al-Shams 91:12

Idhi'nbaʿatha ashqāhā "When the most wretched of them shot forth."

Root: ب-ع-ث. Its primary sense is to raise a thing from its place and send it, to set it in motion. From the same root come baʿth (resurrection — the raising of the dead from their place), baʿatha (He sent a prophet), baʿtha (a detachment, a company sent out).

Here the pattern is decisive. The verb is in the انفعل pattern (Form VII). In Arabic this form conveys muṭāwaʿa: coming under an effect and yielding to that effect. Kasartuhū fa'nkasara — "I broke it, and it broke."

Inbaʿatha, that is, means exactly this: he did not rise of himself; he was raised, and he rose. He was pushed, and he shot forth.

This is a detail easily missed in reading the verse, but it changes the law of the sūra. The sentence does not say "the most wretched of them rose"; it says "the most wretched of them was thrust forward". There is a push behind him.

The Qurʾān shows this push plainly in another sūra:

"They called their companion, and he took [the sword] and hamstrung her" (al-Qamar 54/29).

Here the order of the verbs is clear: first the calling (nādaw — plural), then the hamstringing (ʿaqara — singular). The deed was done by one man, that is, but there was a community that called him.

Now we can come to what looks like an inconsistency within Sūrat al-Shams itself:

• Verse 12: inbaʿatha ashqāhā — singular. One man.
• Verse 14: fa-kadhdhabūhu fa-ʿaqarūhā — plural. They gave him the lie, they hamstrung her.

Who hamstrung the she-camel? By the twelfth verse one man, by the fourteenth all of them.

The classical answer is this, and it is sound: the deed came from the hand of one man, but it was written against everyone who consented. Consent is partnership. Even if a person does not take part in fact, if he approves, the outcome belongs to him too.

The sūra does not merely assert this; it shows it by grammar: the verb of the one who did the deed is in Form VII — that is, it was done "by being pushed". Those who pushed are partners in the crime, because the deed came about by their pushing.

This is the sūra's most contemporary place, and it can be said without forcing: an extreme act appearing within a community is very often the product of that community's average. A crowd does not commit the crime; it produces the person who will commit it and pushes him forward. And then it separates that person from itself: "he is not like us."

The verse does not permit this separating. In the twelfth verse there is one man; in the fourteenth the punishment comes down on all of them.

Root: ش-ق-و / ش-ق-ي. Its sense is wretchedness, unhappiness, being in hardship. Its opposite is saʿāda. Shaqiya — he fell into distress, he became unhappy.

The Qurʾān uses this root for the distinction in the hereafter: "Among them are the wretched (shaqī) and the happy (saʿīd)" (Hūd 11/105).

The pattern: an elative (the afʿal pattern) — "more / most wretched". The annexation here (ashqāhā — "its most wretched") places the word at a degree of superiority within the people: the most wretched of this people.

The choice of the word gives one pause. Of the man who hamstrung the she-camel it could have been said "the most unjust", "the most overstepping", "the most unbelieving". It is not said. "The most wretched" is said — that is, the word looks less to the harm the agent did to another than to what came upon himself.

This is directly connected with the first half of the sūra. There too the verbs turned back upon the soul: zakkāhā, dassāhā — both the one who purified and the one who buried were doing it to his own soul. So here too: the man who hamstrung the she-camel did it, in truth, most of all to himself. The sūra keeps in both its halves the idea that a moral act returns upon the agent.

And there is this too: the word al-ashqā will come again in the next sūra — "None enters that fire but the most wretched" (al-Layl 92/15). This is one of the bridges of vocabulary between the two sūras, and it will be taken up all together at the end.

The verse begins with إِذِ: "when, at that time". This adverb indicates a particular past moment and is attached to the verb kadhdhabat in the preceding verse: the giving of the lie took place at the moment their most wretched shot forth.

The giving of the lie and the hamstringing of the she-camel are not two separate events, that is. The hamstringing is the giving of the lie itself. Thamūd gave the lie not with a word but with a hand.