وَٱلَّيْلِ إِذَا سَجَىٰ
1. To come to rest, to settle, to grow calm. The most typical example the dictionaries give is the sea: baḥrun sājin — a sea whose waves have died down and gone flat. In the same way ṭarfun sājin, a gaze grown calm and soft. Beneath the root lies the stopping of movement, the ending of turbulence.
2. To cover, to overspread, to close over. In Arabic, drawing a cloth over a dead body is called tasjiya; this usage is settled. Covering here is not concealing but closing over in order to quieten — like covering a child.
The two senses are not cut off from one another. The night quietens by covering. A cover stills what lies beneath it.
This root does not occur anywhere else in the Qurʾān; it is found in this verse alone. (This finding rests on memory, not on a full search.)
The oath is sworn not by the night but by a state of the night. Idhā denotes a time whose occurrence is certain: "whenever it grows still — then."
The whole of the night, then, is not what is meant. At the beginning of the night movement continues — people return, doors are shut, sounds go on. The growing still is an advanced hour of the night: the moment when everything has settled into place and movement has ended.
The Qurʾān swears by the night in many places, but each time together with a different verb. The verb chosen determines the subject of that sūra:
| Place | Expression | The state chosen |
|---|---|---|
| al-Layl 92/1 | idhā yaghshā | When it enshrouds — covering, overspreading |
| al-Muddaththir 74/33 | idh adbara | When it turns its back — withdrawal |
| al-Takwīr 81/17 | idhā ʿasʿasa | When it draws on / when it withdraws |
| al-Fajr 89/4 | idhā yasri | When it journeys on — flowing away |
| al-Shams 91/4 | idhā yaghshāhā | When it enshrouds the sun |
| al-Inshiqāq 84/17 | wa mā wasaqa | Together with what it gathers |
| al-Ḍuḥā 93/2 | idhā sajā | When it grows still — settling into calm |
What the table shows is this: when the Qurʾān names the night it names not its darkness but the work the night does. And the work chosen in this sūra is the bringing to stillness.
At first glance the two oaths look like an opposition: day and night, light and darkness. In the Qurʾān that opposition really is set up — the first two verses of Sūrat al-Layl are exactly that: "By the night when it enshrouds, and by the day when it shines forth" (al-Layl 92/1-2). There one covers and the other uncovers; the contrast is clear.
Because the words chosen do not set up a contrast. Ḍuḥā is light in its settled, quietened state — neither the indistinctness of dawn nor the violence of noon. The sājī night is darkness in its settled, quietened state — neither the bustle of evening nor the shiver at the middle of the night.
Both oaths, then, are sworn by the same thing: by stillness. One a lit stillness, the other a dark stillness.
Its relation to the subject of the sūra is direct. The situation the addressee is in is a silence: the revelation has stopped, no voice is coming. And silence is the emptiness a person fills fastest with the worst interpretation. By swearing, the sūra does this: it redefines the silence itself.
The darkness of the night is not the cancelling of the day. The cutting off of light does not mean that light has ended. Night is not an absence but a part of an order; and within that order the night has a stillness of its own. This is the bond between the thing sworn by and the thing said under the oath: both states are God's, and both are repose.
This reading rests on the view that the oath establishes a "relation of evidence" (the grounds for that view were taken up in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr). It is not a binding preference; but it is the reading that works most consistently with the rest of the sūra.
One further note: the oath begins with ḍuḥā and continues with the night — that is, the order runs from light to darkness. This is also the order the addressee lived: first the revelation came, then it was cut off. The sūra follows the order of the addressee's own experience.