al-Burūj 85:21-22

Bal huwa Qurʾānun majīd · Fī lawḥin maḥfūẓ "Rather, it is a glorious Qurʾān; on a preserved tablet."

The close of the sūra. And the close binds everything the sūra has related to a contrast.

The nineteenth verse had begun with bal: "rather, they are in denial." The twenty-first verse again begins with bal: "rather, it is a glorious Qurʾān."

The two bals complete one another:

• The first corrects the situation of the addressee: the matter is not knowledge but attitude.
• The second corrects the standing of the text: whatever is denied, it stands where it is.

In its last two verses, that is, the sūra turns the subject from people to the text.

There is a pronoun in the verse whose referent is not stated openly: huwa — "it".

The explanation of the exegetes: the pronoun refers to the Qurʾān. This is understood from the word takdhīb (denial) in the nineteenth verse — what is denied is the Qurʾān. The pronoun, that is, refers to a referent that is unstated but known from the context.

This is a widespread usage in the Qurʾān, and it is the same structure as "We sent it down…" (innā anzalnāhu) in the first verse of Sūrat al-Qadr; it was treated in the section on al-Qadr.

قُرْءَان — Root: ق-ر-أ. This root was treated in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAlaq; I do not repeat it here.

مَّجِيد — the second coming of the word that occurred in the fifteenth verse.

And this repetition is one of the finest moves of the sūra.

In the fifteenth verse majīd was the attribute either of the Throne or of the owner of the Throne (according to the variant reading). In the twenty-first verse it is the attribute of the Qurʾān.

The sūra, that is, gives the same attribute to two things: to the Throne and to the text.

Recall the sense in the root of the word: majd is the breadth and abundance of honour. A majīd text, that is, is a text both lofty and inexhaustible.

I record this as an observation; that the word occurs in two verses is a datum of the text, and the bond between them is my own reading.

Root: ل-و-ح. The semantic field of the root runs in two directions, and both are interesting:

1. A flat, level tablet; a board. Lawḥ — a flat surface written upon.

The Qurʾān uses this sense in two places:

"We wrote for him on the tablets an admonition concerning everything…" (al-Aʿrāf 7/145) — the tablets given to Moses. Also al-Aʿrāf 7/150 and 154.

"We carried him upon a thing of planks and nails." (al-Qamar 54/13) — Noah's ship.

al-Qamar 54/13 is noteworthy: the same word is used for the planks of the ship. Lawḥ, that is, is not a sacred term; it is the name of a material. A flat, level piece.

2. To shine, to appear. Lāḥa — it shone, it appeared. The Qurʾān: "Scorching to the skin (lawwāḥatun li'l-bashar)" (al-Muddaththir 74/29) — in this verse the word conveys a burning or altering, and it is explained differently by the exegetes.

The relation between the two branches of the root has been disputed by the lexicographers; I issue no firm ruling. The sense in the verse is beyond dispute the first.

The word لَوْح occurs in this sense in the Qurʾān only here, and in the singular. Its other occurrences are plural (alwāḥ).

Root: ح-ف-ظ. To protect, to watch over, to keep; and also to memorise (to keep a thing in the mind).

مَحْفُوظ is a passive participle: that which is protected, that which has been preserved. Passive — not preserving itself, but being preserved.

A note on variant readings. There is a genuine difference in the reading of this word:

Both readings are transmitted in the sources of the variant readings. I give no firm ascription as to which imām held which reading.

The difference in sense is fine but real: in the first the preserving is ascribed to the vessel, in the second to the content. Neither is contrary to the text, and in practice they come to the same result.

This construct has given rise to a long tradition of debate in the literature of kalām and of Sufism: what the tablet is, where it is, what is written in it, what its relation to destiny is.

That debate is not entered into in this commentary. The Qurʾān uses this construct once and does not describe it. To describe what is not described is not the business of this text.

There are expressions within the Qurʾān that may be related to it — kitābin maknūn (al-Wāqiʿa 56/78), umm al-kitāb (al-Zukhruf 43/4; al-Raʿd 13/39), kitābin ḥafīẓ (Qāf 50/4) — but whether these expressions are the same as one another is itself disputed, and no ruling is issued here.

The function of the verse within the sūra, however, is beyond dispute, and that is the real matter.

Now recall the sūra from beginning to end.

The sūra related a fire. The work of fire is to destroy: it burns, it reduces to ash, it leaves nothing behind. And into that fire people were thrown — for believing.

There is one other thing fire can burn, and it has very often been burned in history: writing.

In its last verse the sūra sets a preserved tablet against that fire.

Let us put the contrast into a table:

The sūra does not establish this contrast openly. It sets the two images at the two ends of the sūra and leaves them there. The reader makes the connection.

But this has to be recorded: the close of the sūra stands like an answer given to the method to which tyranny has resorted most through history. The most common way of doing away with a belief is to destroy its bearers and its texts. People are burned, books are burned, the record is erased.

What the sūra says is this: fire can burn a human being; it cannot burn the text — because the original of the text is not here.

I offer this as my own reading. The structure of the sūra (its opening with fire and closing with a preserved tablet), however, is a datum of the text and is too marked to be counted a coincidence.

There is one thing more, and it takes on meaning when one thinks of the first addressees of the sūra.

This sūra came down in Mecca. At that time the Qurʾān had no written muṣḥaf; the verses were being memorised and written on scattered materials. The Muslims were few in number, unprotected and under pressure.

The sūra, that is, says "it is preserved" about a text that was in fact unprotected.

And it says this at the end of a sūra that has related how people could not be protected. The people were not protected; the text was. The sūra does not shrink from putting these two sentences one after the other.