al-Qamar 54:24-25

Fa-qālū a-basharan minnā wāḥidan nattabiʿuhu innā idhan la-fī ḍalālin wa suʿur — a-ulqiya'l-dhikru ʿalayhi min bayninā bal huwa kadhdhābun ashir "They said: 'A single human being from among us — are we to follow him? Then we should indeed be in error and madness. Has the remembrance been cast upon him alone out of all of us? No, he is a brazen liar.'"

The people's speech is spread over two verses and contains three distinct objections. Each rests on a single word:

The three objections stand on three separate grounds: kind (that he is human), number (that he is one), choice (that it is he).

And all three are objections repeated elsewhere in the Qurʾān:

• The objection of kind: "This is nothing but a human being like yourselves" (al-Muʾminūn 23/33-34); "Should an angel not have been sent down to us?" (al-Anʿām 6/8).
• The objection of choice: "Has the remembrance been sent down upon him out of all of us?" (Ṣād 38/8 — exactly the same objection); "Should this Qurʾān not have been sent down to a great man of one of the two cities?" (al-Zukhruf 43/31).

The comparison with Ṣād 38/8 is worth recording, because the wording is almost identical and there the speech belongs to the Meccans, here to Thamūd. The sūra, that is, makes its addressees hear their own sentence from the mouth of an earlier people.

I record this as my own reading. The closeness in wording between the two verses is verifiable data of the text.

بَشَرًا is in the accusative (a-basharan), yet the verb of the sentence comes afterwards: nattabiʿuhu.

This is the structure Arabic calls ishtighāl: the object is brought forward, remains in the accusative, and attaches to an elided verb (a-nattabiʿu basharan… nattabiʿuhu).

Its function is emphasis. The first word heard in the sentence becomes basharan. The centre of the objection, that is, has been brought to the front: "A human being!"

And the order is: basharan (a human being) → minnā (from among us) → wāḥidan (a single one) → nattabiʿuhu (are we to follow). The verb is left to the very end. All the grounds of the objection are enumerated first, and then what is being asked of them is said.

بَشَر — Root: ب-ش-ر. Its concrete sense: skin, the outer surface of the hide. Bashara — the skin. And bashar is the naming of the human being by his visible, touchable side. The word insān, on the other hand, comes from the root of intimacy/forgetting and looks in a different direction.

The objection, then, shows in the choice of word too: they speak of the messenger by way of his skin. Whoever says bashar counts the one before him as nothing more than what is visible.

I record this as my own reading; the root sense of the word is a datum of the language.

ضَلَال — Root: ض-ل-ل. Its concrete sense: to lose the way, to be lost, to miss where one is going. Ḍalla — he was lost. From the same root ḍāll (one who has lost his way) and — strikingly — ḍalla'l-shayʾu fi'l-shayʾi: one thing being lost inside another.

سُعُر — Root: س-ع-ر. Its concrete sense: to kindle a fire, to make it blaze, to make it fierce. Saʿara'l-nār — he made the fire blaze up.

And the word yields two distinct senses:

In the mouth of Thamūd the first sense is at work: "If we follow him we shall be in error and madness."

And now look at verse forty-seven:

إِنَّ ٱلْمُجْرِمِينَ فِى ضَلَٰلٍ وَسُعُرٍ "The guilty are in error and blazing fires." (54/47)

The two expressions are identical: ضَلَالٍ وَسُعُرٍ. The same two words, in the same order, in the same letters.

The difference lies only in whose the sentence is:

Thamūd had said, "if we follow him we shall become so." The sūra says, "those who do not follow him already are so" — and it says it with their own sentence.

And the word's two senses become functional here: they had said "madness"; in verse forty-seven the same word can also be read as "blazing fires". The word stays the same, its sense changes place.

This is the clearest example of the "handing the word back to its owner" that the sūra performs three times. The others:

I record this as my own reading. The wording and verse numbers of the three pairs are verifiable data of the text; gathering the three under a single technique is my reading.

أُلْقِيَ — Root: ل-ق-ي. Laqiya — he met, he encountered. Ilqāʾ (Form IV) — to cast, to let fall, to set before someone.

The verb is passive: ulqiya — "it was cast". The agent is not named.

The Qurʾān uses this verb of revelation:

• "You did not expect that the Book would be cast to you" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/86 — an yulqā ilayka'l-kitāb).
• "He casts the spirit of His command upon whom He wills of His servants" (al-Muʾmin 40/15 — yulqi'l-rūḥa min amrih).
• "We shall cast upon you a weighty word" (al-Muzzammil 73/5) — treated in al-Muzzammil.

The verb, then, is the Qurʾān's own verb for revelation. In making their objection Thamūd use the right verb — what they object to is not that revelation came but to whom it came.

I record this distinction as my own reading and I count it important: the sentence does not reject the possibility of revelation; it rejects the choice of recipient. The expression min bayninā — "from among us" — says exactly this.

كَذَّاب is, from the root ك-ذ-ب, the فَعَّال pattern, and in Arabic this pattern conveys intensity and a trade or habit: najjār (a carpenter), khayyāṭ (a tailor), kadhdhāb (one who makes lying his business). It means, then, not "someone who has told a lie" but "one who has made lying his habit".

أَشِر — Root: أ-ش-ر. Ashar — the insolence that comes of abundance of favour, self-satisfaction, excess. The word does not convey a haughtiness rooted in the self; it conveys an excess that comes of being sated.

Words close in sense: baṭaran (al-Anfāl 8/47 — going astray through ease), fariḥīn (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/76 — rejoicing insolently), maraḥ (Luqmān 31/18 — walking with a swagger).

Thamūd say two things of Ṣāliḥ, then: a liar and insolent. The second is interesting: to count a prophet "insolent" is to read his claim as overstepping his place.