al-Infiṭār 82:8

Fī ayyi ṣūratin mā shāʾa rakkabak "In whatever form He willed, so He assembled you."

The ordinary order of the sentence would have been rakkabaka fī ayyi ṣūratin mā shāʾa. The verse pulls the phrase fī ayyi ṣūratin in front of the verb.

In Arabic an element pulled forward from its normal place gains emphasis and restriction. So the centre of gravity of the sentence is not "He assembled" but "in whatever form".

What this means is that the verse emphasises not the act of assembling but the form's having been chosen. Not that you were made, but that you were made like this.

Root: ص-و-ر. Shape, figure, appearance. Taṣwīr — to give shape. Muṣawwir — the one who gives shape; it is among the names of God (al-Ḥashr 59/24).

Its uses in the Qurʾān:

• "He fashioned you and made your forms good." (al-Taghābun 64/3; similarly al-Muʾmin 40/64).
• "He assembled you in whatever form He willed." — this verse.

One further sense of the word is recorded: ṣūra — a horn, a trumpet blown into. Ṣūr (that which will be blown at the end) is a relative of this word. But I do not set this kinship up as a link of meaning; I content myself with recording it.

Mā here may be redundant (zāʾid) or a relative pronoun (mawṣūla). There are two readings:

• Redundant: "in whatever form He willed" — mā merely increases the indefiniteness.
• Relative: "whatever form He wills is the form" — mā shāʾa becomes the explanation of ayyi.

The difference in sense between the two readings is small. The common outcome is this: the form has been chosen, and the one who chose is God.

Here we must stop and close off a misunderstanding. The verse does not present the bodily differences of people as a measure of superiority or of inferiority; it does exactly the opposite. That the form has been chosen means that no one has chosen his own form. Height, face, colour, build — none of them is the person's achievement or his fault.

This is a line the Qurʾān sets up openly in other places: "We have made you peoples and tribes so that you might come to know one another. The most honoured of you in God's sight is the one most mindful of Him." (al-Ḥujurāt 49/13 — this verse was cited as a measure in the section on al-Baqara.)

One of the words that carries the structure of the sūra.

Root: ر-ك-ب. Its concrete sense: to climb onto a thing, to mount. Rākib — a rider. Rikāb — riding beasts. Markab — that which is ridden.

From this a second sense is born: to set one thing upon another, to build a whole by placing the parts one upon the other.

• تَرْكِيب (tarkīb) — assembling, bringing parts together. In Arabic grammar the construction of a sentence is tarkīb; in chemistry a compound is murakkab.
• مُرَكَّب (murakkab) — compound, made up of more than one part. Its opposite is basīṭ — simple, of one piece.

The pattern: تفعيل (tafʿīl). The verb is not rakiba but rakkaba. As was treated in the sections on al-Humaza and al-Shams, this form conveys both transitivity and intensification: the multiplicity of the parts and the repetition of the operation.

So rakkabaka is not "He made you" but "He built you part by part, setting one upon another".

Now the structure noted at the end of verse 4 is completed.

The opposition is not only in the four verbs; it is in the words themselves.

Intithār (scattering) and tarkīb (assembling) are exact opposites in Arabic: one disperses what is together, the other brings together what is dispersed. In the same way infiṭār (splitting) and taswiya (bringing the parts into correspondence) work in opposite directions.

So the sūra shows two directions of the same operation one after the other: the universe is coming apart, you have been put together. And the doer of both is the same.

The conclusion that follows from this observation is the following, and I write it as my own reading: the sūra does not set up the scene of the end as a scene of terror. It sets it up in order to compare it with the structure of man himself. The argument works like this:

The one who can scatter things that stand together is the one who gathers together what is scattered. It is He who gathered you together. Then it is possible for Him to gather you together again.

This is the abbreviated form of an argument the Qurʾān frequently uses for the possibility of the resurrection, and it is stated openly in other places: "As He began the first creation, so He will repeat it." (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/104 in sense; also al-Rūm 30/27, Yāsīn 36/79).

And one more layer: in the fourth verse the graves were overturned. The grave is where the man whose assembly has been undone lies. The eighth verse says who set that assembly up.

The order of the four verbs is meaningful too, and resembles a process of manufacture:

1. خلق — to measure and cut. The determining of the raw material. 2. سوّى — to bring the parts into correspondence. The getting right of the proportions. 3. عدل — to balance. The two sides being equal to one another. 4. ركّب — to assemble. The bringing together of the parts.

But there is a question of order here: logically, assembling (tarkīb) is expected not at the end but before the balancing — first the parts join, then the balance is set.

The explanations given for this in the classical sources are these: (a) the letter fāʾ does not always convey temporal order, sometimes it conveys tartīb dhikrī (order of mention); (b) the eighth verse is not joined by a fāʾ — it has no connective — and therefore is not the continuation of the preceding three but their explanation; (c) rakkaba here means not "He built" but "He placed into a form".

The second explanation appears best suited to the wording: the eighth verse comes without a connective and is a sentence that gathers up the preceding series of verbs. This is a preference; it is not binding.

Something striking happens here in the sound structure of the sūra.

Verses 1-5 ended on the sound -rat. Verse 6 ended with -īm (al-Karīm). Verses 7 and 8 end with these sounds: فَعَدَلَكَ and رَكَّبَكَ — both with -ka.

So for two verses the rhyme of the sūra becomes "you". And those two verses are precisely the two that recount the making of the one addressed.

Moreover, the same sound occurs twice inside verse 6 as well: gharra-ka bi-Rabbi-ka and in what follows khalaqa-ka, sawwā-ka, ʿadala-ka, rakkaba-ka. In a stretch of three verses the pronoun of the one addressed is repeated six times, and in two of them it holds the end of the verse.

I record this not as a claim of a miracle but as an agreement of form with content: that two verses whose subject is "you" should have "you" for their sound as well is a consistency often seen in the short Meccan sūras. An observation of the same kind was made in the section on al-Humaza.

And in the ninth verse the sound will change again — because the one addressed will change too: from singular to plural.