al-Takwīr 81:17-18

Wa'l-layli idhā ʿasʿas ۝ Wa'ṣ-ṣubḥi idhā tanaffas "And by the night, when it turns away; and by the morning, when it breathes."

The two most beautiful verses of the sūra.

Root: ع-س-س, a quadriliteral reduplicated form (four letters, the pair repeated): ʿas-ʿas.

And the word is one of the aḍdād — that is, it conveys both a thing and its exact opposite:

This class of words, called aḍdād in Arabic, is interesting, and it is not rare. But in this word the opposition is no accident — it follows from the logic of the root.

At the centre of the root lie thinning, growing sparse, lightness. And the night has two thin ends:

• At its beginning: the darkness has not yet settled; it is thin and new.
• At its end: the darkness has already dissolved; it is thin and about to be over.

ʿAsʿasa, then, names not the thick middle of the night but its thin edge. And because the night has two thin edges, the word can look both ways at once.

This reading takes the opposition out of being an oddity of language and makes it the appearance of a single sense from its two ends. What the word describes is not a direction but a consistency. I offer this as the explanation I find strongest; the preference is not binding.

The root's relatives support this too:

• عَسَّ — to go about by night, to patrol.
• العَسَس — the night watchmen, the patrol. Beneath the root lie the night, and movement in the night.

Both views have been defended in the classical commentaries. But the next verse makes the choice easier:

وَٱلصُّبْحِ إِذَا تَنَفَّسَ — "and by the morning, when it breathes."

If what were meant were the night coming on, the two oaths would be sworn at two moments far apart: evening and morning. If what is meant is the night going, then both oaths are sworn at one and the same moment: the last edge of the night and the first instant of the morning.

And that moment is a single moment — the seam itself. As the night draws back, the morning breathes.

This is why most of the exegetes stand in this direction. My preference is in the same direction, this is its ground, and it is not binding.

In the section on al-Ḍuḥā the Qurʾān's oaths by the night were given in tabular form; there, for this verse, the note "when it draws on / when it withdraws" was entered — that indeterminacy was deliberate, and it is explained here.

Root: ن-ف-س. This root was treated in the section on al-Shams 91/7 (nafs), and this verse was mentioned there; I do not repeat it here. In summary: beneath the root lies breath — nafas (the air breathed), tanaffus (breathing in and out), nafīs (precious), munāfasa (vying for something precious).

What is to be added here:

One. The pattern is Form V. This form conveys gradualness (coming about slowly, by degrees) and reflexivity. The morning, that is, is not lit from outside; by itself, little by little, it lets out its breath.

This fits what the morning actually looks like: the light does not come all at once; the horizon opens by degrees. The pattern itself carries this gradualness.

Two. Why "breath"?

Because breath is the sign of being alive. That a thing breathes shows that it has not died. The sūra's first thirteen verses recounted death, dismantling, going out; the eighteenth verse answers with a drawing of breath.

And breath comes from within. The morning is not lit by a source outside it; it releases what it has held inside.

Three. Two images of the same event.

The Qurʾān uses two different images for the morning, and the two look from opposite directions:

In the section on al-Falaq fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ was dwelt on: the night is closed, it cracks at some point of the horizon and the light comes out from within. Here the same event is given not as a splitting but as a drawing of breath.

The two images do not contradict one another; they look at the same event from two sides. And they show that the word the Qurʾān chooses changes according to the work of the place it is chosen for: Sūrat al-Falaq is a sūra of taking refuge, and there the splitting of the darkness was what was wanted; al-Takwīr is a sūra of report, and here the aliveness of the morning is what is wanted.

Four. And a return of a root inside the sūra.

The fourteenth verse: عَلِمَتْ نَفْسٌ — a nafs knows. The eighteenth verse: تَنَفَّسَ — the morning drew breath.

The same root. The word the sūra uses for the human being and the word it uses for the morning come from one root: breath.

A nafs is a breath. And the morning is the breath at the end of the night. The sūra names the person and the morning with the same word.

I record this as my own reading; it is not visible without the analysis of the root made in al-Shams.

And now look at where these two verses stand.

Before them: across fourteen verses the sun was rolled up, the stars fell, the sky was stripped away, the seas caught fire. The ending of a world.

After them: "Truly it is the speech of a noble messenger" — the arrival of a report.

And exactly in the middle, two verses: the night withdraws, the morning breathes.

In passing from the ending to the report, the sūra sets in between the image of what comes after an ending. Morning follows night; and this is a fact repeated every day, and disputed by no one.

I offer this as a possible reading: these two oaths of the sūra do more than swear — they carry the argument itself in the form of an image. Darkness is not the last word. The same observation was made in the section on al-Falaq: "darkness is not permanent", and there too the ground was the splitting open of the morning.