al-Burūj 85:6-7

Idh hum ʿalayhā quʿūd · Wa hum ʿalā mā yafʿalūna bi'l-muʾminīna shuhūd "When they were sitting at the edge of it. And they were witnesses to what they were doing to the believers."

The two heaviest verses of the sūra. And their weight lies not in the torture they relate — but in their not relating the torture.

Notice: the sūra does not describe the torture itself at all.

Not how many there were, not how they were thrown in, not how long it lasted, not the screams. None of it. The Qurʾān is not setting up a scene of horror here.

The only thing it relates is the posture of the wrongdoers: they were sitting and they were looking.

This is a choice, and it shows where the sūra is looking. The subject is not what the fire did; it is what those who watched the fire became.

Idh is an adverb of past time, and in Arabic it is used to bring a scene before the eye. It occurs very often in the narratives of the Qurʾān: idh qāla, idh yarfaʿu, idh humā fi'l-ghār.

English has no single particle for it; "remember when…" comes nearest: it opens a scene in the hearer's mind.

Root: ق-ع-د. To sit. Its derivatives:

• قَاعِد — one sitting. Its plural is قُعُود.
• مَقْعَد — the place where one sits, a seat, a station. The Qurʾān uses it of the garden: "…in a seat of truth (maqʿadi ṣidqin)" (al-Qamar 54/55).
• قَاعِدَة — a foundation, a basis; that which has been set down. Turkish has borrowed this word as kaide, "rule, principle".
• قَوَاعِد — foundations. "Abraham and Ishmael (Ismāʿīl) were raising the foundations of the House" (al-Baqara 2/127).

The Qurʾān uses this root also for those who stay back from fighting: "…be with those who sit (al-qāʿidīn)" (al-Tawba 9/46, 83); "Those who sit among the believers … are not equal" (al-Nisāʾ 4/95).

In the root, that is, there is the idea of not moving and of staying in one place.

The grammatical point here is important. The verse does not build a verbal sentence: it does not say qaʿadū (they sat). It builds a nominal sentence: hum … quʿūd — "they are sitters / they are in a state of being seated."

In Arabic a nominal sentence conveys continuity and fixity; a verbal sentence conveys occurrence and renewal. This distinction is a measure often used in the exegesis of the Qurʾān.

The verse, that is, is not relating an act of sitting; it is relating a state of sitting. Not: they sat; but: they were those who sit.

And the seventh verse repeats the same structure: hum … shuhūd — again a nominal sentence.

Two nominal sentences one after the other. The sūra builds the wrongdoers' immobility with grammar.

The particle ʿalā conveys being above and in a commanding position. As was recorded in the section on Sūrat al-Fīl in this commentary, the particle draws the direction of the event.

The direction it draws here is this: the trench below, they above. The position of a grandstand.

Some explain this as "they sat at the edge of the fire", others say "seats had been set up around the pit". The detail is not in the Qurʾān; but the particle establishes the difference in level between the watched and the watching.

And here is the root's second turn. In the third verse there was shāhid; here shuhūd — the plural of the same word.

This link is the most important internal connection in the sūra.

In the third verse the sūra swore "by a witness and by what is witnessed". By whom the oath was sworn was left indefinite. And four verses later, the first concrete witnesses the sūra shows are people watching a human being burn.

Within one sūra, then, four verses apart, the word passes from its highest sense (a witness sworn by) to its lowest (a spectator).

And in the ninth verse it will turn a third time: وَٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍ شَهِيدٌ — "and God is witness over all things."

Let us put the three occurrences into a table:

What the sūra builds is plain: the watchers are being watched. The wrongdoers were the audience of a scene; but the scene itself stood before another witness.

I offer this reading as my own inference; but the root's turning three times in three verses is a datum of the text and can be counted.

Something has to be said at this point, because these two verses of the sūra establish a moral category.

Who lit the fire? The verse does not say. Who dug the trench? It does not say. Who threw the people in? It does not say.

The only acts the verse records are "sitting" and "looking".

And these two acts are, as a matter of language, passive verbs — they harm no one, they move nothing. Even so, the sūra fastens the verdict on them.

The reason for this is visible in the structure of the seventh verse: عَلَىٰ مَا يَفْعَلُونَ بِٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ — "to what they were doing to the believers". The verb is yafʿalūn — "they are doing". Those sitting and those doing, that is, are in the same pronoun.

The verse does not separate watching from doing. The spectator and the agent are inside the same "they".

There is a further reason for this, and it is visible when one looks at the language: the word shuhūd means not "spectator" but "witness". And a witness is the legal ratifier of an event. To watch an event, in this Arabic word, comes to mean to bear witness to it — that is, to enter it into the record and to accept it.

The sūra does not recognise spectatorship as a neutral position.

The verse names the people who were burned مُؤْمِنِين.

This choice of word is noteworthy. The Qurʾān does not say here which community they belonged to, which book they followed, how they worshipped. It mentions them by a single attribute: that they had believed.

And the next verse will say what it was they believed in as well: "that they believed in God — the Mighty, the Praiseworthy."

This is one of the widest doors in the sūra. As was recorded in the section on Sūrat al-Bayyina, the Qurʾān's tying its verdict to the attribute and not to the identity is its own method. So it is here: the sūra is not lamenting a congregation, it is lamenting a situation.