al-Qamar 54:31

Innā arsalnā ʿalayhim ṣayḥatan wāḥidatan fa-kānū ka-hashīmi'l-muḥtaẓir "We sent against them a single cry, and they became like the dry brushwood of the maker of a fold."

صَيْحَة — Root: ص-ي-ح. Ṣāḥa — he shouted, he cried out. Ṣayḥa — a loud sound made once. The pattern is مَرَّة (faʿla), and in Arabic this pattern conveys a single occurrence: ḍarba (one blow), naẓra (one look), ṣayḥa (one cry).

The word already carries the sense "once", then. The adjective وَاحِدَة reinforces this further.

The Qurʾān uses different words for the destruction of Thamūd in different sūras, and in al-Shams the itemisation of this was given: ṣayḥa (Hūd 11/67), rājifa / ṣāʿiqa (al-Aʿrāf 7/78; Fuṣṣilat 41/17), damdama (al-Shams 91/14), ṭāghiya (al-Ḥāqqa 69/5 — treated in al-Ḥāqqa). I do not repeat that table.

Al-Qamar's contribution is the word وَاحِدَة.

And this word will occur once more in the sūra — in verse fifty, in an entirely different context:

I record this as my own reading: verse fifty is the general rule of verse thirty-one. The destruction of Thamūd came by a single sound; verse fifty says that this is not an exception but the rule: the command is always one. And in verse fifty-one it will be said "We have destroyed your likes" and the refrain will be repeated.

In al-Ḥāqqa a similar weave was recorded under the heading "the repetition of wāḥida carrying the difference of speed between the two sections of the sūra"; there nafkhatun wāḥida and dakkatan wāḥida did the same job. The same word does the same job in two sūras: it reduces the duration of the event to zero.

The most original comparison in the sūra, and it is taken from a scene of shepherding.

هَشِيم — Root: ه-ش-م. Its concrete sense: to break something dry and brittle into small pieces, to crumble it. Hashama — he broke, he crushed.

هَشِيم is on the faʿīl pattern with the sense of a passive participle: broken, crumbled, dried up and scattered plant matter.

The Qurʾān uses the word once more, and there it gives the process as well:

"Set forth to them the likeness of the life of this world: it is like water We send down from the sky, and the plants of the earth mingle with it; then it becomes dry stubble that the winds scatter (hashīman tadhrūhu'l-riyāḥ)." (al-Kahf 18/45)

Hashīm, then, is a plant that was once alive and has dried and crumbled. There is a past inside the word: this thing was once green.

A note on the language. It is widely transmitted that the name Hāshim, borne by one of the Prophet's forefathers, comes from this root and is given the sense "one who crumbles bread for broth". I transmit this as a piece of lexical information; it has no bearing on the sense of the verse, and I make none.

ٱلْمُحْتَظِر — Root: ح-ظ-ر. And this word is the real key.

Ḥaẓara — to enclose a thing, to draw a fence around it, to close it off. And from this:

• حَظِيرَة (ḥaẓīra) — a fold. A shepherd weaves a fence of dry thorn and brushwood to gather his animals at night; the area this fence encloses is called a ḥaẓīra.
• مَحْظُور (maḥẓūr) — forbidden, fenced off. In the Qurʾān: "The gift of your Lord is not withheld" (al-Isrāʾ 17/20 — mā kāna ʿaṭāʾu Rabbika maḥẓūrā).

The same root, then, gives both "to make a fold" and "to forbid". The link is plain: to forbid is to fence something around.

ٱلْمُحْتَظِر is the active participle of Form VIII: one who makes a fold, who weaves a fence.

The exact rendering of the expression is therefore: "the dry brushwood of the one who makes a fold."

The picture is this. The shepherd weaves a fence of thorn and brushwood to protect his animals. In time the brushwood dries, breaks, and is crumbled underfoot by the animals. What collects at the base of the fence is the dust of broken dry thorn — no use for fuel, no use for fencing.

There is a variant reading. The word has also been read as ٱلْمُحْتَظَر (muḥtaẓar, with fatḥa); on that reading it is a passive participle / noun of place and means "the fold itself": "the dry brushwood of the fold". Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which imām, I write no names. Between the two readings the picture does not change.

This comparison is the clearest of the sūra's comparisons chosen to suit its addressee, and it works on the same logic as the locust comparison of verse seven.

Let us set the four great comparisons of the sūra side by side:

All three comparisons are taken from the addressee's own way of making a living: the crop, the palm grove, the fold. What the Qurʾān does here is to speak in a community's everyday images.

And there is something common to all three: each of them is the dead state of a thing. A swarm of locusts finishes the crop; an uprooted palm ceases to be a tree; dried brushwood ceases to be a fence.

I record this as my own reading.

One last note, and it is my own reading.

As was recorded in al-Shams, Thamūd are named in the Qurʾān as the people who carved houses out of the mountains (al-Aʿrāf 7/74; al-Ḥijr 15/82; al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/149), and at al-Fajr 89/9 they occur as "those who hollowed the rocks in the valley".

A people who made houses out of rock is likened to a shepherd's dry fence.

This contrast is the same as the one drawn for ʿĀd in the section on al-Ḥāqqa: there too the comparison was to the dead part of the palm, the tree of permanence, and it was recorded that what was raised up in al-Fajr and what was brought down in al-Ḥāqqa were set opposite one another.

Al-Qamar does the same thing a third time — and this time the material chosen is the thing furthest from stone that there could be: dry thorn.

I record this as a reading; the wording of the verses can be verified, the contrast is a reading I have set up.