وَٱلْعَصْرِ
The وَ (wāw) at the head is not a conjunction here but the particle of oath — the particle used in Arabic when one says waʾllāhi. It puts the noun after it in the genitive (al-ʿaṣri) and loads the sentence with the sense "I swear that…".
The function of an oath in language is not to give information but to reinforce it. You can state a piece of news as it is; when you state it under oath you have told the one addressed something further: I am not opening this for debate, I stand behind it. The classical books of rhetoric divide a statement into three kinds according to the condition of the one addressed — a person with no knowledge of the matter is given the bare statement, a person with doubts is given it with one reinforcement, and a person who denies it with heavy reinforcement. Sūrat al-ʿAṣr has the oath, and inna, and the lām. The one addressed, then, is not someone ready to accept what is about to be said; he is someone who will object.
In this sūra the oath is sworn by something created: by time. There are many like it in the Qurʾān — the sun, the moon, the night, the morning, the fig, the olive, the pen, the star, the city, the soul. Human beings, by contrast, are forbidden this: it is reported that the Prophet said, "Whoever would swear, let him swear by God, or else keep silent" (al-Bukhārī and Muslim, from Ibn ʿUmar). The servant may swear only by God; God swears by whatever He wills.
First — magnification (taʿẓīm). To swear by a thing is to announce that the thing matters. When God swears by something He has created, He has drawn attention to it, put it on the agenda. On this reading part of the message is already in the sentence "waʾl-ʿaṣr" itself: look at time.
Second — a relation of evidence. A link is sought between the thing sworn by and the thing said under oath. Time, that is, is the witness that man is in loss. This explanation works extraordinarily well in this sūra: time is the living proof that something is continually going out of a person's hands. The oath itself becomes the evidence for the ruling. This is also the reading I find strongest; but it is a preference, and it is not binding.
Third — speaking in the language of the one addressed. The Arab held an oath to be a weighty thing; to object to what was said under oath was shameful. The revelation is using the addressee's own habit of speech.
Fourth — the assumption of an unexpressed construct. Some scholars hold that in every oath sworn by a created thing there is an unspoken word: "By the Lord of time." This view is a minority one and has been judged weak, because the Qurʾān repeats these oaths in dozens of places and in none of them does such a construct appear openly. It is still worth recording, because the anxiety behind it is serious: the anxiety that reverence shown to a created thing may turn into worship of a created thing.
The concrete, tangible sense of the root ع-ص-ر in Arabic is to press — to squeeze a thing in the hand or in an instrument so that the liquid inside it comes out. To press grapes, to press olives, to wring a wet cloth until the water runs out.
- عَصِير (ʿaṣīr) — pressed liquid. This is still the word for fruit juice in Arabic today.
- مِعْصَرَة (miʿṣara) — the instrument of pressing; a wine-vat, a press, an oil-press.
- إِعْصَار (iʿṣār) — a whirling storm, a whirlwind. A wind that twists the air and compresses it towards a point. It occurs in the Qurʾān: the disaster that burns a man's garden to ashes is so named (al-Baqara 2/266).
- ٱلْمُعْصِرَات (muʿṣirāt) — in Sūrat al-Nabaʾ, the things from which rain is sent down (al-Nabaʾ 78/14). The exegetes differ over whether these are the clouds or the winds, but the word itself speaks of compression, of pressing: that which is compressed and about to release its load.
- Twice in the story of Joseph (Yūsuf): the dream of his fellow prisoner — "I see myself pressing wine" (Yūsuf 12/36) — and the good news of the year of plenty — "In that year the people will be given rain, and in that year they will press" (Yūsuf 12/49).
From the same root, and in the same lexical entry, comes also the sense of time: ʿaṣr = a time, the age (dahr), an epoch; and specifically the hour of the afternoon. The classical dictionaries do not split these two senses into separate entries; they give them side by side.
Care is needed here: not all the lexicographers draw this link in the same way, and some think it unnecessary to draw at all. The explanation repeated in the dictionaries is this: ʿaṣr is the hour towards the end of the day when the shadows lengthen and the daylight begins to narrow, to be compressed — the day is being pressed as it gives up its remaining light. That the word should have widened from here to time in the absolute seems plausible.
To this one thing may be added — and I must state plainly that this is an inference of mine, not a classical report: time does to a person what a press does to grapes. It passes over him, presses him as it passes, draws something out of him with each pressing, and leaves the pulp behind. A lifespan is the fruit being pressed. What comes out cannot be put back. This reading joins the second verse of the sūra in a surprising way: what is pressed must necessarily diminish — and the name of that diminution is khusr, that is, loss.
I offer this as a fine point, not as a ruling. But it is a possibility lying ready in the root itself; it is not an invention.
A point not to be confused: the word عُسْر (ʿusr), meaning "hardship, difficulty" — the ʿusr of the verse in Sūrat al-Inshirāḥ, "with every hardship there is ease" — is from a different root (ʿayn-sīn-rāʾ). ʿAṣr is ʿayn-ṣād-rāʾ. In transliteration the two look alike, and they are sometimes confused with one another. There is no etymological kinship between them.
Because the range of meaning the word carries is wide, the exegetes differ. The views and the grounds on which they rest:
| View | What it means | Ground | Its weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time in the absolute / dahr (the majority) | All time, time as it flows | One of the primary senses of the word in the dictionary; there is no indication in the sūra that narrows it; it relates directly to the following verse (loss/depletion) | — |
| The afternoon hour / the afternoon prayer | The last portion of the day, or the prayer performed at that hour | That ʿaṣr is the proper name of that hour; the reports about the merit of the afternoon prayer | There is no indication in the sūra pointing to prayer; the definite article here may be generic |
| The age of the Prophet | The period of the message | An oath is sworn by what is noble; the noblest period is the one in which the revelation came down | There is no sign in the text indicating this; the restriction is left without evidence |
| The daytime, or the night and the day | Time in its divided state | That the Qurʾān swears elsewhere by the night and the day | An analogy with oaths in other sūras is not evidence here |
The preference of the majority is the first, and its ground is strong: the word has come absolute, not annexed to anything, not delimited. Moreover this reading sits within the sūra's own inner logic — time is the witness, because loss takes place within time.
What can be said for the afternoon view. At first sight this view looks forced, but one side of it gives pause: the link between the afternoon and loss is already established in the hadith literature. It is reported that the Prophet said of the person who misses the afternoon prayer that "it is as though he had been bereft of his family and his property" (al-Bukhārī and Muslim). The language of loss is already attached to the hour of the afternoon. This does not prove the afternoon view; but it makes intelligible where the view came from.
This too should be added: the views do not exclude one another. When the word is read as time in the absolute, the afternoon is already inside it. The narrowing views may be taken to have selected one instance from the wide sense.
That an oath is sworn by time says that time is not neutral. What is sworn by is a witness; and a witness recounts what it has seen. This stands directly against the understanding that takes time for an empty vessel: here time is not a volume to be filled but a witness that keeps a record.
The second point is more concrete: the sense of "pressing" in the root says something about the direction of time. A press works in one direction only. The liquid pressed out of the fruit does not go back in. What physics calls the arrow of time — the irreversibility of processes — looks towards the same place as the intuition this word carries. I record this not as a claim of miracle but as a conceptual overlap; the word is not announcing a law of physics, but it does record the oldest observation human beings have made about time: it cannot be taken back.