al-Dhāriyāt 51:47

Wa'l-samāʾa banaynāhā bi-aydin wa innā la-mūsiʿūn "And the sky — We built it with power; and We are indeed possessed of vast means."

One of the verses of this sūra — and perhaps of the whole Qurʾān — most exploited in the modern period. For this reason three separate tasks have to be done here: first to set out honestly the word order and the lexical sense of the words, then to report what the classical exegetes understood, and then to write out, with its grounds, the position taken towards the modern claim.

I apply exactly the method applied in the discussions of al-Ṭāriq 86/7 and al-ʿAlaq 96/2.

First let us look at how the sentence is built, because there is a grammatical point here.

وَٱلسَّمَآءَ — in the accusative. But the sentence already has an object: banaynāhā — "We built it", the pronoun hā referring back to the sky.

The object has been named twice, that is: once as an explicit noun (in the accusative, brought forward), once as a pronoun.

The grammarians call this اِشْتِغَال (ishtighāl): a noun is brought forward, read in the accusative, and the verb comes after it and returns to that noun with a pronoun. The supplied form is: wa banaynā'l-samāʾa banaynāhā.

And the function of ishtighāl is emphasis. By bringing the noun forward attention is drawn to it, and then the verb takes it up again.

This pattern is in the next verse too: wa'l-arḍa farashnāhā — the same structure, the same emphasis.

And the word order builds a pair:

47: The sky — banaynāhā (We built) 48: The earth — farashnāhā (We spread)

The two verses mirror one another. The same pair was in al-Baqara 2/22 (firāsh / bināʾ), and the comparison of that pair was recorded in the section on al-Shams: "the sky a building, the earth a bed: the same pair, there a proof, here an oath."

And here there is a genuine confusion, because two separate words look the same in writing.

In the indefinite both are written بِأَيْدٍ.

The first word — the root أ-ي-د:

• أَيَّدَ (the tafʿīl form) — to strengthen, to support. The Qurʾān uses it often: "We supported him with the Holy Spirit" (al-Baqara 2/87, 253) — wa ayyadnāhu.
• تَأْيِيد — strengthening, supporting.
• مُؤَيَّد — supported.
• أَيْد — power, strength. The Qurʾān uses it of David (Dāwūd): "Remember Our servant David — he was a man of strength" (Ṣād 38/17) — dha'l-ayd.

Ṣād 38/17 is a decisive indication, because there the word occurs without tanwīn and in a construct (dha'l-ayd), so there is no possibility of its being the plural of yad — it is plainly in the sense of "strength".

The overwhelming majority of the classical exegetes read the first word in this verse: bi-aydin = with power, with might.

Their grounds:

1. The Qurʾān's own usage (Ṣād 38/17). 2. To ascribe the plural of yad to God is not found in the Qurʾān's ordinary language — the Qurʾān uses the singular (yad) and the dual (yadayn), but does not use the plural in this context. 3. The context: the sentence recounts a work of building, and building is done "with power".

I too take this reading as my basis, and its grounds are above. It is not binding, but I must also state that the minority reading has no serious support.

And I enter this record: the confusion of the two words appears in English renderings as well, and the phrase is sometimes translated "with hands". That rendering arises from identifying the root wrongly.

And the whole dispute over the verse lies in this word.

Root: و-س-ع. Its concrete sense: breadth, a thing's capacity to hold something inside it.

The branches of the root:

And now the Qurʾān's own usage — this is the datum that settles the dispute.

The word مُوسِع occurs in one other place in the Qurʾān, and there its sense is beyond dispute:

"Provide for them: the one of ample means (al-mūsiʿ) according to his measure, and the one of straitened means (al-muqtir) according to his." (al-Baqara 2/236)

The mūsiʿ here is not "one who widens" but "one who has ample means". And its opposite is set down as muqtir (of straitened means).

And the same root again in a similar sentence:

"Let the man of ample means spend out of his amplitude." (al-Ṭalāq 65/7) — li-yunfiq dhū saʿatin min saʿatih.

