al-Najm 53:38

Allā taziru wāziratun wizra ukhrā "That no bearer of burdens bears the burden of another."

This root was treated in two places:

• In the section al-Inshirāḥ, وِزْر (wizr) — a heavy load, and from there sin.
• In the section al-Qiyāma, وَزَر (wazar) — a refuge, the rock one takes shelter behind in a mountain.

In the section on al-Qiyāma it was analysed how the two senses join, and what was recorded there is decisive here:

The explanation the lexicographers transmit is this: at the centre of the root lies the idea of weight and mass. Wazar is the steep and heavy mass of rock on a mountain — the thing a person shelters behind. Wizr is the weight carried. Wazīr is the one who shares the weight. The same family of words names both what is loaded onto you and what supports you. For both are weight: one stands upon you, one beneath. I present this joining as my own reading; that both senses are present in the root is a lexical datum, the conceptual division of labour between them is a connection of my own making.

And the section on al-Qiyāma had put precisely this verse in its table of comparison:

And the conclusion there: "The same root carries two refusals at once: on that day there is nothing to hide behind and no one on whom to load your burden. There are two ways of escape — to hide or to throw the responsibility onto another — and the Qurʾān closes both with a word from the same root."

The section on al-Qiyāma made the connection; I complete it here and add two details.

The most familiar derivative of the root: وَزِير (wazīr). This word, which lives on in English as vizier, comes from the same root and means "one who shares the burden".

The Qurʾān uses this word — and where it uses it is instructive:

"And give me a helper (wazīran) from my family: Aaron (Hārūn), my brother. Strengthen me by him and make him a partner in my task." (Ṭāhā 20/29-32)

When Moses asked his Lord for a wazīr he was asking for a partner in a burden. And note: verse 36 of this sūra speaks precisely of the scrolls of Moses.

This may be a coincidence, and I think it is; yet when these two ends of the word-family stand together — a helper who shares a burden and a responsibility that cannot be transferred — a distinction becomes visible:

In a task one may be helped; in a reckoning one may not. A vizier shares the burden of the work; but on the day of reckoning no one takes another's wizr.

I record this distinction as my own reading. The two derivatives of the word are lexical data; this division of labour between them is a connection of my own making.

وَازِرَةٌ … وِزْرَ — and the verb is تَزِرُ as well. Three words in the sentence are from the same root:

Agent, verb and object — all three from one root. This is a strong emphasis in Arabic and turns the sentence almost into a formula.

And that the active participle is feminine is a grammatical matter: wāzira — "one who bears (feminine)". The reason is that the word nafs is feminine; that is, "a soul that bears a burden". This is the working of Arabic grammar, not a ruling about sex.

This sentence occurs in five places in the Qurʾān, and in almost the same wording:

This repetition was already recorded in the section Nūḥ and was used there as evidence in a theological debate:

The Qurʾān's general principle is the opposite of this. "No bearer of burdens bears the burden of another" (al-Anʿām 6/164; al-Isrāʾ 17/15; Fāṭir 35/18; al-Zumar 39/7; al-Najm 53/38). This principle is among the rulings the Qurʾān repeats most. No one is condemned for the family he was born into.

And the distinctive thing about the occurrence in this sūra is this: in the other four places the sentence is given as a ruling. Here it is given as the first item of "what is written in the ancient scrolls."

The sūra does not, that is, claim this principle as its own; it presents it as a foundation shared with the earlier revelations.

This is the real matter in the word order and must not be passed over.

I offer a reading and state that it is my own.

Those addressed by this sūra were a community who thought they were hearing something new. And the matter debated in the first half of the sūra was exactly this: where does this man speak from?

The thirty-sixth verse brings a third party into the debate: Moses and Abraham. Both are names known in that society and — Abraham especially — claimed by it. Mecca claimed to be the heir of Abraham.

What the sūra does, then, is this: it points to a source the one addressed accepts and says that the same principles are found there.

And this is the move that closes the sūra's argument about knowledge. The source of knowledge had been asked about twice: did he see (35), was he told (36). Now the third answer comes: these principles had already been communicated before.

One of the sūra's last verses will formulate this explicitly: هَٰذَا نَذِيرٌ مِّنَ ٱلنُّذُرِ ٱلْأُولَىٰ — "This is a warner of the warners of old" (56).

The sūra sets up a claim of continuity, then, not a claim of novelty.

The same matter was treated in the section al-Aʿlā, and the note recorded there holds here as well: "The scrolls of Abraham were not matched with any existing text. It was recorded that the verse carries not a claim about a document but a claim of continuity."

The same reserve is needed here: the Qurʾān does not say to which text now in hand "the scrolls of Moses" correspond, and I make no such matching.