ʿAbasa 80:33-37

Fa-idhā jāʾati'ṣ-ṣākhkha ۝ Yawma yafirru'l-marʾu min akhīh ۝ Wa ummihi wa abīh ۝ Wa ṣāḥibatihi wa banīh ۝ Li-kulli'mriʾin minhum yawmaʾidhin shaʾnun yughnīh

"When the sound that deafens the ears comes — on that day a man flees from his brother, and from his mother and his father, and from his wife and his children. On that day each of them has a concern of his own that suffices him."

Root: ص-خ-خ. A doubled root (muḍāʿaf). Its meaning: a sound violent enough to deafen the ear; a noise that strikes and deafens. Ṣakhkha — it struck, it deafened.

The word occurs only here in the Qurʾān.

The names of the resurrection, and what each name brings to the front, were given in a table in the section on al-Qāriʿa 101; this name is included there and was bound to hearing. I do not repeat it here.

What is to be added here is this: of all the names given to the resurrection, the one that brings hearing to the front is used precisely in this sūra.

The sūra had opened with a matter of seeing: a man who could not see came among those who could, and was not seen. And the sūra's scene of the resurrection opens with an event in which the distinction between seeing and not seeing loses its meaning: a sound it is impossible not to hear.

The sūra does not establish this link; I am the one establishing it, and I record this as my own reading. But the choice of word does not look like chance: with seven or eight names for the resurrection at the Qurʾān's disposal, its choosing the name of hearing in a sūra about seeing is worth recording.

Why is sound so central? Because sound cannot be escaped. The eye closes; the ear does not. One can refrain from looking where one should not look; a sound one should not hear cannot be left unheard. The most direct way to relate that an event covers everyone equally is to describe it as a sound.

And fa-idhā. The particle idhā denotes a time whose coming to pass is certain; this was treated in the section on al-Zilzāl. The fāʾ at the head binds the passage to the one before it: the picture of the table ended, the word matāʿ was said, and then. There is no break.

This is one of the places in the sūra that most needs to be dwelt on.

The order is this: brother → mother → father → wife → children.

The rhythm says something too: the brother by himself (verse 34), then two pairs (35 and 36). 1 + 2 + 2. The brother is named alone, and he opens the door.

On what basis is the ordering?

So the ordering runs from the easiest to break to the hardest. The sequence is a rising staircase, and its last step is the children.

Why this is the summit is plain: a person will do almost anything for his own child. The tendency of a parent to protect his child is one of the strongest and most widespread patterns of human behaviour; it is observed in every society, in every age. The verse describes a moment in which that pattern is broken. The measure of the terror is the last item of the list.

The second logic of the ordering: completeness.

Look at the five people. Lateral (the brother), upward (the parents), horizontal-and-chosen (the wife), downward (the children). Every axis of kinship a person can belong to has been counted. No one is left outside.

So this is not a list of examples but a census. The sūra does not say "he flees from his relatives"; it counts out one by one every kind of nearness and marks them all.

The third logic: the chronology of a person's life.

The brother — the companion of childhood. Mother and father — the beginning. The wife — the bond established in adulthood. The children — the future. The list passes in order through the bonds a person forms over the course of his life.

Why the mother before the father? The Qurʾān generally uses collective expressions such as wālidayn or abawayn; here the two are named separately, and the mother first. This agrees with the precedence the Qurʾān and the body of hadith give to the mother in the matter of goodness towards parents ("His mother bore him in weakness upon weakness…", Luqmān 31/14 — there too the mother is named particularly).

Its function here may be this — as my own reading: the mother is the person one would least expect to be fled from. As the staircase rises, she is the first step that shakes. For this reason she has been placed at the head of the pair.

The verse does not say zawja, it says صَاحِبَة.

Root: ص-ح-ب. To be together, to keep company, to accompany. Ṣāḥib — friend, companion; ṣuḥba — companionship; aṣḥāb — those who are together.

The difference is real: zawja relates a legal bond (the marriage contract); ṣāḥiba relates companionship. The verse brings to the front not the legal bond but the living side by side.

Why? Because what matters in the scene of flight is not the legal bond but habit and closeness. A man flees not from a contract but from the person with whom he shared his life.

And a link: Sūrat al-Takwīr uses this root too, in a critical place. "Your companion (صَاحِبُكُم) is not possessed" (al-Takwīr 81/22). There the word rests on the acquaintance built by having lived together for long years: you know him.

The two sūras use the same root in two different directions: in one, companionship is a proof (you know him); in the other, companionship dissolves (he flees from her). I record this parallel as my own reading.

Root: ف-ر-ر. To flee, to desert. Turkish borrowed the word from this root as firar, "desertion". Mafarr — the place one flees to: "On that day man will say: where is the place of escape?" (al-Qiyāma 75/10).

The word does not mean "to part" but "to flee". Parting is neutral; fleeing presupposes a threat. The one who flees is expecting harm from what he flees.

What, then, is the threat? Two explanations are given, and both agree with the text:

1. Fear of being called to account. The person knows he has a debt towards these people. To meet them is to be reminded of the reckoning. 2. The weight of his own concern. The thirty-seventh verse gives this explanation openly.

The second explanation is the closer to the text, because the verse itself says it.

الْمَرْء — a person. Root م-ر-أ. Imruʾ — a person, a man; imraʾa — a woman; murūʾa — humanity, manliness, virtue. From the same root.

In relating the moment at which man's most human bonds dissolve, the sūra uses a word akin to the root of murūʾa. I record this as a nicety; I do not claim that there is this much intention in the choice of the word — marʾ is the ordinary word in Arabic in this context.

The sūra's finest turn of a word is here.

شَأْن — root ش-أ-ن. State, business, condition, a matter of importance. The Turkish words şan and şe'niyet are borrowings from this root. In the Qurʾān: "Every day He is upon some business" (al-Raḥmān 55/29: kulla yawmin huwa fī shaʾn).

That the word comes indefinite is for magnification: "such a concern that…". It is not defined, its boundary is not drawn.

يُغْنِيهِ — root غ-ن-ي. And here is the sūra's turn.

In the fifth verse there was this: مَنِ ٱسْتَغْنَىٰ — the one who sees himself as self-sufficient, who counts himself free of need.

In the thirty-seventh verse there is this: شَأْنٌ يُغْنِيهِ — a concern that makes him self-sufficient, that suffices him.

The same root, at the two ends of the sūra.

The meaning of the verb: aghnāhu'sh-shayʾu — that thing sufficed him, took him out of needing anyone else. So the verse says: each will have such a concern that he will have no room left to think of anyone else.

And the irony here lies in the word itself:

In this world a man had supposed himself self-sufficient. He had thought he needed no one, and for precisely this reason he drew everyone's attention. On that day the thing he wanted will be given him — he really will need no one. But by then it is no longer a privilege; it is the description of having no one.

The same technique was recorded in the section on al-Layl: there too the sūra gave the man who supposed himself ghanī his own word back, by telling him that his wealth would not avail him. ʿAbasa does the same work: istighnāʾ is given to the one who wanted istighnāʾ.

This is an inference, and I record it as my own reading. But that the root occurs at exactly the two ends of the sūra, in exactly these two positions, suggests that the words were not chosen at random.

And there is this: in its first ten verses the sūra had spoken of a matter of the distribution of attention — who is turned towards, who is turned away from. The thirty-seventh verse describes a day on which attention comes to an end altogether. That is, the sūra traces an arc: how you distribute your attention today is measured in the light of a day on which no one will be able to attend to anyone.