فَكَذَّبُوهُ فَعَقَرُوهَا فَدَمْدَمَ عَلَيْهِمْ رَبُّهُم بِذَنۢبِهِمْ فَسَوَّىٰهَا
Fa-kadhdhabūhu fa-ʿaqarūhā fa-damdama ʿalayhim Rabbuhum bi-dhanbihim fa-sawwāhā "So they gave him the lie and hamstrung her. Then their Lord came down upon them for their sin and levelled it."
In Arabic this letter conveys coming immediately after. Thumma (then) puts time in between; fāʾ does not.
The verse gives the chain of cause and effect in a single breath. And the first two links of the chain belong to man, the last two to God. The symmetry is even: two verbs they did, two verbs were done to them.
There is a matter of sound as well: all four of the verbs are of the same pattern and begin with fa. Read aloud, the verse is heard to accelerate. The longest verse of the sūra is at the same time the fastest-read.
Root: ع-ق-ر. The concrete sense of the word is lost when it is rendered simply "they slaughtered her".
ʿAqara'l-baʿīra — to cut the leg tendons of a camel. This is not killing the camel directly; it is a work done in order to bring her down. A large animal cannot be slaughtered standing; first its leg is disabled, the animal collapses, then its throat is cut.
The sense of barrenness is not a piece of side information here. What was cut down was a female camel — a being that bred, that gave milk, that multiplied. The root of the verb that cut her down means, at the same time, "barren". What Thamūd did is recorded, within the word itself, as the stopping of reproduction.
And this looks to the same place as the verb dassā (to bury) in the first half of the sūra: both are the keeping of what would have grown from growing. The man who buries his soul and the people who hamstring the she-camel are doing the same work at different scales.
The lexicons give the root thus: damma'l-shayʾa — to plaster over a thing, to cover it, to overlay it. Covering over the mouth of a well or a grave with earth is described with this verb. Damdama is the doubled form, and in Arabic doubling conveys force and repetition: to cover layer upon layer, to heap up over and over, to overlay entirely and destroy.
The senses given to the word gather within this frame: it came down upon them, it closed over them, it enveloped them all at once and destroyed them.
عَلَيْهِمْ — "upon them". The particle indicates something coming from above downward. Not from the side, from over the top.
There is an overlap here worth recording: damdama means to cover over. In the fourth verse of the sūra yaghshā (it covered) was said of the night; in the tenth dassā was said of the man who buries his soul. Now damdama is said of the destruction. Three separate roots, one single idea: covering over the top.
And the sequence gives one pause — I write this as my own reading: the people that covered its own soul is covered over. What they did is done to them. The punishment is the deed itself, enlarged.
Root: ذ-ن-ب. And the concrete sense of this root is of interest: ذَنَب (dhanab) — a tail. Dhanūb — the tail portion; istadhnaba — he attached himself behind someone.
That the word dhanb (sin) comes from this root is explained thus: a sin is a deed that drags something behind it. It has a tail; it has a train. Not a thing done and finished but a thing that draws a consequence after it.
This is exactly what the verse says: bi-dhanbihim — because of their sin. The bāʾ here is causal. The destruction is not an arbitrary punishment; it is the tail of the deed.
Its coming in the singular. The word is not dhunūbihim (their sins) but dhanbihim (their sin) — singular. This may be the singular used to denote a kind; but on one reading what is meant is a single sin: the hamstringing of the she-camel. This reading fits the text, since the verse had already named that deed.
And that one sin should suffice to wipe out a people says something about the character of that sin. What was cut down was not an animal; it was a word that had been given.
سَوَّى. It had occurred in the seventh verse: "wa nafsin wa mā sawwāhā" — "and by the one who ordered it". Now the same verb comes again, in the same form, with the same pronoun.
| Verse | Verb | Object | Sense |
|---|---|---|---|
| 91/7 | sawwāhā | The soul | He brought its parts into balance, made it complete and fitting |
| 91/14 | sawwāhā | Their dwellings / themselves | He levelled it to the ground, made it flat |
The sense of the root is the same in both: to make equal, to make level. What changes is what is made level.
The same verb is used both in building a structure and in tearing it down, because both are a "levelling": in the one the parts are ordered so as to come out even with one another, in the other everything is brought level with the ground.
Its function within the sūra: the sūra is saying that the power which balances man is the same as the power which levels the one who breaks the balance. The giver and the taker are one. The sawwā of the seventh verse is a favour; the sawwā of the fourteenth is a judgement; and there is no contradiction between them — two faces of the same principle of order.
The Qurʾān uses the same verb in describing the Resurrection as well: "On that day… they will wish that the earth were levelled over them (tusawwā bihimu'l-arḍ)" (al-Nisāʾ 4/42). Levelling again.
| View | Sense | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| To their dwellings / their cities | He levelled their dwellings to the ground | The object most fitting the sense "to level" of the verb sawwā is a place; and the expression "upon them" calls a settlement to mind |
| To the people (the community) | He made them all equal — great and small, woman and man, He brought them to the same end without distinction | The sense of sawwā as "to make equal"; the punishment's setting no one apart |
| To the she-camel / to the community | A view rarely found | Weak |
The first two views both fit the text and do not exclude one another. The second has a force of its own: making equal means, on the first reading, a favour (the balancing of the soul), and on the second a judgement (the setting of everyone at the same end). And this closes the matter of the singular agent in the twelfth verse: the deed was done by one man, but the outcome made everyone equal.