al-Dhāriyāt 51:46

Wa qawma Nūḥin min qabl; innahum kānū qawman fāsiqīn "And before them the people of Noah. They were a people who had strayed from the way."

And there is a break in the grammar.

Three narratives had opened with wāw + fī: wa fī Mūsā, wa fī ʿĀdin, wa fī Thamūda. The fourth is different: وَقَوْمَ نُوحٍ — there is no fī, and the word is in the accusative (qawma, not qawmin).

The grammarians resolve this accusative in two ways:

Both views arrive at the same result: the sentence no longer conveys "a sign", it conveys a verb directly.

And the meaning of the break may be this: the first three narratives were presented as "in … too there is" — that is, as a list of proofs. The fourth is added to the list but stands outside the pattern, and so the list closes.

I record this as an observation about the structure; the grammarians' solutions were given above and both have been defended in the classical sources.

The people of Noah are among the peoples most often recounted in the Qurʾān — a whole sūra (71, Nūḥ) is given to it, and it was treated in this commentary.

Here, one verse. Indeed the event itself is not recounted at all: no flood, no ark, no span of time. Only a judgement: kānū qawman fāsiqīn.

And the order is meaningful: the five narratives shorten fast — from fourteen verses to one.

The structure of "ending by narrowing" recorded in the section on al-Mursalāt is at work here within a single section: the list closes by accelerating.

And the qualification min qabl corrects the sequence. Noah is before all those enumerated; he has been put last in the list. The list, that is, is not chronological.

This shows that the list is not a telling of history: the examples are arranged not by order of time but by some other logic. Without imposing a preference I can record this much: the example put last is the oldest — and so the list closes not "from nearest to farthest" but the other way about.

Root: ف-س-ق. And the concrete sense of the root corrects the word's present-day use.

The proper sense the lexicographers record: فَسَقَتِ ٱلرُّطَبَةُ — the date came out of its skin. Fisq, that is, is a thing's coming out of its own skin, its own husk.

From the same root fāsiq — one who comes out, who spills beyond.

And this shows where the word sits: fisq is not "committing a sin"; it is going outside the order one is in. A date that comes out of its skin spoils — it is left unprotected.

The Qurʾān uses the word over a wide field, and its centre is always this: going outside a limit.

And in the last verses of the sūra its opposite will come: the fifty-sixth verse will say what man and jinn were created for. An order will be described, that is. The fāsiq is the one who goes outside that order.

I record this as a link between the words.