84. Sūrat al-Inshiqāq

Twenty-five verses. On its being Meccan there is a state close to agreement; the style supports this too: short verse-endings, an opening on the Resurrection, a scene of reckoning, oaths, the absence of legal content.

It takes its name from the verb in the first verse: ٱنشَقَّتْ — it was split.

The sūra consists of three blocks, and the way the three blocks are joined to one another gives the sūra's real matter.

The first block (1-5). Two idhā ("when…") clauses. The sky is split, the earth is levelled. But these clauses have no apodosis — the "…then such-and-such happens" part does not come. The sentence is left hanging.

The second block (6-15). In place of the sentence left hanging comes an address: "O man!" And man's life is named with a single word: kadḥ — scraping, working oneself away. Then two outcomes: the one given his book in his right hand, the one given his book from behind him.

The third block (16-25). Oaths (the afterglow, the night, the moon) and a ruling: "You shall surely mount stage upon stage." Then the attitude taken towards the Qurʾān, and the close.

What joins these three blocks to one another is an idea nowhere named in the sūra: everything is passing from one state to another. The sky splits and passes to another state. The earth empties and passes to another state. The moon fills and passes to another state. Man scrapes and scrapes and passes to another state. The nineteenth verse says this idea outright and locks the sūra: "You shall surely mount stage upon stage."

And just for this reason the man in the fourteenth verse is interesting: the man "who supposed he would never return". That is, who supposed he would not pass from one state to another. The whole structure of the sūra is built to give that supposition the lie.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and so is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without the basmala.

Idha's-samāʾu'nshaqqat "When the sky is split."

In Arabic there are two conditional particles for future time, and the difference between them is one that has to be treated several times in this commentary:

• إِنْ (in) — for what is doubtful, what may or may not happen.
• إِذَا (idhā) — for what will certainly happen, only whose time is unknown.

The Qurʾān opens its scenes of the Resurrection with idhā almost without exception: Idha'sh-shamsu kuwwirat (al-Takwīr 81/1), Idhā zulzilati'l-arḍu (al-Zilzāl 99/1), Idhā waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa (al-Wāqiʿa 56/1). The particle itself carries a ruling: what is at issue is not "will it happen" but "when".

This connects directly with the sūra's later argument. In the twenty-second verse it will be said that "those who disbelieve are giving the lie". What is being given the lie has already been set down, in the first verse, in the mood of certainty.

Root س-م-و: to rise, to be high. Samāʾ is "what is above"; from the same root come ism (a name — the mark that raises a thing, that brings it forward) and asmāʾ.

In Arabic the word does not indicate a single thing: everything above the head is samāʾ — the atmosphere, the cloud, the stars, and the unseen upper realm. The Qurʾān preserves this breadth and does not narrow it. In descriptions of the Resurrection the text does not say which layer of the "sky" is meant; where it does not say, neither do we.

Root: ش-ق-ق. Its concrete sense is to split, to divide in two, to break apart by cracking. The derivatives of the root show the direction in which the sense opens out:

• شِقّ (shiqq) — one of the two parts split off; a half. In Turkish the borrowed word şık, "one of the options", comes from this root: a separated part of a whole.
• شَقّ (shaqq) — the crack, the fissure itself.
• شَقِيق (shaqīq) — a full brother. The lexicographers' explanation: one split off from the same root. The Turkish use of şakîk comes from here as well.
• مَشَقَّة (mashaqqa) — difficulty, hardship. The explanation the lexicographers transmit: hardship is what splits a person, what wears him down.
• شِقَاق (shiqāq) — separation, division, hostility. The Qurʾān uses this of communities: "But if they turn away, then they are only in a state of division (shiqāq)" (al-Baqara 2/137).

These last two derivatives are important. Within the root there is physical splitting, and hardship, and separation all together. The same root names the cracking of a rock, the wearing down of a person, and the breaking apart of two communities from one another.

The verb in the verse is in the إِنْفِعَال (infiʿāl) pattern: inshaqqa. In Arabic this pattern conveys muṭāwaʿa — that is, accepting an external effect, undergoing that effect. The counterpart of the verb shaqqa (he split) is inshaqqa (it was split, it yielded to being split). The sky is not cracking of itself; it is submitting to something done to it.

This detail is a preparation for the next verse: the sky is split, and immediately afterwards it is said "it listened to its Lord". The splitting is already presented as a form of obedience.

The occurrence at ʿAbasa 80/26 is particularly striking: the same verb is used in the sense of the soil's being split so that provision may come out. The root by itself, that is, does not convey destruction; what a splitting is depends on what the split thing leaves behind.

The Qurʾān describes the opening of the sky with three separate roots, and the three are not the same thing. Setting up this distinction is necessary in order to see what the verse is saying.

ف-ل-ق (falaq). This was treated in detail in this commentary in the section on Sūrat al-Falaq. The observation there was this: falq is the splitting of something closed and the coming out of something from inside it — the cracking of the seed, the morning's coming out from inside the night. The splitting is a form of birth; at its end there is life.

ف-ط-ر (faṭr). The concrete sense of this root is likewise to split; but the real weight of this root is on beginning. From the same root come fāṭir (the one who brings into being from nothing), fiṭra (the state of first creation) and ifṭār (the breaking of the fast, the beginning to eat). Faṭr, that is, is to split a thing for the first time and so bring it into being; here splitting is the name of a founding.

ش-ق-ق (shaqq). In this root there is neither birth nor founding. What happens here is the breaking up of a whole. And the other branches of the root — mashaqqa (wearing down), shiqāq (separation) — all look the same way: something was holding together, and now it is not.

If we gather the three in one sentence: falaq opens what is closed; faṭr splits from nothing and founds; shaqq divides what has been founded.

And this is the root Sūrat al-Inshiqāq has chosen. The whole subject of the sūra is the scattering of things that were holding together: the wholeness of the sky is undone, what is inside the earth is thrown out, whatever a man has held together through a lifetime is laid open. The choice of root fits the content of the sūra.

I present this as a comparison of roots; the lexical senses of the three roots are given in this way in the classical sources of the language. The conceptual division of labour I set up among the roots, however, is my own reading, not a transmitted report.

Wa adhinat li-Rabbihā wa ḥuqqat "And it listened to its Lord — and so indeed it had to."

One of the densest verses of the sūra, and one of the hardest to translate.

Root: أ-ذ-ن. At the centre of this root there is an organ: أُذُن (udhun) — the ear.

All the derivatives of the root come out of that organ, and the line of descent can be followed:

In English there is no link between "permission" and "the ear"; in Arabic they are the same word. This is critical for understanding the verse. In Arabic, to give someone permission is really to listen to him: the request has reached the ear and has been accepted. Permission is the result of listening.

Which sense is in the verse? Both have been defended:

The first reading is both more settled in the language and more suited to the context. The "listening" sense of the construction is reflected in the language of hadith as well: in a report found in al-Bukhārī it is transmitted that the Prophet said God has never given ear (mā adhina) to anything as He gives ear to a prophet reciting the Qurʾān with a beautiful voice. The same construction, the same sense.

Here one has to stop and think, because the expression is not a usual one.

The verse said the sky was split. Then it names that splitting a listening. That is, the breaking apart is described as a form of obedience.

There is a parallel to this within the Qurʾān, and it is direct:

"Then He turned to the sky, which was smoke, and said to it and to the earth: 'Come, willingly or unwillingly.' They both said: 'We come willingly.'" (Fuṣṣilat 41/11)

There sky and earth were speaking at the moment of creation; here the same sky and earth are listening at the moment the end has come. The Qurʾān's conception of nature is seen in these two verses: sky and earth are told of as beings that take a command and give an answer. This is a language of description; the Qurʾān carries it far enough to say, as was also recorded in the section on Sūrat al-Fīl, that "nature is not a mechanism answerable to itself but an army under orders".

And from here an opposition is born — the sūra itself will set this opposition up in the twenty-first verse:

The sky listens to its Lord. Man does not prostrate himself when the Qurʾān is recited to him.

In the first part the sūra uses the verb adhinat (it gave ear); in the twenty-first verse it says "when the Qurʾān is recited to them they do not prostrate themselves". The sky that gives ear and the man who does not stand at the two ends of the same sūra.

Root: ح-ق-ق. To be fixed, to be realised, to be right and in place. Ḥaqq means both "the real" and "the share belonging to someone"; both senses come out of the idea of "what is in its right place". The same root gives ٱلْحَاقَّة (the one that is realised, that is confirmed), one of the names of the Resurrection — recorded in the table of names of the Resurrection in the section on al-Qāriʿa.

