with the next verse.

Through the sūra a great deal has been said. In the first verse people were asking one another; in the third they were in disagreement; in the thirty-fifth idle speech and lying were spoken of.

And now the right to speak is withdrawn.

I record this as my own reading, but the sūra's weave of speech is in the text:

The sūra opens with a conversation and closes with a conversation. In between, the right to speak narrows steadily.

Yawma yaqūmu'l-rūḥu wa'l-malāʾikatu ṣaffā · Lā yatakallamūna illā man adhina lahu'l-Raḥmānu wa qāla ṣawābā "On the day when the Spirit and the angels stand in ranks. They will not speak — except one whom al-Raḥmān permits and who says what is right."

This is one of the most debated words in the Qurʾān and the honest course is to give the disagreement as it stands.

The majority's preference is Gabriel and the parallel usage at al-Qadr 97/4 (tanazzalu'l-malāʾikatu wa'l-rūḥu) is the strongest evidence: there too the angels and the Spirit stand side by side and are named separately.

I do not impose a preference. What has to be recorded is this: what the word corresponds to in this verse has not been plainly given in the Qurʾān, and every reading that tries to fix it is obliged to go beyond the text.

And a principle needs recalling. The Qurʾān records the answer it gives to a question asked about the word rūḥ:

"They ask you about the spirit. Say: the spirit is of my Lord's command; and you have been given of knowledge only a little." (al-Isrāʾ 17/85)

This verse shows that the indefiniteness around the word is the text's own choice.

Root: ص-ف-ف. To arrange in a row, to line up. صَفّ — a row, a line. مَصْفُوفَة — arranged in rows.

The grammarians differ over the word's place in the sentence: a circumstantial qualifier ("standing in ranks") or an absolute object.

How many ranks? Two readings:

• A single rank: all in one line. The word's coming in the singular supports this.
• Rank upon rank: more than one line. If the word is counted a generic noun it can convey plurality.

Both have been defended.

What does the scene say? Standing in ranks conveys an order and an awaiting. A crowd standing in ranks is not a crowd moving on its own; it is a crowd awaiting a command.

And the Qurʾān uses this picture for the angels elsewhere too: "[The angels say:] There is none of us but has an appointed station. We are indeed those who stand in ranks; we are indeed those who glorify" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/164-166).

Root: ك-ل-م. كَلَام — a word. تَكَلَّمَ (Form V) — he spoke.

In the preceding verse it said "they cannot address"; here it says "they will not speak". The difference between the two words:

• خِطَاب — to speak by turning towards someone; to face an addressee.
• كَلَام — speaking itself.

The verse, that is, widens the note of the first verse: not only can they not address Him, they cannot speak at all.

إِلَّا مَنْ أَذِنَ لَهُ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنُ وَقَالَ صَوَابًا — there are two conditions for being able to speak:

1. Permission — al-Raḥmān must permit. 2. Right speech — what is said must be on the mark.

That the two conditions come together is worth noting. Permission alone does not suffice; the one permitted must also speak rightly.

The grammarians differ over to whom the second condition belongs:

The second reading has also been defended and it is meaningful: the word spoken in this world giving rise to a right to speak there.

Root: ص-و-ب. And the concrete sense of the root is to hit, to strike the target.

Its derivatives:

• أَصَابَ — it hit, it struck, it reached.
• مُصِيبَة — a calamity; that which strikes home. The word is current in Turkish as well.
• صَيِّب — a downpour; that which strikes the ground. In the Qurʾān: "Or like a rainstorm from the sky" (al-Baqara 2/19).
• صَوَاب — right, on the mark.

In Arabic, then, "right speech" is speech that hits its target.

This is a datum of the language worth recording. Rightness is conceived not as the abstract quality of a proposition but as the accuracy of a shot. Wrong speech is an arrow that misses the target.

And the root's second branch is striking: muṣība is from the same root too. In Arabic, that is, good and bad alike "strike". Striking is in itself neutral; what strikes is another matter.

This is an observation about the language; I draw no conclusion from it for the verse.

Now set the two verses side by side:

• 78/35: In the Garden neither لَغْو (idle speech) nor كِذَاب (lying) is heard.
• 78/38: Only the one who receives permission and speaks صَوَاب (on the mark) speaks.

