إِنَّ سَعْيَكُمْ لَشَتَّىٰ
1. The oath — the three-verse series. 2. إِنَّ — assuredly. 3. لَ — the lām of emphasis at the head of inna's predicate (what the lexicographers call the "displaced lām"). 4. A nominal sentence — it conveys fixity and permanence.
In al-ʿAṣr we saw that this piling up shows the one addressed to be in the position of a denier. Here there is the same piling up, and what is said is not at first sight anything to be objected to: people's strivings are of course different. Why, then, so much emphasis?
The answer comes out when one looks carefully at what the sentence says. The verse does not say "people do different work". It says "your strivings are separate from one another" — that is, they are not going to the same place. It is this that is being objected to: the thought that everyone is doing something good in his own way, and that in the end they all come out at the same place.
Root: س-ع-ي. Its concrete sense is to walk fast, to go at a pace close to running. The state between walking and running.
From there the word widened in Arabic to mean to strive, to labour, to run after some business — the English "to run after" carries both of these senses, which makes it a good rendering.
- Physical running: "Call the birds, and they will come to you running" (al-Baqara 2/260); "And from the far end of the city a man came running" (Yā-Sīn 36/20; similarly at al-Qaṣaṣ 28/20).
- Striving: "Man shall have only what he has worked for" (al-Najm 53/39); "And whoever wants the hereafter and makes for it the striving it deserves, being a believer…" (al-Isrāʾ 17/19).
- Hastening to a command: "When the call to prayer is made on the day of congregation, hasten to the remembrance of God" (al-Jumuʿa 62/9).
The choice of the word is meaningful. It could have said ʿamal (work), fiʿl (act), kasb (earning). Saʿy was said — that is, a state of being in motion, in haste, after something.
This says something about the sūra's conception of man: man is not a being that stands still but a running being. Everyone is going somewhere. The question is not "are you going?" but "where?"
It joins with the finding in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr: there it was said that time passes without stopping, here it is said that man runs without stopping. The two together establish that there is no neutral position.
Root: ش-ت-ت. Its meaning is to scatter, to separate, to break into pieces. Shatta'l-shayʾu — a thing scattered, came apart from itself.
شَتَّى is the plural of the word shatīt and means "separate from one another, scattered, of many kinds".
"You would think them united, but their hearts are all scattered" (al-Ḥashr 59/14). This verse is the perfect companion of al-Layl 92/4: single from outside, separate within.
"We have brought forth pairs of plants of many kinds (shattā)" (Ṭāhā 20/53).
In Arabic it is not usual for a singular subject to take a plural predicate. The discordance here is deliberate, and it is explained thus: since the word saʿy is a verbal noun it can bear both a singular and a plural sense; the expression "your striving" covers the striving of each one of those addressed, and so is plural in meaning.
But the effect the choice produces is more interesting: the sentence sets "striving" up as one single thing and then breaks it apart. First it joins them with "your striving", then it separates them with "are scattered". A tension that does not carry over fully into English: you are all running, but not in the same direction.
This short sentence lays down the programme for the rest of the sūra. The seventeen verses that follow will show what that "scatteredness" is — and what they will show is not an endless number of directions but two.
The answer is in the verse itself: shattā conveys not multiplicity but separateness. The idea beneath the word is dispersal, not variety. And a thing that disperses can come apart into two pieces as well as into a hundred. The sūra says that hundreds of different ways of living come down in the end to two balances.