al-Inshiqāq 84:13-14

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).