The two verses say the same thing from two directions. The one by counting negatively (what is absent), the other by laying down a positive condition (what is required).

And when the three words are read together, three states of speech emerge:

This triad is a classification I have made myself; but the root senses of the three words stand in the text and in the lexicon.

This verse is one of the proofs in the classical theological debate on intercession. The same condition occurs at al-Baqara 2/255: "Who can intercede with Him except by His leave?"

This commentary does not enter the debate on intercession, because this verse establishes no ruling; it lays down a condition. What the verse says is plain: on that day speech depends on permission.

What can be recorded is this: the verse by itself proves neither the existence nor the non-existence of intercession. What it says is that speech on that day does not happen of itself.

Dhālika'l-yawmu'l-ḥaqq · Fa-man shāʾa'ttakhadha ilā rabbihī maʾābā "That is the true day. So let him who wills take a place of return to his Lord."

ذَٰلِكَ is in Arabic the demonstrative that points to what is far. This word was treated in detail at al-Baqara 2/2 and what was recorded there was this: the use of the distant demonstrative can convey magnification — it shows the height or the unreachability of what is pointed at.

The same function is present here: the day is pointed at from a distance.

But there is something more. Through the sūra the last day has been related as though it were happening now (perfect verbs: futiḥat, suyyirat, kānat). Now the text draws back a step and looks at the scene from a distance: "that is the day."

I record this as an observation.

Root: ح-ق-ق. Beneath the root lies the idea of being fixed, being in place, coming about. حَقّ — the true, the fixed, the right; and a right (a claim upon someone).

ٱلْحَاقَّة (al-Ḥāqqa) is from this root too and was recorded in the table of the names of the last day in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the direction the root brings forward is verification — a claim turning out true.

And this is exactly the work being done here.

In its first verse the sūra spoke of a disagreement. A disagreement is two claims set against one another: one says "it will happen", the other "it will not". And the resolution of a disagreement is one of the claims turning out true.

The thirty-ninth verse announces this: that day is the day that is true.

The sūra, that is, closes in the thirty-ninth verse the disagreement it recorded in the third. And in between, at the seventeenth verse, stood yawm al-faṣl (the day of separation).

Three verses, a single chain:

I record this chain as my own reading; the places of the three words in the sūra, however, are in the text.

And the sūra's most unexpected sentence is here.

What has been related for thirty-eight verses was a necessity: the day is an appointed time, the trumpet will be blown, the sky will open, the mountains will become a mirage, Hell is in ambush, the reckoning will be held.

And now a choice is given.

شَاءَ — Root: ش-ي-أ. To will, to want. مَشِيئَة — willing, volition.

The sentence is conditional in structure: "Whoever wills… let him take." And the sentence has no compulsion in it, no threat, no command. It states only a possibility.

This pattern occurs in several other places in the Qurʾān and always stands in the same position — after a scene has been related:

"Say: the truth is from your Lord. Let him who wills believe, and let him who wills deny." (al-Kahf 18/29)

"This is a reminder; let him who wills take a way to his Lord." (al-Muzzammil 73/19; al-Insān 76/29)

These last two verses are very close to this one: the same structure (fa-man shāʾa'ttakhadha ilā rabbihī…), only the last word differing — there سَبِيلًا (a way), here مَـَٔابًا (a place of return).

And the sūra's second maʾāb is here.

In the twenty-second verse Hell was "a place of return for the transgressors". Here it says "a place of return to his Lord".

The difference between the two maʾābs lies in the prepositions and in the ownership:

In the first maʾāb the person does nothing. Hell is already there, ready for the transgressors; no one "takes" it. In the second maʾāb, on the other hand, there is a verb: to take.

The sūra, that is, says this: the bad maʾāb is ready; the good maʾāb is taken.

I record this as my own reading. But the grammatical difference between the two verses is in the text: in the one there is no verb, in the other there is.

And the link with the section on al-Qāriʿa. There the expression "his mother is the Abyss" was treated and this was recorded: the person is not thrown somewhere; he arrives where he belongs. And hāwiya was named with the word umm, meaning "the place returned to".

Al-Nabaʾ says the same idea plainly and adds something: the place returned to can be chosen.

