al-Qamar 54:37

Wa-laqad rāwadūhu ʿan ḍayfihi fa-ṭamasnā aʿyunahum fa-dhūqū ʿadhābī wa nudhur "They had indeed pressed him for his guests. So We wiped out their eyes. 'Taste My punishment and My warnings!'"

Root: ر-و-د. Its concrete sense: to go back and forth in search of a thing, to range about. Rād — the scout who searches for pasture. Rāʾid — one sent out on behalf of a people to look for a place. Irāda — to want; to turn towards something.

This root was treated in al-Burūj, al-Ṭāriq and al-Qiyāma.

The verb is on the pattern of Form III (mufāʿala): rāwada. This form conveys persistence and mutual pressure: not asking once but asking insistently, again and again.

And the key to the pattern is the preposition: عَنْ.

Rāwada fulānan ʿan shayʾin is a settled construction in Arabic, and its exact sense is: to try to make someone give up something, to press him in order to prise that thing from him.

The Qurʾān uses this construction once more, and there its sense is beyond dispute:

"The woman in whose house he was pressed him against his will (rāwadathu'llatī huwa fī baytihā ʿan nafsih)." (Yūsuf 12/23)

The use in Sūrat Yūsuf and the use here are the same construction, and the difference lies in the word that comes after the preposition: there ʿan nafsihi (from himself), here ʿan ḍayfihi (from his guest).

Root: ض-ي-ف. Ḍāfa — he became a guest, he lodged. Aḍāfa — he received as a guest; and in grammar iḍāfa (making one noun a guest of another, annexation) is from the same root.

The word is a generic noun: it is used in the same form for the singular and the plural. The Qurʾān does this at al-Dhāriyāt 51/24 as well: ḍayfi Ibrāhīma'l-mukramīn — "Abraham's honoured guests" (a singular word, a plural adjective). That verse was treated in al-Dhāriyāt.

And the choice of the word is decisive, and I record this as my own reading.

In describing the offence the verse could have done three things: it could have named the act, characterised the perpetrators, or named the victim. The path it chose is the third, and the name it chose is "guest".

The offence, that is, is framed in the language of the sūra as the violation of guesthood. And this frame is one of the gravest violations in the addressee's own law: in Arab custom the protection of a guest is the host's personal obligation, and that obligation is binding in tribal law. To touch the guest is to touch the host.

This is a piece of social history and I transmit it as such. That hospitality (ḍiyāfa) was an institutional obligation in Arab society is widely documented in pre-Islamic poetry and in the later sources.

And the word order of the verse supports this: the direct object of the verb is Lot (rāwadū-hu), while the guest comes with a preposition (ʿan ḍayfihi). In the grammar, that is, the one pressed is Lot. The offence is directed at the host before it reaches the guest.

I record that the Qurʾān names the act of the people of Lot more explicitly in other sūras (al-Aʿrāf 7/80-81; al-Naml 27/54-55; al-ʿAnkabūt 29/28-29), and I do not go into the detail of those verses here, because what al-Qamar does is different: the sūra names the offence by way of the right of a guest.

Root: ط-م-س. This root was treated in full in al-Mursalāt and this verse was cited there. I take the finding there as it stands:

"The idea beneath the root: to destroy the trace, the shape, the distinguishing lines of a thing. To erase a writing, to blur a road, to flatten a face. … This is the root's most decisive feature: not to destroy but to render indistinguishable."

I likewise do not repeat the three Qurʾānic examples given in the section on al-Mursalāt: Yūnus 10/88 (iṭmis ʿalā amwālihim — the property is made useless), Yā Sīn 36/66 (la-ṭamasnā ʿalā aʿyunihim — the function of sight is removed), and this verse.

Two things I add here.

One — the matching of offence and penalty.

The offence begins with a look and the penalty takes the eye as its target.

In al-Ḥāqqa a "table of offence-and-return matching" was set up in this commentary (al-Ḥāqqa 69/33-34 ↔ 35-36). The same method is at work here.

And the kind of act is worth recording: ṭams is not destruction but the ending of a function. The eye remains; it cannot distinguish what it sees. The penalty does not take the organ; it takes the organ's work.

Two — the difference from Yā Sīn 36/66.

In Yā Sīn the verb comes with لَوْ (a conditional): "Had We willed, We would have wiped out their eyes" — that is, a possibility that did not occur is spoken of. In al-Qamar the verb is perfect: ṭamasnā — it occurred.

The same verb, then, occurs in one place in the Qurʾān as a warning and in another as an event.

I record this as an observation about usage; the wording of the two verses can be verified.

And here the sūra's second refrain changes mood.

ذُوقُوا — Root: ذ-و-ق. Dhāqa — he tasted. The word is the sense of the tongue and conveys the nearest, most direct contact.

The Qurʾān often gives punishment with this verb: "Taste the punishment" (al-Anfāl 8/50; al-Sajda 32/14; al-Qamar 54/48).

And who is commanded? The people of Lot have long since been destroyed; no command can be given to them. Two solutions are transmitted:

I do not impose a preference; both are recorded.

But something can be said about its function within the sūra, and I record this as my own reading: the change of mood comes exactly just before the turning point of the sūra. In verse forty-three the text will turn to the addressee and ask "are your disbelievers better than those?" The imperative in verses thirty-seven and thirty-nine is the first sound of that turn.

The refrain, that is, prepares by mood for the last section of the sūra.