al-Fajr 89:5

Hal fī dhālika qasamun li-dhī ḥijr "Is there in this an oath for one who has understanding?"

One of the densest verses of the sūra, and the place where the four oaths are tied to a condition.

The sentence is built as a question: hal — "is there?"

But no answer is expected. In Arabic this is called istifhām taqrīrī: the questioner asks in order to bring the one addressed to accept something; the answer is already known, and the one addressed is meant to say it with his own mouth.

English has the same structure: the sentence "That's enough, isn't it?" asks for no information; it asks for assent.

The assent here is this: yes, there is an oath in this.

But choosing the form of a question has a cost and a gain. Its cost: certainty is suspended to a degree. Its gain: the one addressed is made a partner in the decision. Had a ruling been stated ("in this there is a mighty oath"), the listener's task would have been to accept it. When a question is asked, his task becomes to look.

The word qasam has been read here in two senses:

The two readings do not exclude one another and come out at the same place in practice: the acceptance that the dawn, the ten nights, the even and the odd, and the travelling night are weighty enough to be sworn by.

To see this something is needed — and the verse names that thing.

Root: ح-ج-ر. And this root is the most instructive word of the sūra.

The best-known derivative of the word is حَجَر (ḥajar) — stone. But the root's essential idea is not stone: to prevent, to hold back, to turn away, to draw a boundary. The stone is a member of this family because the stone is what sets a boundary and blocks passage.

Its derivatives show that the root turns around a single idea:

• حِجْر (ḥijr) — forbidden, prevented, made untouchable. In the Qurʾān: "These are untouchable cattle and crops" (al-Anʿām 6/138 — ḥijrun maḥjūr). And: "They say: 'Forbidden, forbidden'" (al-Furqān 25/22 — ḥijran maḥjūrā).
• حَجْر (ḥajr) — in jurisprudence, the restriction of a person's disposal over his property. The word's legal life carries the sense of the root exactly: the person is prevented.
• حُجْرَة (ḥujra) — a room. A place separated and enclosed by a wall. The Turkish hücre (cell) is from this root.
• حِجْر (ḥijr) — the lap. The area enclosed by the arms; the space that holds what is within it and does not let it fall.
• الحِجْر (al-Ḥijr) — the name of the homeland of Thamūd and the name of a sūra. A place enclosed by rocks.

The common idea: to enclose something and prevent it from getting out.

Now we come to what the verse does. Saying "one who has understanding", the verse does not say dhī ʿaql, it says dhī ḥijr — "possessor of a restraint", "possessor of a boundary".

The explanation the lexicographers give is this: the intellect is given this name because it holds its possessor back from doing what he should not do. The intellect is what restrains a person.

This description is interesting in itself. But what is really interesting is that the other word for intellect in Arabic does the same work.

In the section on al-Baqara 2/44 the root ع-ق-ل was taken up, and what was recorded there was this:

The root ʿ-q-l: to bind. The ʿiqāl is the rope tied around a camel's knee so that it will not run off. Arabic has given the intellect this name — that is, the intellect, within the word's own logic, is not a store of knowledge but a bond. What holds a person, reins him in, prevents him from being flung about.

And the conclusion there was this: "you have knowledge, you read, you even teach — but if the knowledge does not bind you, you have not used your intellect. This is the difference between knowing and using the intellect: one is acquiring, the other is being bound."

Now let us set the two words side by side:

Both words describe the intellect not as a capacity but as a power of restraint. One ties the rope, one draws the wall; but the work of both is the same: to prevent a thing from going somewhere other than where it should go.

And the matter is not confined to two words. Let us look at the other words the Qurʾān uses for the intellect:

Four of the five words come directly from a root of holding, binding, preventing or forbidding. Only lubb looks from a different place — and it too says not "capacity" but "what is essential".

I record this finding as an observation about the language and draw from it no claim of cultural superiority; every language's conceptual map comes from its own history, and similar examples can be found in other languages too. What I record is only this: the words Arabic uses for the intellect picture it not as something added but as something that holds back.

The consequence of this, as my own reading, is: in modern language "intelligence" measures a capacity — how fast, how much, how complex. These words measure something else: whether the brake is working. That a person knows a great deal and that he can restrain himself are two separate things, and according to these words the name of the second is intellect.

The verse's choice of this word has a counterpart within the sūra too. The three peoples the sūra will describe were superior in capacity — they raised columns, they carved rock, they founded a kingdom. What was lacking was not capacity. In the eleventh verse what they were will be said: ṭaghaw — they exceeded the limit. That is, their brakes did not hold.

The word in the fifth verse and the verb in the eleventh are exact opposites of one another: one holds the boundary, the other crosses it. I record this as my own reading, but that both words turn around the concept of a boundary is a fact standing in the text.

The last word of the verse sets a condition: li-dhī ḥijr — "for one who has ḥijr."

That is, the oath is not an oath for everyone. To look at the dawn, the ten nights, the even and the odd, the travelling night, and to see a weight in them, requires a condition.

This is a structure the Qurʾān often uses. Sūrat al-Baqara does the same work by saying "that Book… is a guidance for those who are mindful" (2/2): the text describes at the outset the person it will be of use to. This is not an exclusion but a statement of condition — and the condition is not an inborn quality but an acquired state.

The verse's being built this way has one further consequence: someone who says "no" to the question has announced not the invalidity of the oath but his own condition. The text deliberately leaves this door open.

In Arabic an oath requires an answer: "By…, it is thus." In Sūrat al-Fajr this answer is not stated openly, and this is one of the oldest grammatical disputes about the sūra.

The solutions put forward:

The second view is the strongest from the point of view of grammar, because the fourteenth verse carries exactly the form the answers of oaths take. I state this as a preference; it is not binding; the first view is also widespread and agrees with the practice elsewhere in the Qurʾān.

Which the answer is does not change the reading of the sūra in any essential way. But it changes this: if the answer is the fourteenth verse, then the whole five-verse series of oaths has been built for a single sentence — and that sentence is where the rest of the sūra rests.