The verb in the verse is in the passive: ḥuqqat. That is, not "it became a due" but "it was made a due". Its subject is not stated; but because li-Rabbihā occurs in the preceding word, the subject is plain.

It is hard to render into English, because the construction has no counterpart there. Some approaches:

• "And indeed it had to do so."
• "And that was what befitted it."
• "And it was bound to this."

The unfolding the classical exegetes give is this: ḥuqqa lahā an tafʿala — "it had been made right and necessary for it to do so". That is, in listening the sky did nothing unexpected; it did what it was bound to do.

Two verbs come one after the other, and the relation between them carries the whole weight of the verse:

1. أَذِنَتْ — active. The sky did it. 2. حُقَّتْ — passive. It was done to the sky.

That is, the verse first gives the sky an act, then says that the act was not the sky's own invention. The sky obeyed — but obedience too was a structure given to it.

This is a rehearsal of what will be said to man at the end of the sūra. Man too enters upon a road (kādiḥ), but where that road ends is not a thing he determines (fa-mulāqīh).

Wa idha'l-arḍu muddat "And when the earth is stretched out flat."

Root: م-د-د. To stretch, to draw out, to spread by pulling. Its derivatives show the concreteness of the root:

• مَدَّ يَدَهُ — he stretched out his hand.
• مِدَاد — ink. What runs out from the tip of the pen. "If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord…" (al-Kahf 18/109).
• مَدَد — reinforcement, support that comes. A force sent by being extended.
• إِمْدَاد — to supply, to give continuously. "And We shall supply them with fruit and meat in abundance" (al-Ṭūr 52/22).
• مُدَّة — a span of time. Time in its extended state.

The verb is again passive: muddat — "it was stretched out". Like ḥuqqat in the preceding verse. The earth is not levelling itself.

The most striking side of this root is this: the Qurʾān describes the creation of the earth with the same verb.

"It is He who stretched out the earth (madda'l-arḍa) and set upon it firm mountains and rivers." (al-Raʿd 13/3)

"And the earth We stretched out (madadnāhā) and set upon it firm mountains." (al-Ḥijr 15/19)

In both verses the verb madd describes the earth's being made habitable for man: a surface spread, opened out, walkable.

Now go back to al-Inshiqāq 84/3: the same verb, the same object — but the result is the opposite.

Where is the difference? In al-Raʿd and al-Ḥijr there are mountains alongside the spreading. The earth is spread and fixatives are set upon it. In al-Inshiqāq no mountains are spoken of; the earth is spread and nothing remains upon it.

The comparison the classical exegetes use in explaining this verse is: muddat kamā yumaddu'l-adīm — "it was stretched as a hide is stretched". When a tanned hide is stretched out with pegs all its creases open, everything on it falls off, and a flat surface is left.

The Qurʾān sets this result out in detail elsewhere:

"He will leave it a level, empty plain, in which you will see neither a hollow nor a rise." (Ṭāhā 20/106-107)

The end of the earth, that is, is the exaggerated form of the earth's beginning: it had been spread, and it is spread thoroughly. And when it is spread thoroughly it ceases to be a place that can be lived in.

The idea here may be this — I say it as my own reading: what makes the earth habitable is not only its flatness but the hollows and risings upon it. The mountain, the valley, the cave, the boundary. Human life is built inside these hollows: to shelter, to hide, to divide, to own. When the earth is made perfectly flat there is no place left to hide either. The next verse will say just this.

Wa alqat mā fīhā wa takhallat "And it casts out what is in it and empties itself."

Root: ل-ق-ي. This root works in two directions in the Qurʾān, and both directions will be used in this sūra:

• لَقِيَ — he met, he came face to face. Liqāʾ — a meeting.
• أَلْقَىٰ (Form IV) — he threw, he cast, he brought out to face. Causative: to bring a thing into the position of meeting.

That is, "to throw" and "to meet" are from the same root. To throw a thing is to bring it out before you.

This detail will confront us two verses later. The sixth verse will say fa-mulāqīhi (you shall meet Him) — Form III of the same root. That is:

The earth casts out what is in it (alqat). Man meets his Lord (mulāqīh).

The two verbs are from the same root. What the earth does and what happens to man stand, within the language, as two faces of the same movement: what was covered comes out to face.

I record this as a reading; the sharing of the root, however, is an incontestable datum of the language.

The verse does not say what it casts out. Mā fīhā — "whatever is in it".

This indefiniteness is deliberate, and when it is joined with the Qurʾān's descriptions elsewhere it becomes clear what is meant:

"When the earth brings out its burdens (athqālahā)." (al-Zilzāl 99/2)

As was recorded in the section on al-Zilzāl, of the athqāl there the exegetes say two things: the buried dead and the buried treasures. Al-Inshiqāq leaves it even more open: whatever there is.

The difference of verb between the two verses is meaningful as well:

Ikhrāj is a neutral carrying; ilqāʾ, however, is throwing — the movement of someone casting a load off himself.

Root: خ-ل-و. To be empty, to have nothing inside. Khalāʾ — emptiness; khālī — empty; khalwa — being alone, being emptied.

The verb in the verse is in the تَفَعُّل (tafaʿʿul) pattern: takhallat. In Arabic this pattern conveys two things, and both are working here:

1. Takalluf — doing by making an effort. Taṣabbur is trying to be patient; taḥallum is trying to show forbearance. On this, takhallat: the earth forced itself to be emptied; it laboured to bring out whatever was in it.

2. Taking on a state completely. Takhallat: it was emptied entirely, nothing was left.

The two senses do not conflict; they join. The earth is emptied, and the emptying is told as its own work.

The nicety of word order is here. The verse gives the two verbs in this order:

1. أَلْقَتْ مَا فِيهَا — it cast out what was in it. 2. وَتَخَلَّتْ — and it emptied itself.

The second looks like the result of the first and might have been counted a surplus: whatever casts out what is inside it is already empty. But it is not a repetition.

The difference is this: the first verb describes an act, the second a state. The earth does not merely cast out what is inside it; after the casting is done it remains in a state of emptiness. And that emptiness is the ground of the scene described for man: a level, entirely empty surface with nowhere at all to hide.

The Qurʾān says the same idea from the other side in another sūra: "On that day man will say, 'Where is the place of escape?' No — there is no refuge" (al-Qiyāma 75/10-11).

The emptying of the earth is the lifting of the refuge.

Wa adhinat li-Rabbihā wa ḥuqqat "And it listened to its Lord — and so indeed it had to."

The second verse is repeated here word for word. Not a letter changes.

This is the sūra's most conspicuous structural move, and its purpose is plain: sky and earth are told with the same sentence.

Let us set the symmetry side by side:

The only asymmetry between the two blocks is the earth's taking one verb more: alqat wa takhallat. The sky is only split; the earth is not split, it is emptied.

The reason for this difference is plain: man lives on the earth. There is nothing man has hidden inside the sky; inside the earth there is — his dead, his goods, his traces. For this reason two extra verbs were needed for the earth.

The same sentence coming twice is no coincidence in Arabic. The work it does here is as follows:

First, it establishes a common ruling. Two different events (the splitting and the emptying) are ended with the same sentence and so put into a single category: both are obedience. That is, the Resurrection is not the collapse of an order; it is the carrying out of a command.

Second, it establishes scale. Sky and earth — the two ends of the realm of being. When both are described with the same sentence, nothing at all is left undescribed. The most economical way of saying "everything listened to its Lord" is to use the same sentence for the two extremes.

Third, it leaves man outside. And this is the real matter. The sky listened, the earth listened. In the sixth verse the address comes: "O man!" He is the only being missing from the list.

The sūra does not say this; it lets it be felt through the ordering. I record it as my own reading, but the ordering belongs to the text.

Five verses set up two idhā clauses, and no answer came to either of them.

In Arabic idhā is a conditional particle and requires an answering clause (jawāb al-sharṭ): "when…, such-and-such happens." In the Qurʾān's similar openings this answer is generally given: in Sūrat al-Takwīr, after twelve idhā clauses, comes "every soul shall know what it has brought" (81/14); in al-Zilzāl comes "on that day the earth will relate its news" (99/4).

Here it does not come. What the grammarians say on this:

All three have been defended in the classical sources, and they make no great difference in meaning.

But the first view has a side worth dwelling on. That the answer is not said does not mean there is no answer; it means it is not worth saying, or cannot be said. This is another form of the work done by the mā adrāka construction recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa in this commentary: before describing, the text announces that description will not suffice.

And there is this too: when the sentence is left hanging, the reader looks for his own answer. The sixth verse enters exactly that gap with "O man!" What fills the gap turns out to be the addressee himself.

