al-Takwīr 81:5 commentary

81/5

وَإِذَا ٱلْوُحُوشُ حُشِرَتْ

Wa idhā'l-wuḥūshu ḥushirat "When the wild animals are gathered."

وَحْش — the wild

Root: و-ح-ش. Waḥsh — an untamed animal, a wild one. Its plural is wuḥūsh.

And from the same root comes وَحْشَة (waḥsha): loneliness, desolation, solitude. In Arabic istawḥasha — he felt lonely, he took fright.

The connection is plain: the wild animal is the one that flees from man, the one found in empty places. Beneath the root lies the idea of "keeping away from man". English has no descendant of this root; the Turkish vahşi ("wild, savage") and vahşet ("savagery") are borrowed straight from it.

حَشْر — to gather

Root: ح-ش-ر. To drive together into one place and collect; to bring together what is scattered. Ḥashr — the gathering at the Resurrection; maḥshar — the place of gathering.

In the concrete sense of the word there is a compulsion: not coming of oneself, but being driven and brought.

A violation of category

Here is what makes the verse shattering: the wild animal is by definition the animal that does not gather. It flees from its own kind and from man; it forms no herd, accepts no stall, comes to no call.

And read together with the fourth verse, a crossing appears:

	The camel (verse 4)	The wild animal (verse 5)
Whose	A man's property, domestic	Nobody's, wild
What happens	It is left	It is gathered

The animal a man owns is abandoned; the animal he does not own is gathered. The two verses do the reverse of one another.

I record this as my own reading. But the two verses standing side by side, and the verbs being exact opposites, gives one to think that the arrangement is deliberate.

Are the animals too called to account?

This verse opens a question in the classical commentaries, and the question is a real one.

The Qurʾān's own datum is this:

"There is no creature that walks on the earth, and no bird that flies with its two wings, but they are communities like you. We have left nothing out of the Book. Then to their Lord they will be gathered (يُحْشَرُونَ)." (al-Anʿām 6/38)

The same verb. And the verse says plainly that the animals too will be gathered.

The views:

View	What it says	Ground
They are gathered, the claims between them are settled, and then they become dust	There is a reckoning, but no requital (Garden or Fire)	In the hadith collections reports are transmitted to the effect that on the Day of Resurrection the hornless sheep will take its due from the horned one; it is stated that this is found in Muslim. I do not quote the wording verbatim
They are merely gathered; it is a part of the terror	The verse speaks of no reckoning; it speaks of a scene	Context: the twelve items are drawing a tableau
The gathering is a general return, as in al-Anʿām 6/38	Not entering into detail	Cautious

No preference is adopted in this commentary; all three have been defended, and the Qurʾān does not open the matter up.

But there is something in the context, and it must be recorded.

The fifth verse speaks of the gathering of the animals. In the eighth verse a murdered child is questioned. The two verses in between are the seas set boiling and the souls paired.

The sūra, then, sets up a sequence that widens the scope of the reckoning: if even the animals are gathered, then a child whose account no one ever called for will certainly be asked after.

The sūra does not say this; I am the one constructing it, and I record it as my own reading. But the order of the verses allows the reading.