al-Ṣāffāt 37:13-17

Wa idhā dhukkirū lā yadhkurūn · Wa idhā raʾaw āyatan yastaskhirūn · Wa qālū in hādhā illā siḥrun mubīn · A-idhā mitnā wa kunnā turāban wa ʿiẓāman a-innā la-mabʿūthūn · A-wa ābāʾuna'l-awwalūn

"When they are reminded they do not remember. When they see a sign they seek to make a mockery of it and say, 'this is nothing but plain sorcery'. 'When we are dead and have become dust and bones, are we really to be raised? And our forefathers of old?'"

Five verses build a single movement step by step, and the steps are marked by verbs:

The chain widens from silence to speech, from reaction to claim, from themselves to their forefathers. This is a structure read off the order of the verses.

Root ذ-ك-ر. And the verse uses the same root in two different forms:

• ذُكِّرُوا۟ — Form II, passive: they were reminded. Work coming from outside.
• يَذْكُرُونَ — Form I, active: they remember. Work that must come from inside.

The sentence says this, then: the outer act was performed, the inner response did not form. A negation comes between the two forms of the same root.

And this ties to the third verse. In the third verse what was sworn by was al-tāliyāti dhikrā — "those who recite a reminder". In the thirteenth verse that reminder comes but is not taken. The sūra shows, that is, that what was carried arrived but was not received.

Four occurrences tell a single story, and this is countable from the text. In the hundred and sixty-eighth verse the same people will say "if only a reminder from those of old had come to us" — whereas in the thirteenth verse it had come.

In the twelfth verse it was yaskharūn (Form I); here it is yastaskhirūn (Form X). The difference of pattern carries sense.

In Arabic Form X (استفعال) does three pieces of work:

All three are transmitted by the lexicographers; on which comes forward I issue no firm ruling.

But the increase between the two verses is plain: in the twelfth verse they were mocking; in the fourteenth they mock in the face of a sign. As the proof comes, that is, the reaction hardens. This is a fact read off the order of the verses.

Āya — root أ-ي-ي: a sign, a mark, a proof. The root was analysed in al-Baqara. Its use here is in the direction of "miracle": a sign seen, a sign shown.

In … illā is one of the sharpest moulds of restriction in Arabic: "nothing but". What they say, then, is not a conjecture but a ruling.

Siḥr — root س-ح-ر. The lexicographers give the root's original picture as "to show a thing as other than it is, to turn the eye". From the same root saḥar — the hour before dawn when darkness and light are mixed. At the centre of the root, that is, there is confusion: the state in which one cannot tell what is what.

This accusation is the most widespread accusation levelled at messengers in the Qurʾān, and it was treated at al-Dhāriyāt 51/52 (mā ata'lladhīna min qablihim min rasūlin illā qālū sāḥirun aw majnūn). I rely on that treatment.

The point here must be recorded: mubīn — "plain". Root ب-ي-ن: to separate, to distinguish. Bayān — distinguishing speech.

There is a tension in the sentence, then, and I record it as my own reading: in the root of siḥr there is confusing, in the root of mubīn distinguishing. To say "a plain confusion" is to say a confusion that can be distinguished — that is, "a deception whose being a deception is evident". The choice of words carries the difficulty inside the claim itself. This is an observation; I do not claim that the text intends it.

This sentence occurs twice in the sūra, and between them there is one word of difference. This is a fact that can be verified from the text:

The two words:

• مَبْعُوثُون — root ب-ع-ث: to be sent, to be raised up. Resurrection.
• مَدِينُون — root د-ي-ن: to be called to account, to be requited. The root was analysed in al-Fātiḥa (māliki yawmi'd-dīn).

The same objection, then, rejects two different things: the first the rising, the second the reckoning. And the sūra gives them from two different mouths — one the deniers as a body, one a single person.

I record this as my own reading: at the second occurrence the one who makes the objection is shown in the midst of the fire (55). The sūra shows in the fifty-third verse where the word said in the sixteenth arrives — by repeating the sentence and changing who says it.

Turāb and ʿiẓām. The ground of the objection is the dispersal of matter: dust (formlessness) and bone (dryness). And the eleventh verse had already answered this: min ṭīnin lāzib — from sticky clay. The answer to the question "how is dust to be gathered?" was given five verses earlier: when water is mixed in, it gathers. I record this link as my own reading; the verse does not set it up openly.

The sentence begins with an interrogative particle (a) and a conjunction (wa): a-wa. The grammarians count this as "an attachment to the preceding question": "…we? And our forefathers of old too?"

A point of word order and of variant reading: if ābāʾunā is read in the nominative it attaches to an elided verb yubʿathu or to the noun of innā; the accusative reading (ābāʾanā) is also transmitted, and then it is attached directly to the noun of innā. The sense does not change markedly.

And the logic of the objection must be recorded — as my own reading: by adding the forefathers the objection is enlarged, because more time has passed over them. The argument, that is, is this: "if even the newly dead cannot be gathered, the long dead can never be gathered at all." This is a proof resting on time, and the verse will answer it not with time but with a single sound: fa-innamā hiya zajratun wāḥida (19). The sūra's answer speaks not of the span but of the span's irrelevance.

Al-awwalūn — "those of old". The word will occur twice more in the sūra: 71 (aktharu'l-awwalīn — most of those of old had gone astray) and 168 (dhikran mina'l-awwalīn — a reminder from those of old). All three occurrences are from the mouths of the same side or about them.