Yā ayyuha'l-insānu innaka kādiḥun ilā Rabbika kadḥan fa-mulāqīh "O man! You are toiling towards your Lord, toiling hard; and you shall meet Him."

The central verse of the sūra and one of the densest sentences in the Qurʾān about man.

The verse does not say "O you who disbelieve" or "O you who believe". ٱلْإِنسَٰن — man, as a genus.

The al- here conveys istighrāq: it encompasses the whole of the genus. That is, the sentence calls not to a group but to the quality of being human. And this is set up before the distinction that will come after the eighteenth verse (the one given his book in his right hand / from behind him). First the common condition is laid down, then the parting.

The same ordering was present in Sūrat al-Qāriʿa as well: first "people" (everyone), then the scale and the two groups. This is the Qurʾān's customary movement — the diagnosis to everyone, the ruling one by one.

Root: ك-د-ح. And this word occurs only in this verse in the Qurʾān; and in that same verse twice (kādiḥun and kadḥan).

The root's primary sense in the lexicon is this: to scrape the skin with the nail or with something hard, to scratch, to graze. In Arabic a scratch on a face, an abrasion, is called kadḥ: bi-wajhihī kadḥun — "there is a graze on his face".

From this comes the second sense: to work until one wears oneself out. Kadaḥa li-ahlihī — he toiled for his family, he wore himself down. Kadḥ is not ordinary work; it is work that leaves a mark. It leaves an abrasion on the one who works.

There is one more distinction the lexicographers transmit: the difference between kadḥ and kasb (earning). Kasb looks to the result — what did you get. Kadḥ looks to the process — how much were you worn down.

What the verse does is this: it names man's life a "scraping".

For naming a life Arabic had dozens of words: saʿy (running about), ʿamal (work), jahd (effort), sayr (walking), ḥayāt. The word chosen is the one that takes something off the surface of the skin.

In this commentary the following verse was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Balad:

لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ فِى كَبَدٍ — "We have surely created man in hardship." (al-Balad 90/4)

The observation recorded there was this: at the centre of the root kabad is the idea of "the middle, the core"; hardship is not a fault at the edge but a structure standing at the centre. And because the particle fī conveys being encompassed, hardship is an element — man does not enter hardship, he begins inside it.

Now set the two verses side by side. Both are about al-insān, both are in short Meccan sūras, both make the same diagnosis. But their points of view differ:

The two verses complete one another. Al-Balad states the situation: hardship is unavoidable. Al-Inshiqāq states what happens inside that situation: unavoidable hardship turns into a wearing-down spent in a direction.

And this difference matters: at al-Balad 90/4 man is placed inside hardship; at al-Inshiqāq 84/6 man walks inside hardship. The first is diagnosis, the second movement.

Reference was already made to this verse in the section on al-Balad; here I record that the link runs both ways.

Kādiḥun (the active participle: toiling) would have sufficed. The verse adds behind it the verbal noun of the same root: كَدْحًا.

This is the structure Arabic calls the absolute object, and it does two things: it reinforces the verb ("you really are toiling") or it conveys the kind or the quantity of the verb.

Here the reinforcing function comes forward. In English it is carried by a doubling: "you are toiling and toiling", "scraping and scraping".

But there is something more. Because the word occurs twice in the verse, the sound of the root is heard twice as well: kādiḥun … kadḥā. ك-د-ح — three hard letters: kāf, dāl, ḥāʾ. Read the word aloud and a friction is heard in the throat. The sound of the word agrees with the movement it describes.

I record this as an observation, not as a claim of miracle; a similar observation was made in the section on al-Qāriʿa, and it was stated there that sound-sense agreement is a phenomenon found in all languages.

The decisive element of the verse is this particle: إِلَىٰ (ilā) — towards a goal, until that goal is reached.

The sentence does not say "you are toiling"; it says "you are toiling towards your Lord".

This has two consequences, and both are hard:

First: the toiling has a direction, and that direction has not been chosen. The verse does not say "you must toil towards your Lord"; it says "you are toiling" — in the indicative. This is not a command but a statement of fact. Whatever a man does, whatever work he busies himself with, the place he is going is the same.

Second: labour does not change direction, it changes only its content. He who piles up wealth is toiling, and so is he who gives it up. Both are going the same way. What differs is what will be in his hand when he arrives.

The Qurʾān says this plainly elsewhere: "Truly, to your Lord is the return" (al-ʿAlaq 96/8); "Every soul shall taste death; then to Us you will be returned" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/57).

The فَ at the head conveys result: the toiling continues, and at the end there is a meeting.

مُلَاقٍ is the active participle of the root liqāʾ in the مُفَاعَلَة (mufāʿala) pattern, Form III. In Arabic this form conveys mutuality: qātala (he fought with another), kātaba (he corresponded), lāqā (he met, he came face to face).

The word does not say "you will arrive" or "you will reach", that is. It says "you will meet" — an encounter in which two parties come face to face.

There is disagreement about the pronoun هِ (hi) at the end of the verse:

The majority prefer the first view. I too prefer the first; my ground is that the fāʾ linking ilā Rabbika to fa-mulāqīhi ties the goal of the road directly to the meeting. It is not binding, and the second view is not contrary to the text either — the continuation of the sūra (the giving of the book) already describes a meeting with one's deed.

In this commentary the following verse was treated in Sūrat al-Baqara:

"They know with certainty that they shall meet their Lord (mulāqū Rabbihim) and that to Him they are returning." (al-Baqara 2/46)

The observation recorded there was this: in Arabic the root ẓann can answer to both a doubtful conjecture and a firm conviction, and in that verse firm conviction is meant.

Now note: the مُلَٰقُوا۟ رَبِّهِمْ at al-Baqara 2/46 and the مُلَٰقِيهِ at al-Inshiqāq 84/6 are the same pattern — the same root, the same form, the same active participle.

And eight verses after using this pattern, Sūrat al-Inshiqāq will use that same verb ẓann at the opposite pole:

إِنَّهُۥ ظَنَّ أَن لَّن يَحُورَ — "He supposed that he would never return." (84/14)

That is:

• al-Baqara 2/46: the believers who suppose (= know with certainty) that they will meet Him.
• al-Inshiqāq 84/14: the man who supposes (= guesses wrongly) that he will not return.

The same verb, at two extremes. And in the middle of the two stands what al-Inshiqāq 84/6 says to everyone: you shall meet Him. Whether the supposition is right or wrong does not change the event.

I record this connection as a reading I have drawn from comparing the two verses; the words they share, however, are in the text.

Fa-ammā man ūtiya kitābahū bi-yamīnih · Fa-sawfa yuḥāsabu ḥisāban yasīrā · Wa yanqalibu ilā ahlihī masrūrā "As for him who is given his book in his right hand, he will be called to a light reckoning and will return to his people rejoicing."

This construction was treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa: ammā is the particle of tafṣīl, used in breaking a whole into its parts; a fāʾ is obligatory in its answer; the division is absolute and leaves no third category.

In al-Qāriʿa the division was made by way of the scale: whose weights come out heavy / light. Here the division is made by way of the manner in which the book is given. The same structure, a different criterion.

The verb is passive: ūtiya. Who gave it is not said.

This is the continuation of the mood the sūra has used from the beginning: ḥuqqat, muddat, ūtiya. The only thing in the sūra that man does with his own hand is kadḥ; everything else is done to him.

The verb is moreover of the إِيتَاء (ītāʾ) form — the fine difference between it and aʿṭā (to give) is debated by the lexicographers; ītāʾ is said to be more formal, to convey the handing over of a right or a share. I do not present this as a settled distinction.

The pronoun returns to the person: his book. That is, what is here is not a general ledger but a record belonging to the person.

The Qurʾān describes this record elsewhere:

"And every man's deed We have fastened to his neck. On the Day of Resurrection We shall bring out for him a book that he will find spread open. 'Read your book! This day your own self suffices as a reckoner against you.'" (al-Isrāʾ 17/13-14)

This verse completes the reckoning-scene of al-Inshiqāq: the one who reads the book is the person himself.

Root: ي-م-ن. The right side. From the same root come yumn (blessing, good fortune) and maymana (the right side; treated in the section on al-Balad).

In Arabic — and in a great many languages — the right side carries a positive association and the left a negative one. The Qurʾān uses this settled association but also loads a ruling upon it: aṣḥāb al-yamīn / aṣḥāb al-shimāl (al-Wāqiʿa 56/27, 41).

The particle بِ here conveys ilṣāq (attachment): the book is given into the right hand, it is held by the right hand.