Root: أ-خ-ذ. To take. اِتَّخَذَ (Form VIII) — he took for himself, he adopted, he made his own.

In the Qurʾān this verb most often occurs in a negative context:

"They took protectors apart from God." (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/41; al-Zumar 39/3)

"Have you seen the one who takes his own desire as his god?" (al-Jāthiya 45/23 — named in the section on al-Qāriʿa)

"They took the calf as a god." (al-Aʿrāf 7/152)

What the verb has in common is this: a person makes something his own, attaches himself to it, puts it at his own centre.

And this verse uses the same verb in a positive direction: ilā rabbihī maʾābā.

What the verse says, then, is this: a person takes something in any case; the question is what he takes.

This is the same as the finding recorded for al-Ṣamad in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ: everyone turns towards something; the question is what the thing you turn towards is.

Innā andharnākum ʿadhāban qarībā · Yawma yanẓuru'l-marʾu mā qaddamat yadāh · Wa yaqūlu'l-kāfiru yā laytanī kuntu turābā "We have warned you of a punishment near at hand — on the day when a man looks at what his own hands have sent ahead, and the denier says, 'Would that I were dust!'"

Root: ن-ذ-ر. This root was treated at al-Baqara 2/6 and what was recorded there is not repeated.

In summary the finding there was: إِنْذَار is to give news of a coming danger; a warning does not remove the danger — it makes it visible.

What is to be added here is this: the verb comes in the perfect.

The verse does not say "we are warning you" or "we shall warn you". It says "we have warned" — the past tense.

And this points at the sūra itself: the warning has been given — over forty verses. The sūra announces that it has finished its work.

Moreover the verb is first person plural: andharnā. The "We" used through the sūra (jaʿalnā, khalaqnā, banaynā, anzalnā, aḥṣaynā) comes here for the last time.

قَرِيب — Root: ق-ر-ب. To be near.

The choice of the word is worth noting, because the sūra's addressee lives precisely on an assumption of distance. That is the assumption beneath the question "When?": this business is far off, perhaps it will never happen.

And the observation recorded at the fourth and fifth verses is completed here: it was noted there that the particle سَ (the near future) was used, not sawfa. Here the same thing is said with an adjective: qarīb.

Near by what measure? The Qurʾān explains this elsewhere:

"They see it as far off; but We see it as near." (al-Maʿārij 70/6-7)

Nearness and distance, that is, change according to where one looks from. And the next sūra will sharpen this further: "as though they had remained no more than an evening" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/46).

ٱلْمَرْء — Root: م-ر-أ. A person, a man, a single human being.

The choice of the word is meaningful. Through the sūra the plural has been used: yatasāʾalūn, sa-yaʿlamūn, taʾtūna, ṭāghīn, muttaqīn. Here it moves suddenly to the singular.

In Arabic ٱلْمَرْء carries a different flavour from insān (إِنْسَان) or nās (نَاس): it conveys the individual, not the species. English catches this with "the individual" — or with "a man", where that word names one person rather than the kind.

And this is what the scene requires. In a place come to in throngs (78/18: afwājā), the looking is done one by one.

The Qurʾān uses this word in scenes of separation:

"On that day a man flees from his brother, his mother, his father, his wife and his children. On that day each one of them will have concern enough for himself." (ʿAbasa 80/34-37)

The same word (al-marʾ), the same scene, the same isolating.

يَنظُرُ — he looks. Naẓar — to look, to turn the eye towards. The verb's coming in the imperfect conveys that the looking continues.

And the choice of verb is worth noting: it does not say "he sees" (yarā), it says "he looks". Looking is a voluntary act; seeing simply happens.

It was recorded in the section on al-Zilzāl: there "they will see their deeds" (yaraw aʿmālahum) — a passive encounter. Here the person looks.

I record this as an observation.

قَدَّمَ — Root: ق-د-م. To put forward, to send ahead. قَدَم — the foot (that which steps forward). قَادِم — the one coming, the one to come. مُقَدِّمَة — a vanguard, an introduction.

