al-Takwīr 81:4

Wa idhā'l-ʿishāru ʿuṭṭilat "When the pregnant camels are left untended."

The most concrete, the most local and the most telling verse of the sūra.

The word. ʿIshār is the plural of عُشَرَاء (ʿusharāʾ). ʿUsharāʾ: a she-camel that has entered the tenth month of her pregnancy, close to giving birth.

Its name comes straight from the numeral عَشَرَة (ten): the one that has reached the tenth month.

To understand this one has to know that economy.

In a desert society the camel was an economy in itself: transport, the carrying of loads, milk, meat, hide, wool, and the unit in which wealth was measured. A man's riches were stated in the number of his camels.

And the pregnant camel was the most valuable part of the herd. The reasons pile one upon another:

1. Two living things. For the price of one camel you have acquired two. 2. Milk. A camel gives milk after she has given birth. A pregnant camel means milk in the near future — and milk, in that country, is a staple food. 3. An investment spread over years. A camel's pregnancy lasts about a year. A camel that has reached the tenth month means the last two months of a year's waiting. 4. Fragility. A camel near her time needs tending; if she is left untended, both she and her young are lost.

The ʿusharāʾ, then, was in that society the thing a man got up in the night to look at. The most watched over, the most talked about, the most calculated over part of the herd.

Root: ع-ط-ل. Its sense: to leave empty, to leave without work, to take off what was worn.

The derivatives show the web of the root:

• عَاطِل (ʿāṭil) — out of work, standing idle. English has no descendant of this root; Turkish borrowed the word, and atıl lives on there in the sense of "idle, inert".
• تَعَطَّلَتِ ٱلْمَرْأَة — the woman took off her ornaments, was left unadorned.
• عُطْلَة — a holiday, the stopping of work.
• بِئْرٌ مُعَطَّلَة — an abandoned well; it occurs in the Qurʾān (al-Ḥajj 22/45).

And this is exactly what the verse says: the camel has not died.

The verse does not say "the camels perished". It says "they were left untended". The camel is there, still pregnant, still valuable — but there is no one who attends to her.

This is the finest observation in the sūra.

The easy way of recounting the end of a world is to say that the valuable things were destroyed. The verse does not do this. It says that the valuable thing is standing where it was, and has lost its value.

And this is a far more exact account. For the value of a thing lies not in the thing but in the attention given to it. If no one is looking, the most valuable property is no different from a lump of rock. Value is not a property of the object; it is a relation between the object and a human being.

The verse cuts that relation. And the moment it is cut, all the calculations a man has given his whole life to are void at once.

Why this stands here, in the middle of the cosmic list, is plain as well. The sun, the stars, the mountains — these are nobody's property. When they are lost no one suffers a personal loss. The fourth verse puts the reader's own property into the list. In a universal list of twelve items, this one item alone comes out of somebody's pocket.

This is also why the word is so narrow and so technical. It could have said "possessions"; it does not. Exactly what will rise in the hearer's mind has been reckoned.

What this says to the present. The word's counterpart today can be asked outright: what is the thing you would go back into a fire for? Whatever the answer, the verse is speaking about it. And what the verse says is not that the thing will be destroyed; it is that you will not be in a state to give it a thought.

In its thirty-seventh verse ʿAbasa said the same thing about people: "every man will have concern enough of his own." al-Takwīr says the same thing about property.