وَءَايَةٌ لَّهُمُ ٱلَّيْلُ نَسْلَخُ مِنْهُ ٱلنَّهَارَ فَإِذَا هُم مُّظْلِمُونَ
"A sign for them too is the night: We strip the day off it; and all at once there they are, left in darkness."
The concrete sense of the root belongs to the butcher's trade, and the lexicographers record this without hesitation:
- سَلَخَ الشَّاةَ — he flayed the sheep, separated the skin from the carcass.
- سَلَّاخ — a flayer, a butcher.
- مَسْلُوخ — flayed.
- سَلَخَ الشَّهْرُ — the month came to its end, ran out (the same picture: a husk being drawn off to the last).
- إِنْسِلَاخ — a snake's sloughing of its skin.
The sentence is built thus: al-laylu — the night is the sign. Naslakhu minhu'n-nahār* — the day is what we strip off it.
| Element | Role |
|---|---|
| Night | The body — the trunk, the thing stripped |
| Day | What is stripped — the skin, the thing drawn off |
This is a verifiable datum of word order, and it is the reverse of the usual picture. In everyday speech the day is the body and the night is its withdrawal. The verse builds the opposite: the night is the body, and the day is what has been drawn over it and taken off again.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the direction of the verb: in the verb salkh what is drawn off is the skin and what remains is the body. If what remains once the day is drawn off is the night, then what is permanent is the night. And this determines the work of the proof: the one addressed counts the day as the ordinary case; the verse shows the day as something added. To show that what is counted ordinary is temporary is what the sūra has been doing all along.
A note: the Qurʾān recounts the relation of night and day elsewhere with other verbs too — covering, winding, bringing one after the other. The verb Yāsīn chooses is the most concrete of these. I record this as an observation; I do not build a claim that the sūra has made a deliberate choice.
Idhā fujāʾiyya — the second occurrence in the sūra. A table of the six occurrences was given in the section on structure.
مُظْلِمُون — root ظ-ل-م, the active participle of Form IV: those who have entered into darkness. The verb is ascribed to them — not "it grew dark" but "they were left in the dark".
The root ظ-ل-م has occurred in many places in the index (Nūḥ, al-Insān, al-Qalam and others), and the second branch of the root — ẓulm, wrongdoing — was treated there. The lexicographers make the connection as "putting a thing somewhere other than where it belongs"; and darkness is light's not being where it belongs. I transmit this relation as the lexicographers frame it; I do not repeat it here.
And a point of word order must be recorded: the verb muẓlimūn is used of people. The verse, that is, recounts not the darkening of the sky but people's being left in the dark. The sign is not what happens in the sky but what happens to a person.