al-Fajr 89:25-26

Fa-yawmaʾidhin lā yuʿadhdhibu ʿadhābahu aḥad • Wa lā yūthiqu wathāqahu aḥad "On that day no one punishes as He punishes; no one binds as He binds."

(On the other reading: "On that day no one is punished with a punishment like his; no one is bound with a binding like his.")

These two verses are among the few places where a variant reading really does change the meaning, and recording it is obligatory.

Both readings are transmitted and both are meaningful. They do not exclude one another: one conveys the unmatchedness of the agent, the other of the object; and the unmatchedness of the agent already entails the unmatchedness of the punishment.

Since I cannot say with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I write no name.

I should like to add an observation: the first reading connects more tightly with verses 6-14 of the sūra. There the one who destroys, who pours out the punishment and who stands in the place of watching was always rabbuka; here, to state the unmatchedness of the work of that same subject would be the natural close of that section. I state this as an observation; it is not binding and we have no proof for counting the second reading weak.

Root: و-ث-ق. Its meaning is to bind, to make firm, to fasten tightly. Wathāq / withāq — a bond, a rope, a fetter.

Its use in the Qurʾān: "Bind the bonds tightly" (Muḥammad 47/4), concerning captives.

And from the same root comes مِيثَاق (mīthāq) — a covenant, a treaty, an agreement.

The root's other derivatives are in the same family: wathīqa (a document — the Turkish vesika), thiqa (a trustworthy person), tawthīq (documentation), al-wuthqā (the firm handhold).

Establishing this link is instructive. A covenant is a bond, and so is a fetter. In a mīthāq the parties are bound to one another — willingly, and the bond holds the parties. In a withāq the person is bound — unwillingly, and the bond holds him.

The same root, the same work: holding. The only thing that changes is whether the bond is accepted or not.

From this I draw an observation and state that it is my own reading: the bond is either accepted at the outset or applied at the end. The two ends of the root say this. I record it not as a claim of rhetoric but as the echo the word carries.

And a line is established with the fifth verse: there we had ḥijr — a restraint, a boundary, what holds. The sūra opened with "the one who holds himself" and closes with "the one who is bound". The work of holding is done either from within or from without.

The word occurs in a negative sentence, and in Arabic in this case it conveys generality: "no one."

It is the same word as aḥad at al-Ikhlāṣ 112/1 — but at an entirely different work. There, in an affirmative sentence, as a noun and an attribute, it conveyed unmatchedness. Here, in a negative sentence, it conveys inclusiveness.

I record this as a short note; I establish no link between the two uses, because the word's two functions are already separate in Arabic.

Both verses end with the same word: aḥad, aḥad. There is one other place in the sūra where two verses close with the same word — 8 and 11, fi'l-bilād — but there the verses were not consecutive; here they are.

This repetition makes the two sentences into a single ruling: the punishment and the binding are two faces of one operation. And the repetition itself serves as a closing — the scene of the resurrection ends here, and in the next verse an entirely different voice begins.