al-Dukhān 44:22

Fa-daʿā rabbahu anna hāʾulāʾi qawmun mujrimūn

"Then he called upon his Lord: 'These are a guilty people.'"

Fāʾ conveys succession without interval (fāʾu't-taʿqīb); it was treated in al-Wāqiʿa.

In the twenty-first verse the last demand is made, and in the twenty-second the text passes straight to the calling. In between neither an answer nor a waiting is described.

I record this as an observation about word order: the text does not narrate the refusal — it skips the refusal. We understand it from its consequence.

The concrete sense: to call out, to summon. Duʿāʾ — a call; dāʿī — one who calls; daʿwa.

And the root has two branches in Arabic: to call to someone and to ask for a thing. Both issue from the idea of "calling" — what is asked for is in a manner called for.

The sūra uses this root twice, and both its branches:

I record this as a verifiable repetition within the sūra.

And here is the most striking place in the verse.

A prayer is made — but the content of the prayer is not a request, it is a report.

"These are a guilty people." The sentence ends there. There is no demand: their destruction is not asked for, their deliverance is not asked for, nothing is asked for.

Let us compare it with other examples of prayer in the Qurʾān:

I present this as my own reading, and its ground is the wording of the three verses: here the prayer is in the form of a report. The messenger states the situation and leaves the verdict.

And the form of the answer supports this reading: the answer that comes in the next verse is not a command to destroy but a command to march — fa-asri bi-ʿibādī.

In Nūḥ Noah's prayer was treated; the difference between the long demand there and the one-sentence report here agrees with the difference in how the two stories are told.

The concrete sense is given by the lexicographers thus: jarama — to cut a thing, to pluck it off; particularly to pluck fruit from the branch (jarama'n-nakhla). From this jurm — an evil thing acquired, an offence committed.

The logic of the root is worth recording: an offence is named as the plucking of a thing from its place. One who plucks the fruit before its time has broken an order.

And mujrim is an active participle — not a single act but an attribute.

The sūra uses this root twice, and both in the same pattern:

And twelve verses apart there are two more sentences built with the same demonstrative:

The first two words of the two sentences are the same: إِنَّ هَٰؤُلَاءِ. One about a community of the past, the other about the community present at the sūra's revelation.

I present this as my own reading, and its ground is the wording of the two verses: hāʾulāʾi is a demonstrative indicating what is near. The sūra points to a far-off people and to a nearby people with the same pronoun of nearness. The distance between the story and the present, that is, is removed in the language.