وَمَآ أَدْرَىٰكَ مَا ٱلْحُطَمَةُ
Mā adrāka — literally: "what made you know?" Its meaning: "your knowledge cannot grasp what this is; had you known it, you would have known it from one who made it known."
This pattern is a structure repeated in the Qurʾān, and it shows an interesting regularity. The finding recorded in the classical sources is this:
| Pattern | What happens |
|---|---|
| وما أدراك (perfect) | An explanation follows; the knowledge is given |
| وما يدريك (imperfect) | No explanation follows; the knowledge is not given, it stays hidden |
Examples: "And what made you know what the Night of Qadr is?" (al-Qadr 97/2) — and after it comes an explanation of three verses. "And what made you know what the steep ascent is?" (al-Balad 90/12) — and the explanation comes. Against these: "What will make you know? Perhaps the Hour is near" (al-Shūrā 42/17); "And what will make you know? Perhaps he will purify himself" (ʿAbasa 80/3) — in these no knowledge is given.
In al-Humaza the pattern is the perfect (adrāka), and the rule holds: from the sixth verse on there comes an explanation of four verses.
- Verses 1-4: the third person. Humaza, alladhī, jamaʿa, yaḥsabu, la-yunbadhanna. Someone is being spoken about.
- Verse 5: the second person singular. Adrā-ka — "you". The telling breaks off and turns to the listener.
- Verses 6-9: the telling returns again to depiction in the third person.
This is the manner of speech called iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address) in Arabic, and it is frequently used in the Qurʾān.
Its function here: the telling stops for a moment, the reader or listener is drawn into the scene, and then the telling begins again. The sentence ceases to be a conveying of information and becomes an event.
It has a further function. Up to this point the sūra had been telling of someone else; the reader was watching from a safe distance. The fifth verse removes that distance: what made you know? The man described is still in the third person, but the one addressed is now the reader.
The verse asks a question, but the answer to the question is "you do not know". That is, before giving any knowledge the verse proclaims that knowledge will not be enough.
The four verses of depiction that come after it have to be read together with this proclamation: the depiction is not a definition but a pointing. The sūra describes the thing after having said that the thing cannot be described. The knowledge given is knowledge whose insufficiency has been admitted in advance.
This is another form of the distinction Sūrat al-Takāthur set up between ʿilm al-yaqīn and ʿayn al-yaqīn: knowledge given by report has a limit.