يَسِير — Root: ي-س-ر. To be easy, to become easy. From the same root come yusr (ease — the ʿusr / yusr opposition at al-Inshirāḥ 94/5-6), taysīr (making easy), maysara (breadth, means).

What does "a light reckoning" mean? The Qurʾān does not explain it, but in the hadith sources an explanation is transmitted, and it is on this verse.

According to a report found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim the Prophet said "Whoever is called to reckoning is punished"; when ʿĀʾisha asked, "Does God not say 'he will be called to a light reckoning'?", he said, "That is the presentation; whoever is picked over in the reckoning is destroyed."

The distinction the report sets up is this: ʿarḍ (a person's deeds being shown to him) is different from munāqasha (every item being disputed one by one). A light reckoning is the records being shown and passed over.

I do not present this report as the only explanation of the verse; but it is the earliest explanation closing a gap in the verse's language — the question of what "light" is light in relation to.

A note on the language: ḥisāban yasīrā is again an absolute object (yuḥāsabu … ḥisāban), like kadḥan in the sixth verse. The sūra uses the same structure twice: once for man's toiling, once for man's reckoning. The toiling is complete, and so is the reckoning.

Root: ق-ل-ب. To turn a thing over, to turn it upside down. And from the same root قَلْب (qalb) — the heart. The lexicographers' explanation: the heart takes this name because it is the thing that turns most from state to state.

اِنْقَلَبَ (Form VII) — he turned, he turned back, he was turned. The Qurʾān uses this verb both for "to turn back" (Āl ʿImrān 3/144 inqalabtum ʿalā aʿqābikum — to turn back on your heels) and for "to come to an outcome" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/227 munqalabin yanqalibūn).

In the use here there is a picture: the person is turning from one place to another. From the place of reckoning to his people. That is, the reckoning is a stopping-place, the arrival is somewhere else.

Root: أ-ه-ل. This root was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Bayyina. The observation recorded there was this: at the centre of the root are belonging and familiarity; ahl is a person's household; an ahlī animal is an animal grown used to living with man; taʾahhul is to marry; ahliyya is to be the man for a task. And the expression "the People of the Book" therefore says more than "those who have a book": the household of the Book.

The analysis of this root was made there and I do not repeat it; what belongs to this place is to whom the word belongs in this verse.

Who are "his people"? The explanations the exegetes give:

The distinction makes no practical difference. What matters is that there is a place to return to.

And the choice of word here is striking. The verse does not say "he enters the Garden"; it says "he returns to his people". The reward is given not as a place but as a belonging. The idea of "the place one is familiar with" in the root of the word is working exactly here: the person is not going somewhere strange, he is returning to his own home.

Root: س-ر-ر. And this root has two branches, both of them striking:

• سُرُور (surūr) — joy, an inward ease.
• سِرّ (sirr) — what is hidden, what is kept within.
• سَرِير (sarīr) — a throne, a couch. It occurs often in the Qurʾān's descriptions of the Garden (in the plural surur: al-Wāqiʿa 56/15, al-Ghāshiya 88/13).

The explanation the lexicographers transmit: surūr is the heart's expanding secretly within itself. Joy, that is, is kin to the "hiddenness" branch of the root — it is what is inside before it shows outside. I transmit this explanation; I pass no definite judgement on the historical development of the root.

The word is a passive participle: masrūr — "made to rejoice". Not sārr (rejoicing). That is, the joy is not a state the person produces himself but something done to him.

Keep this detail in mind. The same word will come once more in the thirteenth verse — and this time in a wholly different place.

Wa ammā man ūtiya kitābahū warāʾa ẓahrih · Fa-sawfa yadʿū thubūrā · Wa yaṣlā saʿīrā "But as for him who is given his book from behind his back, he will cry out for destruction and will enter a blazing fire."

The strangest and most discussed expression of the sūra.

وَرَاء — behind, back. ظَهْر — the back. Root ظ-ه-ر: to appear, to come out into view; and from the same root ẓahr (the back — the visible, outward-facing side of the body), ẓāhir (what appears), iẓhār (bringing into the open), and ẓuhr in the sense of noon.

Why so strange? Because the movement described is physically awkward. For a thing to be given to a man from behind his back requires the arm to be bent round backwards.

In another place in the Qurʾān the same scene is told differently:

"But as for him who is given his book in his left hand, he says: 'Would that I had not been given my book!'" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/25)

There, that is, the left hand; here, the back. The ways in which the classical exegetes join these two verses:

The first view is the most widespread in the classical sources. The third is a reading that can be strained in point of language, but it is not contrary to the logic of the sūra either.

I state no preference here, because neither is contrary to the text and the ruling to be given does not rest on a piece of information about which view is right.

Whichever the preference, the picture the expression sets up is fixed, and it is this: the person cannot look at his own record.

A book given from the right can be seen, read, shown. In al-Ḥāqqa this is said plainly: "Here, read my book!" (69/19). A book given from behind, however, is closed to its own owner.

And this connects with what the sūra has been working at from the beginning. In the fourth verse the earth cast out what was in it and emptied itself — that is, everything came into the open. But for this person what has come into the open is in a place he himself cannot see. Everyone can see it; he cannot.

There is one more link, and it stands between two sūras. In Sūrat al-Burūj occurs: وَٱللَّهُ مِن وَرَآئِهِم مُّحِيطٌۢ — "and God encompasses them from behind" (al-Burūj 85/20). The same word — warāʾ. In both sūras the side man cannot see is the side from which the ruling comes.

Root: ث-ب-ر. To be destroyed, to perish, to be ruined. The root has a second branch as well: to be hindered, to be held back (thabara ʿan).

يَدْعُو ثُبُورًا — word for word: "he calls destruction". That is, the person cries out "yā thubūrāh!" — "oh, my ruin!" It is the Arabic cry of calamity; like the English "alas!" or "I am finished!"

The Qurʾān sets this scene out in detail in Sūrat al-Furqān and there makes an addition:

"And when they are cast, bound together, into a narrow place of it, they will call out there for destruction. — Do not call this day for one destruction; call for many destructions!" (al-Furqān 25/13-14)

The relation between the two verses is striking. The expression in al-Furqān, "bound together", is a picture that supports al-Inshiqāq's description of "being given from behind". And al-Furqān's addition, "not one but many", shows how open-ended is the word thubūran, left indefinite (with tanwīn) in al-Inshiqāq.

The root occurs in one further place in the Qurʾān, of a particular person: "O Pharaoh! I think that you are doomed to destruction (mathbūr)" (al-Isrāʾ 17/102). — And note: in that verse too there is the verb ẓann, the verb of the fourteenth verse of this sūra.

صَلَىٰ — Root: ص-ل-ي. To enter the fire, to be roasted in the fire, to be exposed to the fire. In Arabic the word is used especially for leaning against a fire, standing before a fire; iṣlāʾ is to put a thing into the fire. It has nothing to do with the Turkish salamura ("brine"); the root should not be confused with it.

Widespread in the Qurʾān: the uses answering to "I shall make him taste Saqar", and "he shall enter a fire of flame" (al-Masad 111/3) — treated in this commentary in the section on al-Masad.

سَعِير — Root: س-ع-ر. To kindle, to set ablaze, to fan. Saʿara'n-nāra — he made the fire blaze. Saʿīr is fire whose flame has been raised.

Among the names the Qurʾān uses for hell, saʿīr is the one that brings the flame itself forward. It is added in this respect to the list of names of hell in the section on al-Qāriʿa: hāwiya names the manner of arriving, ḥuṭama the crushing and grinding, and saʿīr the having been set alight.

The word again comes indefinite (with tanwīn): saʿīran, "a blazing fire". Like nārun ḥāmiya in al-Qāriʿa, the indefiniteness conveys magnification.

Innahū kāna fī ahlihī masrūrā · Innahū ẓanna an lan yaḥūr "Because he was rejoicing among his people. Because he supposed he would never return."

To understand these two verses one has to go back to the ninth:

وَيَنقَلِبُ إِلَىٰٓ أَهْلِهِۦ مَسْرُورًا — "and he returns to his people rejoicing." (84/9)

إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ فِىٓ أَهْلِهِۦ مَسْرُورًا — "because he was rejoicing among his people." (84/13)

The same two words in the two verses: أَهْل and مَسْرُور.

But everything changes. Let us put the differences in a table:

The sūra takes the same two words and changes their tense and their particle. And these two changes turn the ruling upside down.

The logic here is this, and the sūra sets it up without saying it: both were rejoicing; one saved his joy for the end, the other spent it at the beginning.

