al-Zilzāl 99:7-8

Fa-man yaʿmal mithqāla dharratin khayran yarah · Wa man yaʿmal mithqāla dharratin sharran yarah "Whoever does a mote's weight of good will see it; and whoever does a mote's weight of evil will see it."

The two best-known and most often repeated verses of the Qurʾān. It is transmitted that in the tradition these two verses together are called "al-āya al-jāmiʿa" (the comprehensive verse).

Let us look at the structure first. Between the two verses a single word differs:

Four of the five elements are the same; one differs. And the one that differs stands exactly in the middle.

Now look at this table once more: two pans of equal length, a measure of equal weight, and, as the only difference, what is placed inside. The structure of the two verses is a balance.

I record this not as a transmitted report but as a reading I draw from the form of the two verses. But this must be added: two sūras later, in al-Qāriʿa, the balance will come openly onto the stage, and there too two pans will come before us in two sentences identical to each other (fa-ammā man thaqulat mawāzīnuh… wa ammā man khaffat mawāzīnuh). Two sūras build the same structure twice.

Root: ث-ق-ل — the same root as athqāl in the second verse of the sūra.

Mithqāl is on the mifʿāl pattern; in Arabic this pattern mostly forms nouns of instrument and of measure (miftāḥ — a key, mīzān — a balance, mikyāl — a measuring vessel). Mithqāl — the value of a thing on the scales, a quantity of weight.

The sequence of the sūra is this:

• Verse 2: the earth brings out its أَثْقَال — the heaviest loads it can carry.
• Verses 7-8: the reckoning is conducted by the مِثْقَالُ ذَرَّة — the smallest weight that can be weighed.

The same root, at two extremes, across eight verses. The sūra uses the word "weight" first for the heaviest loads in the world and then for the smallest thing a human being can imagine. The scale changes, the unit does not.

The most disputed word of the sūra, and the word most often misused in the modern period.

Root: ذ-ر-ر. Beneath the root lies the sense to scatter, to sprinkle, to disperse: dharra'l-ḥubūb — he scattered the grains. From the same root comes ذُرِّيَّة (dhurriyya — lineage, offspring); some of the lexicographers explain this link by "the scattering and spreading of a lineage", while others attach dhurriyya to another root. I do not enter into this disagreement.

The explanations transmitted concerning what the word answers to in the classical language:

What these explanations have in common is that the word announces not so much the name of an object as a limit: there is nothing smaller than this. In the Arabic language, the last step of smallness.

Here one must speak plainly.

In modern Arabic the word ذَرَّة is used as the equivalent of "atom": al-ṭāqa al-dharriyya — atomic energy, al-qunbula al-dharriyya — the atomic bomb. In English too the word is regularly rendered "atom" in translations of this verse.

This equivalence was given to the word afterwards. As scientific terms were being carried over into Arabic in the twentieth century, the existing word meaning "the smallest particle" was chosen as the counterpart of the new concept. In the search for an equivalent of the Greek atomos (indivisible), the word that already meant "the smallest" in the language was taken. This is a normal operation of term-coining and happens continually in languages.

To say that this verse speaks of the atom is to read a later-given term back into the text. The verse does not speak of physics; it speaks of the smallest weight its hearers knew.

The rule laid down by the method (Method) holds here exactly: no hunting for scientific miracles. Nor am I hunting for any.

And this must be added: the force of the verse has no need of this claim in any case. The verse does not rest on how small a mote physically is; it rests on its being the smallest thing a human being can imagine. For the first hearers this was the young of an ant; today it may be something else. The function of the measure stays the same: even the smallest quantity you can bring to mind is inside the reckoning.

Indeed the Qurʾān does the same work with another word as well: "Even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, and be within a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth, God will bring it forth" (Luqmān 31/16). There the unit is a mustard seed. The Qurʾān's concern is not a particular particle but that the smallest thing should not fall outside the record.

Both words are in the accusative, and the grammarians differ over their parsing:

• A specifier (tamyīz) — the distinguishing element that removes the vagueness in mithqāla dharra: "a mote's weight — of the kind that is good".
• A substitute (badal) or an explicative apposition (ʿaṭf al-bayān) — an element that explains mithqāl.
• A circumstantial qualifier (ḥāl) — it states a condition.
• The object of an elided verb: yaʿmal ʿamalan khayran.