The Qurʾān relates deeds as something "sent ahead" and this is a conception worth recording:

"Whatever good you send ahead for yourselves, you will find it with God." (al-Baqara 2/110)

"On that day a man will be told of what he sent ahead and what he left behind." (al-Qiyāma 75/13)

"We give life to the dead, and We write down what they sent ahead and their traces." (Yā-Sīn 36/12)

The conception is this: the human being is on a journey and sends his deeds on ahead. At the place he arrives at he finds them.

This is a different image from the scales of al-Qāriʿa, and the two complete one another: the scales measure; "sending ahead" carries.

يَدَاهُ — his two hands. A metonymy: the hand is the instrument of the act; by saying "hands" the deed is meant.

But why the dual? In Arabic both dual and plural can be used for "his hands". The choosing of the dual is attached to the fact that a human being works with two hands; the expression, that is, stays concrete.

An observation. In verses six to sixteen of the sūra it was related that God did everything (jaʿalnā, khalaqnā, banaynā). In the fortieth verse what the human being's own hands did is looked at.

The sūra opens with a work of a hand and closes with a work of a hand: the one a hand that builds, the other a hand that will give account.

I record this as my own reading.

The sūra's last sentence begins and the singular is used once again: ٱلْكَافِر — with the definite article, conveying the kind.

The definition recorded at al-Baqara 2/6 holds here: unbelief is not a failure to know; it is the covering over of what one knows. The concrete sense of the root is to cover — the farmer's covering of the seed with soil.

And now the root of the word joins with the word that is spoken.

Kāfir — one who covers. And the word he speaks: "Would that I were dust."

The man who covered all his life wishes, at the end, to be covered. The soil that lies in the concrete sense of the root becomes the thing he wishes for.

I record this as my own reading. The sense of the root (to cover) and the agricultural origin of the word (covering the seed with soil) were treated in this commentary in the sections on al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Baqara; the one who makes the link is I.

لَيْتَ — a particle of wishing. Arabic has two particles of wishing and the difference between them matters:

The verse has layta. What is said, that is, is a wish the speaker himself knows to be impossible.

يَا — a vocative particle. And there is an oddity here: a vocative particle normally requires an addressee ("O so-and-so!"). Here there is no addressee.

In Arabic this use is called nidāʾ al-tahaddus or the cry of regret: although there is no person being called, the vocative particle is used to show the pain of the word. The English exclamation "Oh!" — or "Alas!" — does this work.

The fullest rendering of the sentence, then, is close to: "Oh, would that I were dust!"

In the Qurʾān the formula yā layta is almost always in sentences of regret:

"The wrongdoer will bite his hands and say: would that I had taken a way with the Messenger!" (al-Furqān 25/27)

"Would that I had not known my reckoning! Would that it [death] had been the end of me!" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/25-27)

"Would that I had sent something ahead for my life!" (al-Fajr 89/24)

The last example is striking: the verb there is قَدَّمْتُ — the same root as the qaddamat of this verse. Two sūras, that is, use the same verb in the same scene.

The last two words of the sūra. And one of the most dwelt-upon sentences in the Qurʾān.

تُرَاب — Root: ت-ر-ب. Dust, earth. And as was recorded above at the thirty-third verse, the word أَتْرَاب (coevals) is from the same root.

Views on the sense of the wish:

The first and second views are the strongest and they do not exclude one another. Both want the same thing: not to have existed.

And now the sūra's last sentence has to be joined with a proof set up earlier in this commentary.

At al-Baqara 2/28 a four-stage proof was treated:

The finding recorded there was: "the fourth step you object to is the repetition of the second step, which has already taken place once."

The last sentence of Sūrat al-Nabaʾ relates a movement inside this scheme.

The denier is in the position of having lived the fourth step — he has been raised. And what he wishes is to go back to the first step: "would that I were dust."

The wish, that is, asks for the reversal of the four-step chain. But the chain runs one way only, and this explains why the wish is framed with layta (the particle of the impossible wish).

I record this as my own reading. What it rests on is the scheme of al-Baqara 2/28 and the content of this verse; both are in the text, the joining is mine.

And one last observation.

• The sixth verse of the sūra: "Did We not make the earth a cradle?" — مِهَادًا
• The last word of the sūra: "Would that I were dust." — تُرَابًا

Cradle and dust. Both from the same earth.