Joy is not forbidden. Nothing is forbidden here at all — the verse does not blame the second man for rejoicing. The next verse will say the real reason: what makes the joy a problem is what it rests on.

The particle fī conveys being encompassed; this has been recorded several times in this commentary (fī kabadin, fī khusrin, fī ʿīshatin). The use here is the same: the person is inside his people — that is, surrounded by his circle, in a position from which he does not see beyond that circle.

And compared with the ilā of the ninth verse the difference becomes clear: ilā conveys a journey, fī a settling.

The first man goes to his people; the second man had stayed among his. The one is movement, the other stillness.

Root: ظ-ن-ن. This word was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Baqara by way of 2/46. The observation there was this: in Arabic the root is a word that can answer both to a doubtful guess and to a firm conviction — in the study of language this is called auto-antonymy — and at al-Baqara 2/46 what is meant is certain knowledge, because the verse says it as praise.

Here there is exactly the opposite pole. In this verse ẓann is at the word's other end: a guess without ground.

Putting the two verses side by side shows how the word works:

The same word, two opposite rulings. And the difference is not in the word itself but in what it is directed at.

The measure that follows is this: the Qurʾān does not blame ẓann in itself. What it blames is the putting of an unproven assumption in the place of certain knowledge. The Qurʾān says this openly as well: "Most of them follow only conjecture. Conjecture avails nothing against the truth" (Yūnus 10/36).

And note: this man's supposition is upon a negative sentence — an lan yaḥūra, "that he would not return". That is, he assumed not that something would happen but that it would not. This is the hardest kind of claim to prove; and the man made it the ground for building a life.

لَنْ in Arabic is the particle of negation directed to the future, and it conveys certainty: "he will never…".

The man does not say "perhaps I shall not return", that is. He says "I shall certainly not return". He has built a supposition, that is, in the mood of certainty.

The structure of the sentence sharpens this further: ẓanna (he supposed) — a verb of uncertainty; an lan yaḥūra (that he would never return) — an expression of certainty. A certain ruling with an uncertain verb. The verse shows this mismatch in the word order of the sentence.

Root: ح-و-ر. The sense at the centre of this root: to turn, to come back, to revert to a state.

Its derivatives and kin:

• حَارَ يَحُورُ — he turned, he came back.
• مُحَاوَرَة / حِوَار (muḥāwara, ḥiwār) — conversation, dialogue. The going and coming of speech between two sides. The Qurʾān: "His companion said to him, while conversing with him…" (al-Kahf 18/37); "God hears the mutual talk of you two" (al-Mujādala 58/1).
• حَوْر — diminution, going back. It has entered the language of hadith as well: in the prayer for a journey found in Muslim it is said, "we take refuge in God from decrease after increase (al-ḥawr baʿda'l-kawr)". The ḥawr here is turning back after having advanced.
• مِحْوَر (miḥwar) — an axis. The thing around which turning takes place. Turkish has borrowed it as well.

The root has a second branch too: whiteness. Ḥawar is the white of the eye being very white; ḥawrāʾ a woman with large eyes whose white is pronounced; and from here the ḥūr of the descriptions of the Garden. And it is among the explanations transmitted by the lexicographers that the word ḥawāriyyūn (the disciples) comes from this branch (the launderer who whitens cloth, or "those who have been purified").

Are the two branches — turning and whiteness — historically a single root, or separate? The lexicons gather both under one entry and transmit unifying explanations; but I pass no definite judgement on whether these explanations are historically correct. The sense at work in the verse is incontestably the first: to return.

The verse gives the barest description of denial and reduces it to a single word.

Did the man deny God's existence? The verse does not say. Did he give the lie to a prophet? The verse does not say. The only thing it says: he did not reckon that he would come back.

This description connects directly with the scene at the beginning of the sūra. The sky was split and listened to its Lord; the earth emptied itself and listened to its Lord. That is, everything turns to a state. The man, however, counted the turning itself as nothing.

And this is the giving of the lie to the ruling of the sixth verse: "You are toiling towards your Lord, and you shall meet Him." The verse said "you shall meet"; the man said "I shall not return". The sūra sets these two sentences face to face eight verses apart.

Both verses begin with إِنَّ: innahū … innahū. This particle conveys emphasis ("surely he…").

Its function here is to set up a chain of grounding. In English it is carried by "because":

• He will enter the fire — because he was rejoicing among his people.
• He was rejoicing among his people — because he supposed he would not return.

The chain works backwards: punishment → state → supposition. The sūra begins from the outcome and descends to the cause, and at the very bottom it finds a conviction. The penalty is derived not from a behaviour but from an assumption.

This is a customary move of the Qurʾān: beneath a behaviour it looks for a conception of the world. The same structure was present in Sūrat al-Humaza: beneath the man piling up wealth lay "his supposing that his wealth would make him immortal" (al-Humaza 104/3) — and there too the verb was ḥasiba (he supposed).

Balā inna Rabbahū kāna bihī baṣīrā "No indeed! Surely his Lord was seeing him."

In Arabic there are three separate particles of affirmation, and the distinctions between them matter:

Balā rejects a negative expression and puts the affirmative in its place. English has no exact counterpart either; it is carried by "no, on the contrary" or by an emphatic "yes, indeed".

The Qurʾān's most famous balā is at al-Aʿrāf 7/172: "Am I not your Lord?" — "Balā (yes, You are); we bear witness."

What does the balā here break? The negative sentence of the preceding verse: أَن لَّن يَحُورَ — "that he would never return". The verse takes that lan and breaks it: no, he will return.

A single word, that is, rejects the assumption on which a life has been built.

What answer would have been expected? "No, he will return." Or "No, it is not as he supposed."

The verse does not say this. It says "his Lord was seeing him".

This is an unexpected answer and worth dwelling on. The man's error was an error of knowledge (he supposed there was no return). The answer, however, is a notice of being seen.

The connection is this: because the man assumed he was not seen, he also counted the return unnecessary. The return is for the reckoning; the reckoning is for the record; the record is for the seeing. The verse touches the very beginning of the chain. If he has been seen there is a record; if there is a record there is a reckoning; if there is a reckoning there is a return.

The verb is in the perfect: kāna … baṣīran — "he was seeing".

This choice of tense is meaningful. The verse does not say "his Lord sees him", it says "was seeing". That is, the seeing was already going on during the very period in which the man was saying "I shall not return".

While the man supposed himself unseen he was being seen. The record was being kept without his being aware of it. The "book given from behind" of the eleventh verse is meaningful for this reason: the book had already been written; the man had no knowledge of it.

In Sūrat al-Balad the same idea was treated with another word: "Does he suppose that no one has seen him? Have We not given him two eyes?" (al-Balad 90/7-8). The observation recorded there — that it says not "We saw you" but "We gave you eyes" — comes here from the other side: in this sūra it is said directly, "his Lord was seeing you".

Root: ب-ص-ر. To see; and beyond that: to distinguish, to grasp. Baṣar is the eye, baṣīra insight, tabaṣṣur looking attentively.

The word is an intensive adjective on the faʿīl pattern: not merely "seeing" but one whose seeing is complete and continuous.

بِهِ — "him". It comes with a preposition: baṣīran bihī. In Arabic the construction baṣīr bi- conveys the seeing's being focused on something: about him, knowing him.

The verse does not set up a general sentence "God sees everything", that is. "His Lord was seeing him" — singular, this man, this life. The man supposed himself lost in the crowd.

This is the last move of the play of scale the sūra has been setting up from the beginning: the sky, the earth, all mankind… and at the end one person.

Fa-lā uqsimu bi'sh-shafaq · Wa'l-layli wa mā wasaq · Wa'l-qamari idha'ttasaq "By the afterglow; and by the night and what it gathers; and by the moon when it comes full."

This construction occurs in several places in the Qurʾān (al-Wāqiʿa 56/75, al-Ḥāqqa 69/38, al-Maʿārij 70/40, al-Qiyāma 75/1), and there is a classical debate about the lā at its head. In the section on Sūrat al-Balad this debate was set out in a table of four views and a preference was stated with its ground; I do not repeat it.

What belongs to this place is the فَ (fāʾ) at the head. In al-Balad the construction began as lā uqsimu; here there is a connective before it.

The fāʾ conveys attachment to the preceding sentence. That is, the oath comes as the continuation and the consequence of what went before. The fifteenth verse said "his Lord was seeing him"; the sixteenth continues, "so then, by this…".

This connective stitches the two halves of the sūra to one another.

