وَجَعَلْنَا ٱلَّيْلَ لِبَاسًا · وَجَعَلْنَا ٱلنَّهَارَ مَعَاشًا
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.
2. To mix, to render indistinct. لَبَسَ عَلَيْهِ — he confused the matter for him, he clouded his mind. اِلْتِبَاس — confusion, indistinctness.
"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.
- 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.
"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.
"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:
| Analysis | Sense |
|---|---|
| Verbal noun with mīm | Living, making a living (the act itself) |
| Noun of time | The time of living |
| Noun of place | The place of living |
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.
| Night (10) | Day (11) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is called | لِبَاس — a garment | مَعَاش — a livelihood |
| The kind of word | An object — something worn | An act / a time — a work that is done |
| The human being's position | Passive — he is clothed, enclosed | Active — he works, he earns |
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.