In the sixth verse the earth is the prepared ground on which a human being lives. In the fortieth verse the substance of that same earth is what the human being wants to be.

And what was recorded above about the cradle works here once more: a cradle is a place one does not stay in. The wish in the fortieth verse is the wish never to have left the cradle.

I record this as my own reading; the positions of the two words in the sūra, however, are in the text.

From beginning to end the sūra turns about a single thing: a piece of news.

The sūra does not defend a piece of news; it relates the news coming about.

And note: nowhere is the question of the first verse answered. The sūra's addressee asked "what is this?"; the sūra did not say "it is this". It set up the scene.

The sound scheme of the sūra is one of the most single-noted in the Qurʾān.

From the fifth verse to the end, every verse ends on the same sound: a lengthened -ā, and for the great majority -ābā.

Read the verse-endings in order:

mihādā · awtādā · azwājā · subātā · libāsā · maʿāshā · shidādā · wahhājā · thajjājā · nabātā · alfāfā · mīqātā · afwājā · abwābā · sarābā · mirṣādā · maʾābā · aḥqābā · sharābā · ghassāqā · wifāqā · ḥisābā · kidhdhābā · kitābā · ʿadhābā · mafāzā · aʿnābā · atrābā · dihāqā · kidhdhābā · ḥisābā · khiṭābā · ṣawābā · maʾābā · turābā.

Thirty-five verses, a single sound.

And among them the number of those ending in ب is markedly high: apart from abwāb and mirṣād, there are maʾāb, sharāb, ḥisāb, kidhdhāb, kitāb, ʿadhāb, aʿnāb, atrāb, khiṭāb, turāb…

The first five verses stand outside this scheme: yatasāʾalūn · al-ʿaẓīm · mukhtalifūn · sa-yaʿlamūn · sa-yaʿlamūn.

The sūra, that is, opens on one sound and moves at the sixth verse to another, and does not let it go until the end.

An observation and its note. This is the form taken in this sūra by the phenomenon recorded in the sections on al-Takāthur and al-Qāriʿa: in short Meccan sūras sound and content often move together. Here the change of sound coincides exactly with the change of content — the section of questioning ends, the tableau begins.

I do not offer this as a claim of a miracle; I record it as a marked instance of the sūra's sound-weave.

There are four places in the sūra where the same word is used twice, on two different sides. This is the sūra's most notable structural feature:

All four words bind the two halves of the sūra together.

And the manner of the binding is meaningful: while the sūra relates the two groups separately, it relates both of them with the same words. The same reckoning, the same return, the same recompense — what differs is their content.

I record this as an observation. The repetitions of the words are verifiable data; the claim that they form a pattern is a reading.

A summary of the dwelling reading set up above:

The two things dismantled are the two firmest of the things built: the peg and the building.

And both dismantlings are in the same grammar: fa-kānat + an indefinite noun. The text, that is, has matched the two transformations to one another.

This reading is mine; the words are in the text.

The tafāʿul form in the sūra's first word is directly functional for today.

Asking a question about a matter and asking one another about that matter are two different works.

In the first there is a direction: I ask the one who knows the answer, or the place where the answer can be found. The answer comes or it does not; but the operation ends at some point.

In the second there is no direction. Nobody knows the answer; everyone collects everyone else's guesses; and as the volume of the talk increases, the feeling arises that the matter has been dealt with — whereas nothing has been dealt with.

Today this second state is far more easily reached than the first. The relation between how much is read about a matter and how far one has got with that matter has weakened.

The answer the sūra gives to this attitude is worth noting: it does not join the conversation. It says kallā, cuts it off, and starts from somewhere else.

The distinction between nabaʾ and khabar gives a practical measure today.

The distinguishing question is this: if this news is true, what has to change?

If a piece of news is heard and nothing changes, then that news — however interesting — is khabar. If something has to change when it is heard, it is nabaʾ.

And the uncomfortable side of this measure is this: the weight of a piece of news is not measured by the attention given to it. What is talked about most through a day may be what affects life least that day. This was exactly the case of the sūra's addressees: the weightiest news was the news most talked about and least acted on.

The diagnosis in the twenty-seventh verse is this sūra's sentence that looks most directly at the present.

