وَٱلْقَمَرِ إِذَا تَلَىٰهَا
Root: q-m-r. The lexicographers connect the root with whiteness; qamar is the name that carries the brightness around the full moon. Arabic has different names for the phases of the moon (hilāl — the new moon; badr — the full moon); qamar is the general name standing over these.
The Qurʾān makes a careful distinction between the sun and the moon, and the distinction is at the level of the words: "He made the sun a ḍiyāʾ (a light) and the moon a nūr (a brightness)" (Yūnus 10/5); "and made the moon a brightness among them, and made the sun a sirāj (a lamp)" (Nūḥ 71/16). Sirāj is a thing kindled, a thing burning; nūr is diffused brightness. Nowhere does the Qurʾān call the moon sirāj.
There is a side of this that agrees with what is known today — the moon does not produce its own light but reflects what it takes from the sun — but I do not write this down as a claim of miracle. The verse is not doing astronomy. I say only this: two distinct words have been used consistently for the two heavenly bodies, and that choice implies a relation of dependence between them.
Root: t-l-w. Its primary sense is to come after, to go behind, to follow. One camel walking behind another is described with this verb.
The word's second sense, far more frequent in the Qurʾān, is to recite — tilāwa. The link between the two senses is direct: to recite is to range letters one behind another. The person reading a text goes along after the words. From the same root come tālī (following, coming after) and the expression in the Qurʾān "and by those that recite a reminder" (fa'l-tāliyāti dhikrā, al-Ṣāffāt 37/3).
The sentence "the moon talā the sun", that is, is built with a word that can place the moon in the position of the sun's reciter. I record this as an opening for interpretation, not as a classical report: the moon is like one who reads what the sun has written — it says nothing of its own, it passes on what it has received.
| View | What it means | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| It followed the sun (the majority) | The moon comes from where the sun has set, or comes after its light | The nearest feminine noun named is the sun; the moon's light comes after the sun's |
| It followed the sun's forenoon | The moon comes out after the daytime | Ḍuḥāhā stands nearer |
| When the moon is full | The rising of the moon as the sun sets — the moment the two stand facing one another | The only case in which the moon "fully follows" the sun is the full moon |
The third reading has a beauty of its own: only at the full moon does the moon carry the whole of the sun's light. But the text gives no indication that would narrow it in that way; the first is the safest reading.
In the first verse the oath was unqualified: "by the sun and its forenoon." From the second onward إِذَا enters: "by the moon when it follows it". The same qualification continues in the third and the fourth.
The difference is not small. The oath by the sun is unqualified, while the moon, the day and the night are named together with a state. That is, these become the subject of an oath not for themselves but for the work they do. The moon matters in its following, the day in its displaying, the night in its covering.
This prepares in advance what will be said about man at the end of the sūra: the soul too will be weighed not for itself but for what it does.