al-Qamar 54:11-12

Fa-fataḥnā abwāba'l-samāʾi bi-māʾin munhamir — wa fajjarna'l-arḍa ʿuyūnan fa'ltaqa'l-māʾu ʿalā amrin qad qudir "So We opened the gates of heaven with water pouring down. And We made the earth burst forth in springs. And the water met upon a matter already decreed."

These two verses are the most tightly built word order in the sūra, and they cannot be read without seeing the symmetry.

Let us first set the two verses side by side:

Four separate contrasts work at once: heaven/earth, opening/splitting, descent/ascent, pouring/bursting.

And then comes the third clause: فَٱلْتَقَى ٱلْمَآءُ — "the water met".

And here is the real point: the water is SINGULAR.

The verse does not say "the waters met" (al-miyāh). الْمَاءُ — definite, singular. What comes from two separate sources is, at the moment of meeting, named a single water.

What the word order does, then, is this: it sets up a duality and ties it to a unity. Two verbs, two directions, two descriptions — and then a single noun.

I record this as my own reading. That the word is singular and definite is data of the text; the reading of "from duality to unity" that I draw from it is mine.

In al-Infiṭār this verse was cited and it was recorded that the resurrection may be described as a repetition of the flood on a universal scale; in al-Nabaʾ in the context of the gates of heaven; in ʿAbasa in the context of fajjarnā. I rely on all three and do not repeat them.

Root: ف-ت-ح. In al-Mursalāt this root was distinguished from the other roots that describe the opening of the sky, and the distinction recorded there is decisive here:

ف-ت-ح is also an opening, but it is the opening of a door; it does not convey splitting.

This is why the verse speaks of gates. The root wants a door.

أَبْوَابَ ٱلسَّمَاء — the gates of heaven. The Qurʾān uses this expression elsewhere too:

• "The gates of heaven will not be opened for them" (al-Aʿrāf 7/40) — about the deniers.
• "And the sky is opened and becomes gates" (al-Nabaʾ 78/19) — treated in al-Nabaʾ.

The comparison with al-Aʿrāf 7/40 is worth recording. There the gates of heaven are not opened for the deniers; here they are opened for the deniers — but what comes through is not prayer, it is water. The same gate works in two directions.

I record this as a reading of the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān; the wording of the two verses can be verified, the contrast between them is my observation.

Root: ه-م-ر. Hamara — he poured, he made flow. Inhamara — it poured out, it came down in a downpour.

The word is the active participle of the pattern إِنْفِعَال (Form VII): munhamir. And Form VII, as was recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq, conveys the middle sense: undergoing an outside action.

That is, the water does not pour of itself; it is released to pour. And this fits the preceding verb: the gates were opened, the water poured out. Another opened the gate; the water poured.

The word occurs only here in the Qurʾān. The note used in this commentary for words of this kind holds here too: a word with a single occurrence is read by its lexical sense, and no intra-Qurʾānic weave of usage is sought for it.

Root: ف-ج-ر. In al-Qadr this root was treated by way of fajr, and what was recorded there is this: the root's proper sense is to split, to crack, to open; infijār (an explosion), fajjara (to make a spring gush), tafjīr are from the same root. The name of the dawn also comes from here: the light that splits the darkness of the night and comes forth.

The verb here is on Form II (tafʿīl), and this form conveys multiplicity: not splitting once, but splitting all over.

عُيُونًا — a grammatical point.

The object of the sentence is the earth, not the springs: fajjarna'l-arḍa — "We split the earth". What, then, is ʿuyūnan?

ʿUyūnan is a specifier (an accusative of specification). That is, the sentence does not say "we opened springs in the earth"; it says "we split the earth into springs".

The difference matters, and it can also be seen:

The verse says the second. Not a part of the earth but the earth itself becomes a spring.

The same specifier structure occurs elsewhere in the Qurʾān: "The head has taken flame with old age" (Maryam 19/4 — wa'shtaʿala'l-raʾsu shayban) — there too what burns is the head, and old age is the specifier; not "my head has whitened" but "my head has caught fire with old age".

عَيْن — Root: ع-ي-ن. This word was treated in al-Raḥmān, al-Wāqiʿa, al-Mulk, al-Ṭūr and al-Mursalāt: it means both "eye" and "spring". The same word will come back two verses later (14) in the sense of "Our eyes".

One word, two verses apart, in two senses. I record this and draw no meaning from it; the polysemy of the word is settled in Arabic.

And the sentence ends here. The flood, the gates, the springs — all are tied to a single expression.

أَمْر — Root: أ-م-ر. Command, matter, decree. This word occurs three times in the sūra, and all three in decisive positions:

In verse three the rule, in verse twelve the instance, in verse fifty the source. The word does the same job on three separate layers of the sūra.

قَدْ قُدِرَ — Root: ق-د-ر. And here the backbone root of the sūra enters for the first time.

This root was treated in detail in al-Qadr in its three senses, and below, under verse forty-nine, I shall compare two of its uses. Here I record only this: the verb is passive (qudira — it was decreed) and is reinforced with قَدْ. Qad + the perfect conveys confirmation in Arabic: "decreed for certain".

That is, the verse says: the flood is not an overflowing; it is a measured matter.

And this is the most repeated theme of the sūra. The table below shows the root's four occurrences in it:

The sūra's first destruction and its last reward are sealed with the same root. I take this circle up again under verse forty-nine.