al-Zilzāl 99:4-5

Yawmaʾidhin tuḥaddithu akhbārahā · bi-anna Rabbaka awḥā lahā "On that day it recounts its reports — because your Lord has revealed to it."

This is the most discussed and the least understood place in the sūra. The two verses must be taken up together, because the second is the ground of the first.

The sūra opened with three "when…" clauses (when it is shaken, when it brings out, when he says). Where is their answer?

The exegetes and the grammarians divide in two:

The first view — the answer is verse 4. "When the earth is shaken… on that day it recounts its reports." On this reading the sentence is complete, and yawmaʾidhin (on that day) carries the answer to the condition.

The second view — the answer has been dropped. "When the earth is shaken, when it brings out, when man says 'what is the matter'… [what things will happen then!]." On this reading verse 4 is a new sentence, and the answer to the condition has been left to the imagination of the one addressed.

The first view is the more widespread and settles more comfortably into the flow of the text. The second view rests on a manner of speech that has its like elsewhere in the Qurʾān — as in Sūrat al-Takāthur, where the answer to the condition "if only you knew with the knowledge of certainty" is left unsaid. We treated that technique in detail there: the one addressed completes the unspoken answer himself, and the answer a person completes himself is always the more effective.

I prefer the first view here, because the adverb yawmaʾidhin naturally attaches to what precedes it. It is not binding.

Root: ح-د-ث. The root's original sense is to be new, to happen, to come about. Ḥādith — what comes into being afterwards, the new. Ḥudūth — coming into being. In the tradition of theology the distinction between qadīm (that which has no beginning) and ḥādith (that which comes into being afterwards) is built from this root; this distinction was touched on in the section on Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ.

From the same root comes حَدِيث, and it carries two senses at once: new ("a new saying") and speech, report, narration. That the two are joined in one word is no accident: a report, by definition, is what is new. A thing already known is not a report.

تَحْدِيث (Form II, tafʿīl) — to recount an event, to convey it, to report it. The choice of the verb is decisive here:

The verse does not say قَالَتْ ("it said"). It does not say نَطَقَتْ ("it spoke"). It does not say شَهِدَتْ ("it bore witness"). It says تُحَدِّثُ — it recounts, it gives its report, it conveys what took place.

The difference is this: "to say" is to frame a sentence; "to recount" is to convey a sequence of events. The work the earth will do is not to make a statement but to transmit, in order, what passed upon it. The word calls to mind not a witness giving testimony but the reading out of a record.

Root: خ-ب-ر. Khabar — the knowledge of a thing, the thing announced. But beneath the root there is a more concrete core: to know a thing by trying it, by looking inside it. From the same root come اِخْتِبَار (trial, testing) and خِبْرَة (knowledge gained by experience).

This is why خَبِير, as one of the names of God in the Qurʾān, is used in the sense of "the one who knows the inner face of the matter"; not merely "the knowing" (ʿalīm) but the one who knows from within.

And this connection is worth recording: the next sūra, al-ʿĀdiyāt, ends with precisely this word. "Surely on that day their Lord is fully aware of them (khabīr)" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/11). In al-Zilzāl the earth gives akhbār; in al-ʿĀdiyāt the Lord is khabīr. Two sūras that come one after the other in the arrangement of the muṣḥaf hold the two ends of the same root: the one that gives the report and the one that already knows the report.

I record this as an observation about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf; it is not a claim about the order of revelation.

The work the pronoun does. The verse does not say "it recounts reports"; it says "its own reports". What are the earth's reports? What took place upon the earth. That is, what you did.

The subtlety here is this: you did it, but the report became its own. The moment an act is performed, it ceases to belong to the one who performs it and passes into the record of the place where it was performed. The verse does not say this as a ruling; it does it by using a pronoun.

The word in the verse that raises the most questions. Was revelation not something that came to prophets?

Root: و-ح-ي. The original sense the lexicographers give: a swift and hidden communication. A transfer of information made by a sign, by a hint, by a route outside speech, which third parties do not notice. There is no "sacredness" at the centre of the word; there is speed and concealment.

The Qurʾān uses this root outside the prophets as well, and the distribution of the usages settles the matter:

• To the bee: "And your Lord revealed to the honeybee: take houses in the mountains, in the trees, and in what they build" (al-Naḥl 16/68).
• To the mother of Moses (Mūsā): "And We revealed to the mother of Moses: suckle him" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/7).
• To the heavens: "And He revealed to each heaven its own command" (Fuṣṣilat 41/12). In point of structure this verse is the closest to the one before us: the revealing, to an inanimate thing, of a matter belonging to it.
• Among the satans, to one another: "They reveal gilded speech to one another in order to deceive" (al-Anʿām 6/121). The clearest proof that the word is neutral.
• To the people of Zechariah (Zakariyyā) by a sign: "And he signalled to them" (Maryam 19/11) — the verb used here is from this root too, and it conveys a communication made without speech.