Root: ش-ف-ق. And this root has two senses; both occur in the Qurʾān:

1. The afterglow — the redness remaining on the horizon after the sun has set (or the whiteness that follows it).

2. Tender concern, anxious care — ishfāq is to be anxious lest something befall someone; mushfiq is one who both fears and spares.

• "They tremble in awe (mushfiqūn) of Him" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/28).
• "Those who believe are anxious about it" (al-Shūrā 42/18).
• "…and they shrank from bearing it" (al-Aḥzāb 33/72).

How do the two senses join? The explanation the lexicographers give is to put رِقَّة (riqqa) — thinness, weakness, fineness — at the centre of the root:

• The afterglow is the thinned, weakened residue of the daylight. Not thick light, but remaining light.
• Tenderness too is the thinned state of a feeling: not a hard affection but a care that notices fragility. And ishfāq is the state in which love is mixed into fear — which is why in Arabic "fear" and "sparing" can stand in the same word.

I transmit this explanation from the classical lexicons; I pass no judgement on the historical development of the root. But this is worth recording: the stretch of time sworn by is the last thin residue of the day.

This is a debate tied directly to a legal consequence, because the time of the ʿishāʾ prayer begins with the disappearance of the shafaq.

Both views have been defended in the literature of law and are a matter of disagreement among the schools. Because I cannot give with certainty which imam held which view, I give no names. In this commentary no legal ruling is issued; I content myself with recording that the disagreement exists.

As regards the sense of the verse the difference is small: in either case what is sworn by is the moment of transition between day and night.

The choice of the oaths is tied to the sūra's matter. The afterglow is the moment of the day's transition: neither day nor night; between the two, a continually changing state.

And what will be said three verses later? "You shall surely mount stage upon stage." The oath is the instance of the ruling.

Root: و-س-ق. And this root carries the subtlest play on words in the sūra.

The primary sense of the root: to gather, to bring together, to drive and collect, to load.

• وَسْق (wasq) — a camel-load; also a measure of volume. In the literature of hadith the threshold for the alms-due is named by this measure: in a report found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim it is said, "there is no alms-due on less than five wasq". The plural of the word is awsuq/awsāq.
• وَسَقَ — the shepherd's gathering of the scattered flock; to collect a thing together and load it.
• اِتَّسَقَ (ittasaqa, Form VIII) — it gathered itself, it became orderly, it came to be complete and regular.

مَا وَسَقَ — "what it gathers". The verse does not say what it gathers.

The ways the exegetes fill this indefiniteness:

The first view is the closest to the concrete sense of the root and has support from within the Qurʾān:

"Have We not made the night a covering, and the day a time of livelihood?" (al-Nabaʾ 78/10-11) "And He made the night a time of rest." (al-Anʿām 6/96)

The function of the night in the Qurʾān is gathering: it draws back what has scattered.

And here is the root's second occurrence. The same root, in two consecutive verses, in two different forms:

The night gathers others; the moon gathers itself.

What does اِتَّسَقَ mean? The moon's gathering is its state of fullness. Beginning as a crescent and growing by one part more each night, the moon becomes a complete circle on the fourteenth night — its parts "gathered", its deficiency completed.

Turkish's borrowed ittisâk and müttesik, which answer to "consistency", are from this root too: the parts of a statement holding to one another, not falling apart.

Now read the three oaths together:

1. The afterglow — the last part of the day; the moment of transition. 2. The night and what it gathers — the gathering of what has scattered. 3. The full moon — a thing that grows part by part and is completed.

All three are stages within a process. Not one of them is a fixed thing.

And note: the moon is the plainest instance among the three, because its completion can be followed with the eye. Each night one part more. A process lasting fourteen nights, and at the end a complete circle.

The nineteenth verse will come upon this: "You too shall mount stage upon stage." That is, what is seen with the eye in the case of the moon holds for man as well.

The sūra does not set up this link itself; it lets it be felt through the choice of the oaths. I record it as my own reading; but that all three oaths meet in the common ground of "change by stages" is a datum of the text itself.

There is a matter of sound too. The verse-endings of the seventeenth and eighteenth verses: وَسَقَ / ٱتَّسَقَ — almost the same sound. And the nineteenth verse ends with طَبَقٍ. Three verses one after another with the same hard close: saqa / tasaqa / ṭabaq. Here the Qurʾān binds three verses to one another by sound as well.

La-tarkabunna ṭabaqan ʿan ṭabaq "You shall surely mount stage upon stage."

The answer to the oath, and the verse that gives the sūra's thesis in a single sentence.

There is a real difference in the reading of this word, and it changes the sense.

In the widely printed copies of the muṣḥaf the reading with ḍamma is the basis. The reading with fatḥa is transmitted in the sources of the variant readings as well and is counted among those transmitted by mass transmission. On the question of which imam of the readings adopted which reading I give no definite attribution, because I am not certain.

Other readings counted weaker (such as a passive form) are also transmitted in the sources; because these are not counted as transmitted by mass transmission I do not take them into assessment here.

The two readings the difference produces:

Read as plural: the address is to mankind and the verse is the continuation of the address "O man!" in the sixth verse. The sense: every man will pass from one state to another.

Read as singular: the address is to the Prophet and the verse becomes a word said to him. On this reading the sense opens in two directions: (a) "you will rise stage by stage" — a notice of ascent; (b) "you will pass from hardship to hardship" — a notice of the stages of the call.

My assessment — it is not binding: the plural reading sits better with the context of the sūra, because the twentieth verse turns immediately afterwards to a plural pronoun: "What is the matter with them, that they do not believe?" Moreover the address al-insān in the sixth verse was an address to the genus. The singular reading is not contrary to the text either; both readings state the same law, they only change the addressee.

Root: ر-ك-ب. To get up onto a thing and move with it. Rakb — a caravan, a mounted company. Markab — a mount. Tarkīb — to join by setting one thing upon another; the Turkish terkip and mürekkep ("compound") are from this root.

The choice of the verb is meaningful. The verse does not say "you shall pass" or "you shall enter"; it says "you shall mount".

To mount is different from to walk. He who walks goes by his own power; he who mounts is upon something that carries him. Neither the speed nor the direction is entirely in the hands of the one who mounts.

This sets up an interesting tension with the sixth verse of the sūra. There man was kādiḥ — scraping with his own nail, toiling. Here he is rākib — carried upon something. Man both toils and is carried. Both at once are true.

I record this as my own reading; but that the two verbs have been given to the same subject in the same sūra is a datum of the text.

Root: ط-ب-ق. At the centre of the root are coming one upon another and fitting exactly:

• طَبَق — a layer; also the lid of a vessel (because it sits exactly upon it).
• طِبَاق — layers one upon another. The Qurʾān: "It is He who created the seven heavens in layers" (al-Mulk 67/3); "Do you not see how God created the seven heavens as layers fitted to one another?" (Nūḥ 71/15).
• مُطَابَقَة (muṭābaqa) — fitting one another, coinciding. The Turkish tıpatıp and mutabakat are from this root.
• أَطْبَقَ — he closed, he covered over.

The word's use for the states of man is known in Arabic as well: ṭabaqāt al-nās — the layers, the degrees of people; and ṭabaq in the sense of a state or period a person passes through.

The particle عَنْ here is of key importance.

ʿAn in Arabic conveys mujāwaza: separating from a thing and moving away from it, leaving it behind. This is the particle used in saying "the arrow left the bow".

Thus طَبَقًا عَن طَبَقٍ is word for word: "onto a stage leaving behind a stage".

Had min been used ("from one stage to another") only movement would have been conveyed. With ʿan the sense of leaving behind is added: to mount each new state is to abandon the one before.

This connects with the fourth verse of the sūra: the earth cast out what was in it and emptied itself. The same movement is repeated for man's life — every state is the leaving of the one before.

On what the verse means there has been more than one view since the classical period:

These views do not exclude one another. The word's being left indefinite (with tanwīn) — ṭabaqan, "a state" — already keeps the sense open-ended.

My assessment — it is not binding: the first view is the one that sits best both with the sense of the root and with the choice of the oaths. The oaths offered a transition (the afterglow), a gathering (the night) and a completion (the full moon); all were instances of change by stages. The verse comes upon these instances.

Recall the supposition of the man in the fourteenth verse: "he supposed he would not return."

The nineteenth verse meets that supposition with a law: passing from state to state is not something man chooses. The moon does it every month; the day does it every evening; man will do it too.

And the whole architecture of the sūra is completed here: the sky changed state (1), the earth changed state (3-4), the moon changes state (18), man will change state (19). The man who supposed he would not change stands in a universe in which nothing at all is unchanging.

