al-Fajr 89:10

Wa Firʿawna dhi'l-awtād "And to Pharaoh of the stakes."

Root: و-ت-د. Watid / watad: a stake, a peg, a post driven into the ground. Its plural is أوتاد (awtād).

The work of a stake is one thing: to hold something in its place. It fixes a tent, a rope, a boundary. A stake is not driven for its own sake; it is driven so that something else will not move.

There is another occurrence of the word in the Qurʾān, and it should be read together with this one:

"Have We not made the mountains as stakes?" (al-Nabaʾ 78/7 — wa'l-jibāla awtādā)

The same word, in two separate places, attached to two separate subjects:

This comparison must be made, because the logic of the sūra passes through here. The idea of fixing is not evil in itself — when the Qurʾān mentions the mountains as stakes it counts this as a favour. What is evil is the confusion about to whom the authority of fixing belongs.

And the sūra will resolve this in the twenty-first verse: dukkati'l-arḍu dakkan dakkā — the earth will be pounded and levelled. Stakes included.

I impose no firm preference. I do not go into detail on the reports concerning the fourth view; I content myself with saying "some exegetes have understood it so", because I cannot issue a ruling on the soundness of the details.

This much I can say: the first three views come out at the same place — a power thought to be fixed and unshakeable. And this is the only thing the flow of the sūra requires, because all three peoples are mentioned with the same claim.

At Ṣād 38/12 the same epithet occurs again: "Before them the people of Noah, ʿĀd and Pharaoh of the stakes also denied." There too the epithet is within the same list — and in the next verse Thamūd is mentioned. That is, the expression "of the stakes" is a settled designation the Qurʾān uses for Pharaoh; it is not an invention particular to al-Fajr. This shows that the expression was something understood by those addressed.

When the subject of ṭughyān was treated in Sūrat al-ʿAlaq, what was recorded was this: this root is used in the Qurʾān most often of Pharaoh ("Go to Pharaoh; he has exceeded all bounds" — Ṭāhā 20/24; al-Nāziʿāt 79/17), and the content of the transgression was given in al-Nāziʿāt: "He said: I am your lord, the highest" (79/24).

The conclusion there was this: the furthest point of ṭughyān is to put oneself in the position of Lord.

In al-Fajr this link is closed. The next verse will state the common act of the three peoples as ṭaghaw — and the most recognised subject of that verb is Pharaoh, mentioned in the verse immediately before. The sūra names the emblem of the word first, then states the act.

There is an observation about the structure here, and I record it as my own reading.

The type of identity of the three links is not the same:

• ʿĀd — the name of a people. A community.
• Thamūd — the name of a people. A community.
• Pharaoh — a person; more precisely a title, but a singular subject.

The triad descends from the plural towards the singular. And in the eleventh verse all three are gathered by a plural relative pronoun (alladhīna ṭaghaw), and then in the fifteenth verse a single noun remains: al-insān.

That is, the sūra descends from the crowd to a single person, and from the single person to man himself. Pharaoh is the intermediate step of this descent: not a people, but not yet "man" either — a particular, historical, recognised subject.

And this descent explains the sūra's method. The historical narrative is not a history lesson; it is the operation of enlarging the scale of the diagnosis and then bringing it down upon the one addressed. The one addressed does not find himself in ʿĀd, and certainly not in Pharaoh; but he finds himself in al-insān. The sūra brings him there step by step.