The verse diagnoses not a fault of belief but a fault of expectation. And expectations, unlike beliefs, are not things a person knows about himself; they settle into behaviour.

The practical counterpart of this is: what a person expects is read not from what he says but from what he reckons with.

• The person who reckons with an assessment coming after a piece of work does that work differently.
• The person who reckons with a word spoken being set before him one day speaks differently.
• The person who reckons with what he does where no one sees being recorded somewhere behaves differently.

And the reverse: the person who does not reckon with these may be accepting the matter theoretically. The verse measures not that acceptance but the reckoning with it.

That the word comes from the root of hope is worth noting too. The reckoning is named not as something to be feared but as something to be hoped for. And this depends on whose favour the reckoning works in: for the one whose right has been taken, the reckoning is a hope.

This gives the sūra's side of justice: to want the reckoning abolished is to want injustice made permanent.

The asymmetry between the twenty-sixth and the thirty-sixth verses gives a measure for today.

Punishment is equal; reward is a gift.

The practical consequence of this is: a person earns his punishment but cannot earn his reward. And this gives rise to two different attitudes:

• When looking at yourself: in reckoning the return for the work you have done, do not assume that the reckoning will protect you entirely. Equal recompense works on one side only.
• When looking at another: in making a return, equivalence is enough; but more is possible too, and the name of that more is bounty.

The Qurʾān commands this distinction separately: "God commands justice and bounty" (al-Naḥl 16/90). Two words side by side and distinct: justice is equivalence, bounty is excess.

The two words in the thirty-fifth verse — laghw and kidhāb — give a classification that works directly today.

Speech breaks down in two ways:

• As a lie — it carries wrong information. This is a recognised fault and there is a defence against it: verification.
• As emptiness — it carries no information at all. This is a less recognised fault, because it says nothing wrong.

It is not hard to say that the second is the more widespread today. Against false speech a mechanism of verification can be set up; against empty speech none can, because there is no claim to be verified.

And that the sūra removes these two faults together in the Garden is meaningful: both make speech useless. The one destroys trust, the other spends attention.

That the Qurʾān counts keeping away from laghw among the qualities of the believer (al-Muʾminūn 23/3; al-Furqān 25/72) is for this reason a practical measure — and it is a matter not of a prohibition but of a habit.

The distance between the sixth verse and the fortieth gives a conception of life.

The earth is a cradle: prepared, sheltering, bearing, rocking. And a cradle is a place one does not stay in.

This is not a rejection of the world — for eleven verses the sūra counted the earth as favour and belittled none of it. The gardens are thickly entwined, the lamp blazes, the water pours.

What it says is finer: that a place is a good place does not mean it is a lasting one.

And the side of this that looks to the present is: to find a place good and to assume one is permanent in it are different things. The second does not follow automatically from the first — but a person most often draws it.

The verb in the thirty-ninth verse — اِتَّخَذَ (to take) — states not a preference but a necessity.

As was recorded above, this verb is mostly in a negative context in the Qurʾān: a person takes protectors, takes gods, takes his own desire as a god. The verb always relates the same thing: a person's attaching himself to something.

And the finding recorded for al-Ṣamad in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ holds here: everyone turns towards something; the question is what the thing he turns towards is.

The possibility the verse gives is this: the place to be returned to can be chosen. And the choosing is done not by a single decision but by the things one takes — because a person returns to whatever he takes.

The closing sentence of the section on al-Qāriʿa holds again here: the person is not thrown somewhere; he arrives where he belongs.