Fa-mā lahum lā yuʾminūn · Wa idhā quriʾa ʿalayhimu'l-Qurʾānu lā yasjudūn "So what is the matter with them, that they do not believe? And that when the Qurʾān is recited to them they do not prostrate themselves?"

In Arabic the construction مَا لَـ + pronoun asks the cause of a behaviour and generally conveys astonishment. Like the English "what is the matter with them?" or "what is it with these people?"

The Qurʾān uses this construction in several places: "What is the matter with them, that they turn away from the reminder?" (al-Muddaththir 74/49).

The question is not a question for information but a question of objection. What is asked is not "what is the cause"; what is said is "there is no cause at all". For nineteen verses the proofs have been set out; the verse now declares by a question that denial is without ground.

Note: in the nineteenth verse the address was in the second person (la-tarkabunna — "you shall mount"). In the twentieth it turns all at once to the third person (lahum — "them").

This is the manner of iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address), treated several times in this commentary. Its function here is marked: the addressee is pushed from the party spoken to into the party spoken about. The word said to his face turns into a word said behind his back.

This is a move that puts distance. And it prepares the hardness of the ruling in the following verses.

Root: ق-ر-أ. This root was treated in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAlaq; the field of meaning of the root and the derivation of the word Qurʾān from it were taken up there, so I do not repeat them.

What belongs to this place is the verb's coming in the passive: quriʾa — "is recited". Who recites is not said.

The function of this choice is: the matter is not the identity of the reciter. Whoever recites, the attitude taken towards what is recited is the same. The text stands before the addressee independently of the reader.

Root: س-ج-د. To bend, to put the forehead to the ground, to submit.

And the expectation of prostration here is very important. Right after saying "they do not believe" the verse says "they do not prostrate themselves". The two have been set one after the other.

Recall the sentence at the beginning of the sūra:

وَأَذِنَتْ لِرَبِّهَا وَحُقَّتْ — "and it listened to its Lord; and so indeed it had to."

The sky listened. The earth listened. And now: the Qurʾān is recited, and man does not bend.

Nowhere does the sūra say this opposition outright. But what it sets up is plain: man does not give the answer the universe gives.

And there is one more detail at the level of language. The verb in the second verse is أَذِنَتْ — its root udhun (the ear). In the twenty-first verse the Qurʾān is recited (it comes to the ear) and no answer is given. The same organ, two different outcomes.

There is a prostration at this verse. In the copies of the muṣḥaf the sign of prostration (۩) is placed at the end of the verse.

Its ground is reports found in the hadith sources: it is transmitted that the Prophet prostrated himself at the sūra "Idha's-samāʾu'nshaqqat". This report is found in the sound hadith collections; rather than give a definite attribution as to the transmitter and the full text, I content myself with recording that the report exists.

Its legal status is disputed and no ruling is issued in this commentary; I content myself with conveying the views of the schools:

I do not give detailed attributions to the schools, because not to mention names where I cannot be certain is the rule of this commentary.

But this literary point is independent of the legal debate: the verse blames the failure to prostrate; and the reader, while reciting that verse, prostrates himself. That is, the exact opposite of the behaviour the verse blames is actually carried out by the reciting of the verse. The text makes its reader fill the very gap it criticises.

Bali'lladhīna kafarū yukadhdhibūn · Wa'llāhu aʿlamu bimā yūʿūn "On the contrary — those who disbelieve are giving the lie. And God knows best what they are storing up within."

Bal in Arabic is the particle of iḍrāb: leaving the preceding sentence and passing to something else, or correcting it.

The twentieth verse had asked "What is the matter with them?" The twenty-second answers, but not in the expected way: the cause is not explained, the intent is explained.

That is, the question was "why do they not believe?"; the answer is "because they are giving the lie". This is an answer that looks circular but is not: the verse is saying that denial is not the result of a thought but an attitude.

Root: ك-ذ-ب. This distinction was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Shams; I recall the observation made there:

• كَذَبَ (Form I) — a person's own telling of a lie.
• كَذَّبَ (Form II) — a person's declaring a lie what another has said.

The verb in the verse is the second. That is, what is charged against them is not lying; it is counting as a lie what is true.

The verb is moreover in the imperfect: yukadhdhibūn — "they are giving the lie", a continuous and ongoing state. Not a one-time decision but a lasting attitude.

The last analysis of a word in the sūra, and one of the finest.

Root: و-ع-ي. The concrete centre of the root is an object: وِعَاء (wiʿāʾ) — a vessel, a container, a thing into which something is put.

The Qurʾān uses this concrete sense. In the account of Joseph (Yūsuf), during the search for the stolen goods:

"So he began with their vessels (awʿiyatihim) before his brother's vessel (wiʿāʾi akhīhi)." (Yūsuf 12/76)

There wiʿāʾ is plainly a sack, a container for a load.

The other branches of the root:

• وَعَىٰ — to hold a thing in the mind as though putting it into its vessel; to memorise, to grasp, to keep in the memory.
• أَوْعَىٰ (Form IV) — to fill a vessel, to hoard, to stack up. The Qurʾān: "and gathered and stored up" (al-Maʿārij 70/18) — there the man who piles up wealth is described.
• وَاعِيَة — retaining, keeping (of an ear).

And now that connection coming from within the Qurʾān itself:

"…and that a retaining ear might retain it." (al-Ḥāqqa 69/12) وَتَعِيَهَآ أُذُنٌ وَٰعِيَةٌ

In this verse أُذُن (the ear) and وَاعِيَة (retaining) come side by side. That is, "ear" and "vessel" are joined in the same sentence: a good ear is the ear that takes in and keeps what it hears.

Now join the two ends of Sūrat al-Inshiqāq:

• 84/2 and 84/5: the sky and the earth أَذِنَتْ — they gave ear (root: udhun, the ear).
• 84/21: man does not prostrate himself when the Qurʾān is recited — he does not give ear.
• 84/23: but man is يُوعُونَ — filling and keeping something within himself.

The sūra is saying this, that is: the vessel is not empty; it is only not full of the right thing. It is not that man takes nothing in; he takes something else in.

The verse does not say what they fill it with. Bi-mā yūʿūn — "whatever they are filling it with". The exegetes generally unfold this as "the denial, the rancour, the enmity they hide in their hearts"; but the word does not specify this. The indefiniteness leaves what is put into the vessel to vary from person to person.

In the last part of the sūra the same idea passes three times, with three separate roots:

The night gathers, the moon is gathered, man fills himself. All three are the same movement; but the first two are visible, the third is not.

And this is exactly what the verse says: وَٱللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ — "and God knows best". The invisible gathering is known too.

I record this threefold pattern as my own reading. The root is different (wasq and waʿy are separate roots); the link I set up is conceptual, not a claim of derivation.

And one further link: in the fifteenth verse it was said "his Lord was seeing him". In the twenty-third it is said "God knows best what they store up".

Seeing looks to what is outside; knowing, to what is inside. The sūra sets up first the outward record, then the inward one. The man's reckoning that "no one saw" is broken twice over.

Fa-bashshirhum bi-ʿadhābin alīm · Illa'lladhīna āmanū wa ʿamilu'ṣ-ṣāliḥāti lahum ajrun ghayru mamnūn "So give them the good news of a painful punishment! Except those who believe and do righteous deeds; for them there is a reward unceasing."

Root: ب-ش-ر. The centre of this root too is an organ: بَشَرَة (bashara) — the outer surface of the skin, the complexion. From the same root بَشَر (bashar) — man; by the lexicographers' explanation, the being whose skin is exposed, not covered with fur.

بِشَارَة (bishāra, good news) comes from here as well: the person who receives good news has the skin of his face change — the blood runs, the expression opens. Good news, that is, is a thing first seen in the skin.

What the verse does is a tahakkum — a scornful, inverted use. The object of the verb "give good news" is given as "a painful punishment".

In Arabic, as in English, this is a figure of style and its effect is sharp: the mismatch between a word and its object gives the utterance a point. It is like the ironic use of "congratulations" in English.

The Qurʾān repeats this usage in several places: "So give them the good news of a painful punishment" (Āl ʿImrān 3/21; al-Tawba 9/34; and al-Inshiqāq 84/24 here).

There is a point of context too. Through the sūra it was told what each would receive: one took his book from the right and rejoiced, one took it from behind and cried out. Now a command is given to the Prophet: give them the "good news". That is, the work of distributing joy is turned inside out and put into the Prophet's hand.

It has no root; it is a particle. Illā separates a portion from a ruling.