The word wusʿ also occurs in the Qurʾān in the sense of "capacity to bear": "God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity (wusʿ)" (al-Baqara 2/286).

In the Qurʾān's own language, that is, this root chiefly conveys a being's capacity — not the physical growth of an object.

The explanations given to this verse in the classical sources gather under a few heads:

The first two explanations predominate in the classical sources and both establish an agreement with the word bi-aydin: if the sentence conveys a power, its second half should convey a power too.

I record that the third and fourth explanations are transmitted as well. But I have to state this: because I cannot give with certainty whose these explanations are, or their exact distribution in the classical sources, I write no names and no attributions. What I can say is that the first two explanations are widespread and the last two less so.

For about a century this verse has stood at the centre of the claim that "the Qurʾān announced the expansion of the universe". The claim is built thus: the word mūsiʿūn means "those who widen"; modern cosmology has established that the universe is expanding; therefore the verse announced this fact.

I reject this claim, and I write out its grounds one by one.

One — the word has no object.

La-mūsiʿūn is an active participle, and its object is not stated. What it widens is not written.

This is a decisive grammatical record. If a verb is to be read as transitive, its object is either stated or drawn with certainty from the context. Here neither is present — and precisely for this reason the classical exegetes read the word as intransitive: "we are possessed of ample means".

The modern claim inserts an object (the universe) that is not there.

Two — even if an object is inserted, that object is not "the universe".

The claim assumes that the object is the preceding word: al-samāʾ (the sky). But the Qurʾān's word samāʾ does not correspond to modern cosmology's concept of "the universe".

Samāʾ in Arabic means "what is above" (root س-م-و: to rise). The Qurʾān uses this word for the place from which rain comes down ("He sent down water from the sky"), for the place where birds fly, and for the place where the stars are. The whole of the universe — the entirety of space-time — is not a concept this word answers to.

And in modern cosmology what expands is not "the sky" but space itself; galaxies are not moving apart within space, the scale of space is growing. The two concepts do not coincide.

Three — the operation runs backwards.

The objection of method recorded in the sections on al-Ṭāriq and al-ʿAlaq holds here exactly: the modern information is taken first, and then room is made for it in the word. The right order is the reverse.

The test of this is simple: if the word really meant "we are expanding the universe", the fact that for fourteen centuries nobody understood it so would be a situation requiring explanation. Yet no explanation is offered; it is only said "that was not known then". But the question is not the absence of knowledge, it is what the word says; and what a word says is what those who speak that language understand by it.

Four — the claim makes the verse fragile.

The finding recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq: "To tie the truth of a verse to a current scientific description is to make that verse share the fate of that description."

The expansion of the universe is a model widely supported today. But the details of the model (the rate of expansion, the source of the acceleration, its behaviour in the far past and in the future) continue to be debated. To nail the verse to this model is to carry every correction of the model into the verse as a problem.

Five — the verse's own work is something else, and that work is stronger than the claim.

Look at the verse's context. The forty-seventh, forty-eighth and forty-ninth verses set out three proofs from creation (the sky, the earth, pairs). And the fiftieth gives the conclusion: فَفِرُّوٓا۟ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ — "so flee to God".

The work of the three verses, that is, is not to give information but to prepare the ground for a call. The argument is: the one who built this is possessed of power, so take refuge in Him.

And this argument works equally well for a Meccan of the seventh century and for a reader today. To turn the verse into a description in cosmology makes the argument invisible.

To sum up: the word's sense of "breadth" is given and not cut short; the "widening" branch of the root wusʿ is real and is not hidden; but the claim that the verse announces the metric expansion of the universe lacks grammatical support (there is no object), does not coincide conceptually (samāʾ ≠ the universe), runs backwards in method (the information is taken first), and weakens the verse. The rule of Method that no hunting for scientific miracles is done exists precisely to preserve this distinction.

One further record. This rejection does not mean that the verse contradicts modern science. The verse makes no such claim; and so there is nothing for it to contradict. The same record entered for 86/7 in the section on al-Ṭāriq holds here as well.