• It was stated plainly that the elision of the alif in the word عَمَّ is a general rule of Arabic and not a choice peculiar to this verse; the reading that the question has been "shortened and sharpened" is mine and its limit was written.
• The pause in the form عَمَّهْ is transmitted; since I cannot state with certainty which authority of the variant readings held this preference, no name was written.
• The two functions of the word tasāʾul in Form tafāʿul (reciprocity / insistence) were given in a table; neither was presented as certainly correct. The reading "it has turned into gossip" is my own interpretation.
• Three views were given on out of whose mouth the question in the first verse comes; no preference was imposed.
• The three-condition distinction between nabaʾ and khabar was given as the definition recorded in al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī's al-Mufradāt and widely transmitted in the exegetical tradition. And a note was attached to the definition: at al-Ḥujurāt 49/6 nabaʾ is used for a false report as well; this shows the limit of the definition and it was stated plainly in the text.
• Two views were given on which root the word nabī derives from (ن-ب-أ / ن-ب-و); no preference was imposed.
• What al-nabaʾ al-ʿaẓīm corresponds to (the resurrection / the Qurʾān / prophethood) is disputed; the majority's preference was stated, but the word-for-word identical phrase at Ṣād 38/67 was also recorded and it was written that the views do not exclude one another.
• Two views were given on who the parties to the disagreement are (among themselves / with the believers). The reading "that those who reject a piece of news should be divided among themselves is a symptom of the groundlessness of the rejection" is mine.
• The lexicographers differ over the function of the particle kallā (rejection / affirmation); both were recorded.
• It was written plainly that some lexicographers do not accept the near/far distinction between سَ and سَوْفَ; the observation resting on that distinction was offered conditionally.
• Four views on the function of the repetition in verses 4-5 were given in a table; no preference was imposed.
• The reading that verses 6-16 form an inventory of a dwelling or a tent — that reading is mine; it was stated plainly that the classical exegetes gather these verses under the heading "the enumeration of favours" and that the connection with a dwelling is a reading I have added. The reading's ground in the text (the dismantling of the same two items in verses 19-20) was also shown.
• مِهَاد was compared with فِرَاش and the finding at al-Baqara 2/22 was relied on. The reading "the impermanence of the cradle" is mine.
• No hunting for scientific miracles was done in the expression "the mountains are pegs" and the ground for not doing so was written in three items. It was stated plainly that the verse gives no piece of geology but names a function.
• The link made between al-Nabaʾ 78/7 and al-Fajr 89/10 (dhū'l-awtād) is my own reading; the shared word, however, is a verifiable datum. Two views were given on the sense of the phrase dhū'l-awtād.
• Two views were given on the sense of the word أَزْوَاجًا (male-female / kind by kind); it was stated that the first is the more widespread, and no preference was imposed.
• The link between subāt (sleep) and death was grounded on al-Zumar 39/42 and al-Anʿām 6/60; it was stated that some of the classical exegetes make this link and not all do.
• The distinction whereby sirāj is used for the sun and nūr for the moon was recorded but was not offered as a claim of a scientific miracle; the ground (that this difference is known to the naked eye) was written plainly.
• The finding that the word وَهَّاج occurs only here in the Qurʾān was not offered as the result of an exhaustive search.
• What ٱلْمُعْصِرَات are (clouds / winds / skies) is disputed; a table was given and no preference was imposed.
• For the hadith concerning the word thajj no source was written, because I cannot state with certainty in which source and in what wording it occurs.
• It was stated that the lexicographers differ over the singular of the word أَلْفَاف.
• The reading that the tableau of the earth forms "a series of increasing density" is mine.
• The link made at 78/17 between faṣl and the ikhtilāf of 78/3 is my own reading; it was written plainly that the two words come from separate roots and that no etymological kinship between them is claimed.
• What ٱلصُّور is (a horn / forms) is disputed; the majority's preference was given with its ground.
• The readings of the contrast at 78/19-20 between the sky's "becoming doors" and the "firm building" of 78/12, and of the mountains' turning "from peg to mirage", are mine; the words are in the text.
• That the word أَحْقَابًا states a term, and the debate over the eternity of Hell, are a matter of theology; three views were given in a table, the verses on the other side (al-Jinn 72/23; al-Nisāʾ 4/169) were recorded, and no side was taken. Figures for how many years a ḥuqub is were not given, on account of the weakness of the transmissions behind them.
