al-Balad 90:14

Aw iṭʿāmun fī yawmin dhī masghaba "Or feeding on a day of hunger."

The conjunction states an option: the ascent has two separate doors. One is the freeing of a slave, the other is feeding.

This shows the realism of the verse. Freeing a slave requires great capital; not everyone can do it. Feeding, on the other hand, can be scaled. The sūra is not saying that there is only one expensive way up the ascent.

Root: ط-ع-م. Ṭaʿām — food. The ifʿāl pattern (iṭʿām) is causative: to give to eat, to feed.

I do not repeat the analysis of this word made in Sūrat al-Māʿūn; the two readings of the construct ṭaʿāmi'l-miskīn and the reason for the choice of the expression "not to urge the feeding" were treated there.

There is a difference of threshold here as against al-Māʿūn, and it has to be recorded:

Al-Māʿūn was bringing the threshold down: not giving — is not even urging enough? Al-Balad draws the threshold up: not urging, but the feeding itself. The two sūras take hold of the same matter from its two ends — one showing the minimum bound, the other the target of the climb.

مَسْغَبَة — Root: س-غ-ب. Hunger, going hungry. Sāghib — hungry. In Arabic the word is used particularly for severe and long-lasting hunger; not for daily appetite.

The pattern: مَفْعَلَة (mafʿala). In Arabic this pattern conveys the place or the time in which a thing is found in abundance. Masghaba, that is, is not "hunger" but "the condition in which hunger holds sway".

ذِى — "possessor of". Literally, then: "a day possessed of hunger." The day is qualified as the possessor of the hunger.

This is more than an ordinary qualification. Famine was the most concrete disaster of that country. In a year when the rain did not come the caravans halted, the flocks died, prices soared. The favour of "feeding against hunger" treated in Sūrat Quraysh is precisely against this threat.

And the condition lies here. To feed in a time of plenty is good too, but it is not hard. The verse chooses the day of famine — that is, a time when the giver is himself hungry, when he cannot put anything in the place of what he gives.

Here is where the "ascent" grows steep. To give one meal on a day of famine is harder than to give ten meals on a day of plenty; because what is given is subtracted from the giver's own chance of staying alive.

This explains the whole logic of the sūra: the hardship lies not in the amount of what is given but in the cost at the moment of giving. The man in the sixth verse said "I have spent wealth in heaps" — but he did not say on which day he spent it.