al-ʿĀdiyāt 100:3

Fa'l-mughīrāti ṣubḥā "And by those that raid at morning."

Root: غ-و-ر. إِغَارَة — to come down upon a body of people in a sudden and swift assault. غَارَة — a raid, an incursion.

The word describes not a regular war but a sudden and short-lived assault. We are speaking of the basic unit of the economic and military life of pre-Islamic Arabia: two armies do not meet face to face; one group comes down without warning on another group's flock or camp, takes, and withdraws.

Root: ص-ب-ح. Ṣubḥ — morning, the first light of day. From the same root miṣbāḥ (a lamp, a source of light), ṣabāḥ, iṣbāḥ (in the Qurʾān, fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ, al-Anʿām 6/96).

In grammar ṣubḥan is an adverb of time: it states the hour of the raid.

Why the morning? There is a concrete military logic to this, and it is historically sound:

• The cover of night is needed for the approach, the light of morning for the blow. One travels by night and comes up on the target silently; but if the assault is made in the dark the target cannot be made out and you do harm to your own men.
• Morning is the moment at which a camp is least defended. The watch ends, people are asleep or newly woken, the animals have not yet been gathered.

In reports found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim it is transmitted that when the Prophet mounted an expedition against a people he did not attack before morning came, that he waited until morning and listened for whether the call to prayer could be heard, and that if he heard the call he desisted. This report shows two things at once: that the morning raid was the standard practice of the period, and that a limit was set to that practice.

This must be recorded, because it prepares the later direction of the sūra:

In Arabic the verb صَبَّحَ means "to come upon someone in the morning", and it mostly describes a hostile coming. And the Qurʾān uses this verb in the accounts of destruction:

• "And in the morning an abiding punishment came upon them." (al-Qamar 54/38)
• "The blast seized them as they entered upon the morning." (al-Ḥijr 15/83; similarly 15/66)
• "You pass by them in the morning, and by night." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/137-138)

That is, in the Qurʾān's own telling the morning is the hour of the punishment. The hour of the raid and the hour of destruction are one and the same hour.

This lays a silent layer beneath the third verse: the scene sworn by stands like a small rehearsal of the day that is to be told of after the oath. I record this as a reading, not as something transmitted.