• That the word بَرْدًا means "sleep" is a view of the lexicographers; the connection with 78/9 resting on that view was offered as a possibility.
• حَمِيم (ح-م-م) and the حَامِيَة (ح-م-ي) of al-Qāriʿa were recorded as separate roots; no derivation from one to the other was claimed. The sense of ḥamīm as "close friend" was recorded as an observation about the language and no meaning was drawn from it.
• The undoubled reading of غَسَّاق is transmitted; no name of an authority was given.
• The kind of the exception in verses 24-25 (connected / disconnected) is disputed; no preference was imposed.
• The reading of the asymmetry between jazāʾ wifāq and jazāʾ ʿaṭāʾ is mine; the words of the two verses are in the text.
• That the verb رَجَا means "to reckon with" in a negative context is a usage the lexicographers record, and it was supported with Nūḥ 71/13.
• The relation of the كِذَّاب pattern to the dialect of Yemen is an explanation the lexicographers transmit.
• Two readings were given at 78/28 of what "signs" corresponds to (the verses of the Qurʾān / the signs in nature); that the second accords with the structure of the sūra is my own observation.
• Three analyses were given of the place of the word كِتَٰبًا in the sentence (absolute object / circumstantial qualifier / specifier); it was stated that this makes no great difference to the sense.
• The resemblance between 78/29 and modern recording technology was recorded as an analogy, not as exegesis; it was written plainly that the verse announces no technology.
• Three explanations were given of the resolution of the tension between 78/26 and 78/30 (equal punishment / increasing punishment).
• The sense of مَفَازَة as "desert" was recorded as a note on the language and no meaning was drawn from it.
• The comparison of the gardens between 78/16 and 78/32 (alfāf / ḥadāʾiq) is my own reading; the root senses, however, are lexical data.
• Two readings (literal / figurative) were given for the verse وَكَوَاعِبَ أَتْرَابًا and no preference was imposed; it was recorded that al-Baqara 2/25 says the descriptions are not exact counterparts. The expression that in the Garden there are things "no eye has seen" was named as a report and no source was given, but al-Sajda 32/17 was shown from the Qurʾān. That the Qurʾān's promise of the Garden does not belong to one sex was recorded with al-Naḥl 16/97 and Ghāfir 40/40.
• The shared root between أَتْرَابًا and the تُرَابًا of 78/40 is a verifiable datum of the language; a deliberate link between the two verses was not claimed.
• Three views were given on the sense of the word دِهَاق.
• The sense of كِذَّاب at 78/35 (a lie / a denying) is disputed and a variant reading is transmitted; no name of an authority was given, and no preference was imposed.
• The lexicographers differ over the relation of the word لُغَة to the root ل-غ-و; no meaning was drawn from this similarity of sound.
• The "problem of speech" link made between 78/35 and the opening of the sūra (tasāʾul, ikhtilāf) is mine.
• The nominative reading of the word Rabb at 78/37 is transmitted; no name of an authority was given.
• The sense of the word حِسَابًا (78/36) (sufficient / according to reckoning) is disputed; both views were recorded and no preference was imposed.
• The meaning set up by the ḥisāb link between 78/27 and 78/36 is my own reading; the repetition of the word, however, is a verifiable datum.
• Who or what ٱلرُّوح is is disputed; five views were given in a table, the majority's preference and its ground were written, and no preference was imposed. It was recorded that al-Isrāʾ 17/85 makes the indefiniteness around the word the text's own choice.
• On the place of 78/38 in the debate over intercession no side was taken; it was written that the verse by itself proves neither the existence nor the non-existence of intercession.
• That صَوَاب and مُصِيبَة are from the same root was recorded as an observation about the language and no conclusion was drawn from it for the verse.
• The threefold classification laghw / kidhāb / ṣawāb is a classification I have made myself; the root senses, however, are lexical data.
• The reading resting on the grammatical difference between the two maʾābs at 78/22 and 78/39 ("the bad maʾāb is ready, the good maʾāb is taken") is mine.
• The link made between the root sense of the word kāfir (to cover) and the turāb wish at 78/40 is mine.
• Four views on the sense of the wish يَا لَيْتَنِى كُنتُ تُرَابًا were given in a table. The view "the animals are turned to dust" was recorded as a transmission and was not confirmed.
• The link made between the four-stage scheme of al-Baqara 2/28 and 78/40 is my own reading; both texts were shown in their places.
• The observation on the sūra's scheme of verse-endings was recorded as a finding about its sound-weave and was not offered as a claim of a miracle.
• The observation that the four repeated words (maʾāb, ḥisāb, kidhdhāb, jazāʾ) bind the two halves of the sūra: the repetitions of the words are verifiable data; the claim that they form a pattern is a reading.