This distribution shows the following: in the Qurʾān waḥy is the command given to each existing thing in its own language. The revelation that comes to a prophet is the highest and most particular form of this general category; but it is not the whole of the category.

What, then, does "revealing to the earth" mean? The explanations the exegetes give are close to one another: to make known to the earth the permission to speak and the thing it is to speak. The earth had been silent until that day; on that day it is commanded to speak, and it speaks. Some exegetes put it more plainly: God commands the earth, and the earth carries out the command; "revelation" here is the command itself.

A small letter, but one that has been dwelt upon.

In Arabic the verb awḥā is normally used with إِلَى: awḥā ilayhi — he revealed to him. Nearly every one of the verses I listed above has this particle (awḥaynā ilā ummi Mūsā, awḥā Rabbuka ila'n-naḥl).

In this verse, however, لَ (lām) is used: awḥā lahā.

The explanations the grammarians give:

The last possibility looks unimportant at first sight, but it is not: verse 3 ended with "mā lahā"; verse 5 ends with "awḥā lahā". Man's question and God's answer close with the same two syllables. The question was asked as lahā, and the answer was given as lahā.

I record this as an observation about sound; not as a ruling.

The sūra is third-person narration from beginning to end: the earth, man, people. In this verse there is a sudden move to the second person singular: "your Lord."

This is the manner of speech Arabic calls iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address); it was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Humaza, and I do not repeat it here. Its function here has three sides:

One. The narration is cut off all at once and a turn is made to the one addressed (in the first place, to the Prophet). The scene ceases to be a report and becomes an address.

Two. This is the first and only place in the sūra where the agent is named openly. In the first verse the verb was passive, in the second the subject was the earth, in the third it was man. In the fifth verse the curtain lifts.

Three. And the agent is named not by a name but by an attribute: not "Allāh" but "your Lord". Rabb — the one who raises, who nurtures, who watches over and cares for. In the section on al-Fātiḥa we saw that this name carries ownership and nurture together.

That this name should have been chosen in a place where the scene is as hard as this is striking. The power that shakes the earth, opens the graves and makes the ground speak is named not as an alien power but as the one who nurtures.

Now we can come to the real subject: why is the ground a witness?

In the Qurʾān's scenes of the resurrection the theme of witness recurs, and the witnesses are always chosen from unexpected places:

• "Until, when they reach it, their hearing, their sight and their skins bear witness against them concerning what they used to do. And they say to their skins, 'Why have you borne witness against us?' They say, 'God, who gave speech to all things, gave speech to us.'" (Fuṣṣilat 41/20-21)
• "On a day when their tongues, their hands and their feet bear witness against them concerning what they used to do." (al-Nūr 24/24)
• "On that day We set a seal upon their mouths; their hands speak to Us, and their feet bear witness to what they earned." (Yā Sīn 36/65)

The structure common to these verses is this: the witness is the one who was inside the event. The ear bears witness to what it heard, the eye to what it saw, the hand to what it did. Bearing witness is not the work of an observer from outside; it is the work of the one who took part in the event.

Al-Zilzāl adds the ground to this list — and the ground is the most comprehensive member of the list. Because:

The limbs belong to the person, the ground belongs to everyone. The hand bears witness only to what its own owner did. The earth bears witness to everything that takes place upon it.

The limbs cannot be escaped, but the ground cannot be escaped at all. A person can do something without using his hand; but he cannot do anything without being on some piece of ground. Place is the necessary condition of an act.

And the ground is the party nobody takes into account. When the witnesses of an act are counted, the ground is not counted. This is exactly why the verse strikes: the record is being kept in the place nobody is looking at.

On this subject it is transmitted, in a report found in al-Tirmidhī, that after reciting this verse the Prophet asked, "Do you know what the reports of the earth are?", and that when the Companions said, "God and His Messenger know better", he announced that the earth would bear witness against every servant who does a deed upon its back concerning what he did. Al-Tirmidhī transmits this report and records an assessment of it; since I cannot speak with certainty about the state of the chain of transmission, I pass the report on with the record "it is transmitted thus", not as a firm ground.

A modern connection looks tempting here: that a place should carry the trace of events that have passed upon it is the working principle of the forensic sciences today. The traces left at the scene of an incident are described as that place "recounting" the incident; in criminalistics there is even a settled principle used for this — every contact leaves a trace.

I frame this connection as a comparison, not as a claim, and I must draw its limit plainly. The verse does not speak of forensic science; it does not speak of a technique, a method, a discovery. What the verse says is that the earth will be made to speak — that is, not the reading of a trace but the ground's speaking as a witness. The two are not the same thing.

The only work the comparison does is this: the idea of "a place keeping a record" is not foreign to us today, whereas for the first hearers it was an entirely unaccustomed conception. This is why it is in one way easier and in another way harder for the present-day reader to feel the force of the verse.

The rule laid down by the method (Method) holds here: modern information is not fitted onto a verse. Nor am I fitting any; I only point to an intuition the present-day reader already has.