No practical difference in meaning arises. What is worth recording is this: good and evil stand here in the position of the substance being weighed. What is placed in the pan is not intention or character but the deed itself.

The key word of the sūra, and the place most easily passed over.

The verse could have said the following and does not:

• yujzā bihī — he receives its recompense / he is requited for it
• yusʾal ʿanhu — he is questioned about it
• yajiduhu — he finds it

It says يَرَهُ: he sees it.

And this agrees exactly with the preceding verse: "so that their deeds may be shown to them." The sūra declared seeing in the sixth verse and applies it one by one in the seventh and eighth. The same root (ر-أ-ي) three times in three verses.

The disagreement of the exegetes:

The first view is the closest to the plain sense of the word and is directly connected to the sixth verse of the sūra. I prefer this reading; it is not binding.

And the preference has a consequence. If the verse really does say "he sees", then the first layer of the punishment is the seeing itself. Before the recompense comes as an operation applied to the person from outside, it comes as the person's watching what he himself did.

This works in both directions. For evil: a person sees, as it is, from outside, the thing he had forgotten or made light of or thought himself justified in. For good: a person sees the thing he does not remember, did not enter in any record, the thing of which he said "is that anything?".

By not using two separate verbs — by saying "he sees it" for both — the verse preserves this symmetry.

A note on the variant reading. It is transmitted that the verb is also read in the passive: يُرَهُ — "it is shown to him". This reading agrees exactly with li-yuraw (so that they may be shown) in the preceding verse and strengthens the meaning: the person is not looking, it is being shown to him. Since I cannot state with certainty to which imām it belongs, I give no name; that the reading is transmitted has been recorded.

To escape the reckoning of deeds, man has used two sentences throughout history, and these two verses close both at once:

The first sentence: "What use is so small a good?" — This is the most widespread way of escaping from doing good, and it requires no ill will; it is merely an error of measurement. A person compares his own contribution with the size of the problem and finds it meaningless.

The second sentence: "What harm does so small an evil do?" — The reverse of the same error of measurement. A person compares his own harm with the sum of harm in the world and finds it negligible.

The logic of both sentences is the same: to measure the value of an act by its proportion within a total. The verse invalidates this way of measuring. What is placed in the pan is not a proportion but a quantity; and there is no lower limit to quantity.

Concerning this measure, it is transmitted in a well-known hadith found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim that the Prophet said, "Guard yourselves against the Fire, even with half a date." The idea the report carries is the idea of the verse: that there is no threshold.

There is one further point to be noticed, and it is important:

The verse does not say "the one who believes" or "the one who disbelieves". It says مَن (whoever) — the particle of condition, in its most general form.

That is, the ruling has been attached not to the person's identity but to his act. This is the textual counterpart of the principle recorded in this commentary's method (Method): what the verses describe are attributes, and whoever bears that attribute is included in them.

A theological debate has been conducted over these two verses throughout history: what is the standing in the world to come of a good deed done by someone who does not believe? The relation of deeds to faith is taken up in other verses of the Qurʾān, and the matter is not confined to these two verses. The detail of the debate goes beyond the limits of this section; the only thing I record here is that there is no note of identity in the wording of these two verses.

The construction mithqālu dharra occurs in several places in the Qurʾān, and each time it does the same work — the impossibility of falling outside the record:

• "God does not wrong by so much as a mote's weight; and if there is a good deed He multiplies it." (al-Nisāʾ 4/40). The same unit, in the context of justice.
• "Not a mote's weight escapes Him, neither in the heavens nor in the earth." (Sabaʾ 34/3; the like of it at Yūnus 10/61). The same unit, in the context of knowledge.
• "And We set up the scales of justice for the Day of Resurrection; no soul is wronged in the least. Even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, We bring it forth." (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/47). This verse joins two sūras: it contains both al-Zilzāl's dharra and al-Qāriʿa's mawāzīn.

The last verse is especially important, because it shows that the link we have framed between al-Zilzāl and al-Qāriʿa already exists within the Qurʾān: the measure of the mote and the balance occur in the same sentence.