al-Ghāshiya 88:17-20

A-fa-lā yanẓurūna ila'l-ibili kayfa khuliqat — wa ila's-samāʾi kayfa rufiʿat — wa ila'l-jibāli kayfa nuṣibat — wa ila'l-arḍi kayfa suṭiḥat "Do they not look at the camel, how it was created? And at the sky, how it was raised? And at the mountains, how they were set up? And at the earth, how it was spread out?"

The sūra's most unexpected turn is here. Through twenty verses the hereafter has been recounted; now there is a sudden return here, to the world before one's eyes.

Structure: hamza (interrogative) + fāʾ (connective) + lā (negation) + verb.

The letter fāʾ matters: it binds the sentence to what precedes. That is, the question is not hanging in the air; it is asked after all that has been recounted. "All this has been recounted, and do they still not look?"

The interrogative mood here too is not asking for information. Its function is astonishment and encouragement — not reproach. The difference between them matters: reproach closes the one addressed, astonishment calls him to think.

نظر — root: ن-ظ-ر. To look. And when it comes with the particle ilā: to look while turning towards something.

The choice of verb is meaningful: not raʾā (to see) but naẓara (to look).

English has the same difference: seeing happens, looking is done. Seeing is involuntary; if your eyes are open you see. Looking is an act; it requires turning, stopping, giving attention.

In the discussion of al-Fīl the verb raʾā was treated, and what was recorded there was this: this verb conveys knowing, grasping and arriving at a conviction just as it conveys seeing with the eye — when someone says "you see that this will not work", no one is speaking of the eye.

A comparison:

And the diagnosis here is finer. In al-Fīl the one addressed has forgotten an event. In al-Ghāshiya there is something standing before the one addressed every day and he is not looking at it. Not failing to see — he sees the camel of course, he sees it every day. He does not look.

This distinction will meet us again in what the sūra says to the present.

This is the most discussed question about the four, and it has a good answer.

The camel was the nearest thing in the life of the one addressed, the most often seen, the least looked at.

The place of the camel in the Arabian peninsula is far more central than would be guessed from today. The camel was this:

• A mount — the only real means of carrying over long distances.
• A beast of burden — the backbone of trade; to say caravan is to say camel.
• Milk — a basic food.
• Meat — for festivals and banquets.
• Wool and hide — tent, clothing, vessel.
• A measure of capital — wealth was expressed in numbers of camels.
• A legal unit — blood-money and compensation were calculated in camels.

That is, in that society the camel was the economy itself. The question "how many camels does he have" was the counterpart of today's "how much property does he have".

Its sense within the sūra is this: in enumerating the proofs of the cosmos, what is put first on the list is the wealth of the one addressed. The sky, the mountain and the earth are far off, huge, outside human intervention. The camel is under one's hand; it is bought and sold, milked, ridden, owned.

The sūra makes him look at what is owned and ask "how was it created?" The property itself becomes a proof.

This ground is also widely voiced in classical exegesis: that a beginning is made from the most familiar thing in the addressee's surroundings. I record this as a general tendency; I do not ascribe it to any particular exegete.

The Qurʾān mentions the same family of animals as a sign in other places too:

"And the livestock He created; in them there is warmth for you and many benefits, and of them you eat… And in them there is a beauty for you, when you bring them home in the evening and when you drive them out in the morning" (al-Naḥl 16/5-6).

"Have they not seen that of what Our hands have made We created for them livestock, and they own them? And We made them subservient to them; some they ride and some they eat" (Yāsīn 36/71-72).

The note in the verse of Yāsīn, "and they own them", is especially meaningful for al-Ghāshiya: the matter of ownership is brought up by the Qurʾān itself.

It is a widespread tendency to go by way of this verse into the biological features of the camel — its retention of water, its hump, the structure of its feet, its eyelids — and to count these "scientific miracles announced by the Qurʾān". I do not do this, and I write the ground for it openly: the verse does not speak of the camel's physiology. Kayfa khuliqat — "how it was created" — is not a question of biology but a question of createdness.

What is legitimate, and can be said with the note that "this is one point of view", is only this much: the camel is a creature whose fittedness to the environment it lives in is extraordinarily marked, and this fittedness is something anyone who looks at it can notice — even without knowing any biology. The verse's question "how was it created" is asking about just this fittedness that lies before one's eyes. More than this goes beyond the text.

A view is transmitted that the word is read al-ibill (cloud) instead of al-ibil (camel).

The reading of the majority is "camel" and that is my preference. My ground is this: the "breaking" of the series is not a fault but the very thing the sūra is doing. To insert an everyday animal among the cosmic proofs brings the chain of proofs down into the addressee's own yard. The reading "cloud" tidies the series but erases the sūra's most original move.

This preference is not binding. Nor have we any decisive proof for counting the second view weak; it is a reading recorded in the sources. I do not give the name of any imam of the variant readings.

The order is this: camel → sky → mountain → earth.

