al-Shams 91:3 commentary

91/3

وَٱلنَّهَارِ إِذَا جَلَّىٰهَا

Wa'n-nahāri idhā jallāhā "And by the day when it displays it."

جَلَّى — to bring out into the open

Root: j-l-w. Its concrete sense is to polish, to burnish, to clear a surface of rust and dirt so that it becomes visible. In Turkish the borrowed word cila — "polish" — comes from this root. Jalā'l-sayfa — he burnished the sword, that is, he lifted the layer on it and brought its real surface out.

Two directions open from here:

To open, to bring out. Tajallī — a thing's becoming visible. In the Qurʾān: "When his Lord manifested Himself to the mountain, He broke it to pieces" (al-Aʿrāf 7/143).
To drive out, to remove, to send away. Jalāʾ — exile. In the Qurʾān: "Had God not decreed exile for them…" (al-Ḥashr 59/3).

The two directions are in fact one work: to bring a thing out you must remove what lies over it.

The pattern matters. The verb is in the تَفْعِيل pattern (Form II), that is, transitive and intensified: not merely "it opened" but "it opened and went on opening, it brought it fully out". This form very often conveys the repetition or the force of the act.

This has to be compared with its counterpart in Sūrat al-Layl, because the difference is meaningful: there the same root comes as تَجَلَّى (Form V) — "wa'n-nahāri idhā tajallā" (al-Layl 92/2). Form V is reflexive: "it opened itself, it came out." In al-Shams the day brings something out into the open; in al-Layl the day itself comes out. Al-Shams points to an object, al-Layl does not. This is the first sign that the two sūras are looking at different places.

جَلَّىٰهَا — what does it bring out?

Again there is disagreement, and again it needs to be given in a table:

View	Reading	Ground	Its difficulty
The sun	The day makes the sun visible	The nearest feminine noun	In fact the sun produces the day, not the reverse — this objection is answered thus: the advance of the day is what makes the sun fully visible
The earth / the world	The day lights up the earth and makes everything visible	The sense becomes the most natural; and al-arḍ occurs in a later verse of the sūra	The referent of the pronoun has not yet been named
The darkness	The day removes the darkness (with the sense of jalā as "removing")	The second sense of the root lends itself to this	Darkness is not named in the text

All three come out in the same place: the day is what lifts the covering. Whatever the referent of the pronoun, the work of the verse does not change. The disagreement has to be recorded, but it is not worth enlarging.