How this construction works was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Tīn. There too a general negative ruling had been laid down ("then We returned him to the lowest of the low"), and then an exception came with the same construction:

إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتِ فَلَهُمْ أَجْرٌ غَيْرُ مَمْنُونٍ (al-Tīn 95/6)

Al-Inshiqāq 84/25 and al-Tīn 95/6 are almost word for word the same. The only difference is that al-Tīn has fa-lahum and al-Inshiqāq lahum.

This is the plainest link between the two sūras, and it joins the two sūras' description of man:

As was recorded in the section on al-Balad as well, in the Qurʾān's short Meccan sūras this construction of exception is a structure repeated after a general negative diagnosis.

There is a grammatical question: from which word is illā making the exception?

The nearest referent is the pronoun هُمْ in the twenty-fourth verse (bashshirhum) — that is, "them" (those who disbelieve). But those who believe cannot be a subset of those who disbelieve.

The grammarians' explanation: this is the kind called istithnāʾ munqaṭiʿ — a disconnected exception; what is excepted is not in fact of the same kind as that from which it is excepted. In English it is carried by "but these are not like that". The function of the construction is comparison, not subtraction.

That is, the verse does not say "except for these among them"; it says "as against this, there are these".

Root: م-ن-ن. This construct was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Tīn. The observation there was this: the root has two branches —

1. To cut, to diminish. Manna'l-ḥabl — he cut the rope. In this sense ghayru mamnūn = unceasing, inexhaustible. 2. To hold a favour over someone. Minna is the throwing of a kindness done in someone's face. In this sense ghayru mamnūn = not held over one's head.

There both senses were left in place; here too I leave them so.

But in the context of this sūra the second sense has a particular flavour. The sixth verse of the sūra had named man's life kadḥ: scraping with the nail, working oneself away. And the last verse says that the return for that scraping will not be held over his head.

That is, the reward is given, and in the giving it is not brought up again. This is a close that agrees with the sūra's description of man: to the one who toils, his toiling is not thrown in his face.

I record this as my own reading; both senses are in the classical sources, and there is no indication making a preference necessary.

Seeing the sūra from beginning to end in a single table shows how tightly it is built.

The sūra's most marked technique is to set up an opposition by using the same word in two different places:

A repetition-economy this dense is not a thing easily met with in a text of twenty-five verses. Instead of bringing in a new word, the sūra turns the word it has already brought.

And this is the same thing as the sūra's content: ṭabaqan ʿan ṭabaq — the passing of the same thing into another state. The text applies in its own vocabulary the law it describes.

I present this as my own reading; the repetitions themselves, however, are a datum of the text and can be counted.

Look at the verse-endings:

1-15: inshaqqat, ḥuqqat, muddat, takhallat, ḥuqqat — a hard series closing in -at. Then: mulāqīh, bi-yamīnih, yasīrā, masrūrā, ẓahrih, thubūrā, saʿīrā, masrūrā, yaḥūr, baṣīrā — long ū / ī sounds.

16-25: shafaq, wasaq, ittasaq, ṭabaq — four verses in a row ending in -aq; hard and short. Then it lengthens again: yuʾminūn, yasjudūn, yukadhdhibūn, yūʿūn — four verses in -ūn.

The sūra, that is, passes between three regions of sound: hard close → long vowel → hard close → long vowel. The sound too enters state after state.

First: the naming of life as "scraping".

What the sixth verse does is to name work without romanticising it and without disparaging it. Kadḥ is neither a sanctified ordeal nor a burden complained of; it is a statement of fact.

Its value for today lies here: the two widespread narratives built upon working life both fall outside this verse. The first is the narrative that counts work a source of meaning in itself — "love your work and you will never have worked a day". The second is the narrative that sees work as wholly an alienation. The verse enters neither: work wears one down (kadḥ), and it is going in a direction (ilā Rabbika). It does not reject the wearing down; it rejects the wearing down's going for nothing.

And read together with al-Balad 90/4 a diagnosis is completed: hardship is structural, but it is not without direction.

Second: the timing of joy.

That the ninth and thirteenth verses use the same two words carries the sūra's most practical ruling. Both men were rejoicing, both were beside their people. The difference is what the joy was built upon and when it came.

The verse does not forbid rejoicing in this world — such a reading would be contrary to the sūra's own language, since the first man rejoices too. What it says is finer: joy taken before an account is closed is an advance.

Translated into today's language: to celebrate the result of a piece of work before seeing it does not change that result. The fourteenth verse already says the cause — the man was celebrating because he had never thought the account would be closed.

Third: not being able to see one's own record.

The picture of the tenth verse — the book given from behind the back — is oddly concrete for today.

Everyone has a record, and the greater part of the record is not seen by the person himself. We do not know what is kept, where, by whom. What the verse describes is of course not a description of a technology; but the feeling it describes is familiar: there is a file about me, and the file is not in my hands.

The distinction the verse makes stands here: the first man can take his record in his hand and read it. That is, the matter is not the existence of the record but whether the person is in a condition to face his own record.

Fourth: "supposing he would not return."

The diagnosis in the fourteenth verse is as much a description of a behaviour as it is a religious description of denial.

"Supposing one will not return" is not a state confined to not believing in the hereafter. It is the state of everyone who assumes the consequence will not come back to him: assuming one will not see the effect of a decision, assuming a debt will not be asked after, assuming a harm will not touch oneself.

And the verse's answer is striking. It does not say "you are mistaken, there is a return"; it says "your Lord was seeing you". That is, the matter is not a lack of knowledge about the future but a false assumption about the past: supposing oneself unseen.

Fifth: reading the passing from state to state as a consolation.

The nineteenth verse is generally read as a warning, and so it is. But it can be read the other way round as well.

The sentence "you shall mount stage upon stage" also says that no state is permanent. Look at the sūra's oaths: the afterglow passes, the night gathers, the moon fills. Not one of the three stays in one state.

Whatever the state one is in — and the sūra does not divide these into good and bad — that state is a stage, and there is another stage to be mounted upon it. This looks the same way as the ruling in Sūrat al-Inshirāḥ, "with hardship there is ease".

I record this as my own reading. The context of the verse is admonitory; but the wording of the sentence is open in both directions.

Sixth: what is put into the vessel.

The verb yūʿūn in the twenty-third verse sets a measure for where attention is to be directed.

The picture in the root of the word was a vessel. Man's interior is a vessel and every day it is filled with something. The verse takes as its subject not the filling but the thing filled — and says that the hiddenness of what is filled is of no use.

Its practical counterpart for today is this: what a person watches, what he reads, what he spends his time with, which sentences he repeats — all of these are things put into the vessel. And to say it with the expression at al-Ḥāqqa 69/12, the matter is whether the ear is a retaining ear: does what enters take up a place inside, and if it does, which place.

• Where the answer to the idhā of verses 1-5 lies is not certain; three views were given in a table and no preference was imposed.
• The conceptual division of labour I set up among the roots ش-ق-ق / ف-ط-ر / ف-ل-ق is my own reading; the lexical senses of the roots are transmitted, the division of labour among them is not.
• On whether adhinat in verse 2 is "it listened" or "it gave permission" two readings were given; the first was preferred, and it is not binding.
• The referent of the pronoun at the end of verse 6 (the Lord, or the kadḥ) is disputed; three views were given, one preference was stated with its ground and it was written that it is not binding.
• On the relation between "being given from behind" in verse 10 and "being given in the left hand" at al-Ḥāqqa 69/25 three explanations were given; no preference was stated.
• The hadith report about "a light reckoning" was conveyed with attribution to al-Bukhārī and Muslim; it was stated that the report is not the only explanation of the verse.
• Whether the shafaq in verse 16 is redness or whiteness is a legal disagreement; the two views were recorded, no attribution to a school was given because I am not certain.
• Which imam held which reading in the variant reading of verse 19 was not given; the consequences for meaning of the two readings were treated.
• On what verse 19 means five views were given; one preference was stated with its ground and it was written that it is not binding.
• The legal ruling on the prostration of recitation at verse 21 was conveyed but attributions to the schools were not given; the disagreement over the number of the verses of prostration was also recorded. No definite attribution was given regarding the chain of transmission of the report.
• On whether the senses "to turn" and "whiteness" in the root ح-و-ر are historically a single root no judgement was passed.
• The pattern of "three gatherings" I set up among verses 17-18 and 23 is my own reading; wasq and waʿy are separate roots and no claim of derivation was made.
• The reading I drew from the shared root ل-ق-ي between verses 4 and 6 is my own interpretation; the sharing of the root, however, is a datum of the language.
• In which sense the construct ghayru mamnūn is to be read was left open here as it was in the section on al-Tīn.
• The observations about the sūra's regions of sound and its economy of repetition were presented as my own reading, not as classical transmission.