فَلْيَنظُرِ ٱلْإِنسَٰنُ إِلَىٰ طَعَامِهِۦ
Through twenty-three verses what was set out was this: pages raised high, noble scribes, creation, measure, death, the grave, resurrection. The scale as large as it could be. And now the verse says: look at your plate.
This is the same movement as the architecture of Sūrat al-Māʿūn. There the sūra began from the day of reckoning and came down to a bucket; the descent here is steeper still: from resurrection to a single meal.
Why? Because the dispute is a dispute about evidence, and the strongest evidence is that which is not disputed. Resurrection can be denied — it has not been seen. Revelation can be denied — its source is not visible. But the food on the plate cannot be denied. It is standing there, everyone eats it, and where it came from can be traced.
The sūra binds its largest claim to the smallest and nearest object. And this agrees with the sūra's first ten verses too: there as well it was related in how small a thing the measure shows itself — in an expression on a face.
A command in the third person, framed with the lām al-amr (the lām of command): "let him look". Not a direct command (unẓur — look), but a command directed at a third person.
This agrees with the context: since the seventeenth verse the one addressed is "al-insān", not a single person. The command is framed accordingly.
نَظَر — to look. Root ن-ظ-ر. In the Qurʾān this verb is used in two ways: to look with the eye, and to examine by thinking. English keeps the same doubling: to look at a thing and to look into it are not the same act.
The particle إِلَىٰ brings the first to the front. Naẓara ilā — to turn one's eye towards a thing. Had it been naẓara fī, "to think it over" would have been the more dominant sense. So the verse asks first for an actual looking: for really looking at the plate.
But the eight verses that follow show where the looking must lead — to the rain, to the soil, to the splitting. That is, the verse asks for a looking with the eye and carries it over into thought. The look is set down as the starting point of thought, not as something that takes its place.
طَعَام — food. Root ط-ع-م: to taste, to eat. This root was treated at al-Māʿūn 107/3 (ṭaʿāmi'l-miskīn); the note there holds here too: the word can mean both "food" (the substance) and "feeding" (the act). Here the first sense is plain.
Another reading. It is transmitted that in the sources "ṭaʿām" is read here figuratively in the sense of the knowledge or teaching a person takes in, and understood as "let man look at what he takes and from whom". Since I am not certain to whom this reading belongs, I give no name. The context looks as though it does not permit it — the eight verses that follow are entirely about agriculture. But I record it as a horizon: for a man to ask after the source of what he takes into himself is not a question belonging to food alone.