Several readings can be proposed for this order. I present them all as my own readings; I do not present them as classical transmitted material.

First reading: from near to far, then the return.

• The camel — under his hand, what he can touch.
• The sky — the furthest, what he can never reach.
• The mountain — on the horizon, what he can see but is far off.
• The earth — under his feet, what he stands on.

The gaze traces a circle: it begins at the nearest, goes to the furthest, comes back, and ends on the ground where the person is standing. That is, the one called to look at the sky ends by having looked beneath his own feet.

Second reading: a movement of the head.

Try to carry out the four verses in order:

• To look at the camel you turn your head to the side.
• To look at the sky you raise it upward.
• To look at the mountain you bring it down to the horizon.
• To look at the earth you bend it downward.

The four verses, when completed, describe a complete look. Up, ahead, down. The sūra is not making an abstract call to think; it is describing a physical movement.

Third reading: from ownership to non-ownership.

The camel can be owned. The sky, the mountain and the earth cannot. The order starts from what is owned and goes to what cannot be owned — and the one addressed sees that what he holds came from the same hand.

Fourth reading: the widening and narrowing of scale.

Camel (one living creature) → sky (the largest) → mountain (large) → earth (the ground). The scale first leaps, then descends by degrees. The order of scale is not a straight increase or decrease; this too supports the reading of the circle of gaze.

In all four verses the verb is passive and the agent is not stated:

khuliqat (it was created) — rufiʿat (it was raised) — nuṣibat (they were set up) — suṭiḥat (it was spread out).

This choice is not accidental and connects with the rest of the sūra.

Two verses later it will be said to the Prophet: "you are not one who rules them by force" (88/22). That is, by not stating the agent of the four verbs, the sūra leaves the one addressed alone with the question itself. The doer is not stated; the one addressed is expected to see it himself.

This also establishes a principle in the method of the call: the answer is not imposed, the question is asked. So long as the verbs remain passive, the one addressed has to find out for himself who the agent is. And a thing one is made to find by force is not counted as found in the first place — the sūra's twenty-second verse will say exactly this.

Two of the four verbs come from roots that occurred in the sūra's earlier sections:

The first pairing: the same verb, one lifting a seat and one lifting the sky. I treated this above.

The second pairing is the more striking. We had seen in verse 3 that the root naṣb means "to set upright"; the sense of weariness comes from there — to stand as though planted, to be unable to sit.

Now the same root is used of the mountains. And this reading comes out, which I present as my own reading:

The mountains were set up and stood. Those faces were set up and grew weary.

The same verb, two different outcomes. One produces a firm standing, the other an unending remaining on one's feet. The difference lies in who did the setting up: another set up the mountain; the one who set himself up is himself.

I record this not as a ruling but as an echo arising from the word's occurring twice within the sūra.

The word of the sūra requiring the greatest care.

Root: س-ط-ح. To spread, to flatten, to lay out. Its derivatives:

• سَطْح (saṭḥ) — a surface, a flat roof. English carries the same pair in surface and superficial: the face laid over a thing, and what stays on that face.
• مِسْطَح (misṭaḥ) — a tool for levelling; the place where dates are laid out.

Now let us come to the matter itself. This verse is one of those most used in the claim that "the Qurʾān says the earth is flat". From the other side there are defences of the form "no, it actually implies its roundness". Both are making the same mistake: they are making the verse answer a question the verse does not set up.

The note made for the word firāsh (bedding) in the discussion of al-Baqara 2/22 holds here word for word, and I rely on that treatment. What was written there was this:

This expression does not say that the earth is flat. Bedding is not flat either — it is spread, it folds, it follows the ground beneath it. What the word states is not shape but function: the earth has been made such that one can stand on it, live on it, rest on it.

I set up the same measure for suṭiḥat:

One. The word conveys a function; it does not set up a proposition of geometry. Saṭḥ is a surface; a sphere has a surface too. To be "spread out" is to be walkable upon, settleable, cultivable.

Two. All the sūra's verbs are set up according to the human being's gaze. This is seen when the four are looked at as a whole: the sky raised, the mountain set up, the earth spread out. These are the states as seen from an observer's horizon. The verse says "look" in any case — the description given is the description the one who looks sees.

Three. The Qurʾān uses other words for the same ground and none of them carries a claim of geometry:

• daḥāhā — "He spread it out and laid it down" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/30).
• mihād — "a cradle" (al-Nabaʾ 78/6).
• dhalūl — "docile, made submissive" (al-Mulk 67/15): "It is He who made the earth submissive to you; so walk upon its shoulders."

All three say the same thing: this ground has been set so that life may be lived on it.

Four, and most important: this is neither a claim of roundness nor a claim of flatness. The verse was not set up to answer this question. To load onto a text the answer to a question it does not ask — in either direction — is not to read the text.

I write this calmly and plainly because the measure laid down by the method (Method) is here: no hunting for scientific miracles is done, and a modern piece of knowledge is not forced onto a verse. This holds when it is done for the purpose of defence as well.