al-Qamar 54:6

Fa-tawalla ʿanhum; yawma yadʿu'l-dāʿi ilā shayʾin nukur "So turn away from them. On the day the caller calls to a thing unrecognisable…"

Root: و-ل-ي. Its concrete sense: to be near, to be adjacent. Walī — one who is near, a friend, a protector. Wilāya — nearness and the authority that comes with it. Tālī — one who follows behind.

And something interesting comes of this: تَوَلَّىٰ (Form V) carries two opposite senses —

• تَوَلَّىٰ عَنْ — to turn away from someone, to withdraw.
• تَوَلَّىٰ (without the preposition) — to take a matter on, to assume charge of it.

The same verb, when it takes the preposition ʿan, conveys withdrawal; without it, taking charge. Here it comes with ʿan: withdrawal.

The one commanded is the Prophet, and this is the only command the sūra gives him. In the second verse the deniers were said to perform iʿrāḍ; in the sixth tawallī is commanded of the Prophet. Two different roots, a similar movement — but one is censured and the other commanded.

Where is the difference? In its source. Their turning away is flight from a sign; the Prophet's turning away is stopping where the delivering of the message ends. Another form of the same command is at al-Dhāriyāt 51/54: "So turn away from them; you are not to blame" — and in al-Dhāriyāt that verse was treated in detail in this commentary. The note recorded there holds here too: this command is not to abandon the delivering of the message but not to take on responsibility for the outcome.

Two elisions of the codex's orthography come together in this expression:

• يَدْعُ — its original is yadʿū (يدعو). The final و is not written.
• ٱلدَّاعِ — its original is al-dāʿī (الداعي). The final ي is not written.

Elisions of this kind are found in several places in the written codex, and the letter is not pronounced in recitation. I record this as a datum of the language; I draw from it no meaning and no numerical claim whatsoever. The prohibition in Method on letter-and-number computation holds here too.

ٱلدَّاعِ — the caller. Root: د-ع-و, and this root was treated in detail in Nūḥ as the backbone of that sūra: it was shown there that the root does two jobs at once in Arabic (to call and to pray).

Who the caller is is not said in the verse. In classical exegesis it is widely said to be the angel who blows the trumpet; the Qurʾān does not name him and neither do I. That the word comes definite (al-dāʿī) shows that a caller known to the one addressed is meant; it does not give his identity.

The same expression occurs at Ṭāhā 20/108: "On that day they will follow the caller, from whom there is no swerving."

نُكُر — Root: ن-ك-ر. This root was treated in al-Mulk, al-Dhāriyāt, al-Mujādala and al-Mumtaḥana. Its concrete sense: not to recognise, not to know, to find strange.

Its derivatives show the field of the root:

• نَكِرَ / أَنْكَرَ — he did not recognise, he denied. To deny is to say "I do not recognise this".
• مُنْكَر — what is not approved, what is rejected. And its exact opposite is مَعْرُوف — "what is known, what is recognised". In Arabic, that is, good is named "the recognised" and evil "the unrecognised".
• نَكِير — repudiation, rejection. At al-Mulk 67/18: fa-kayfa kāna nakīr — treated in the section on al-Mulk.
• نَكِرَة — an indefinite noun (in grammar). Unrecognised, not determined.
• تَنَكَّرَ — he disguised himself, he became unrecognisable.

The form نُكُر is an adjective and means "unrecognisable, unfamiliar, without precedent".

And this is exactly what the verse says: what they are called to resembles nothing known. The verse does not describe what that day is; it states that it cannot be described.

This says something about the method of description itself, and I record it as my own reading. There are two ways of conveying a thing: to liken it, or to say that it is like nothing. The Qurʾān uses both — and in this sūra the two stand side by side:

The sixth verse says "it resembles nothing"; the seventh immediately makes a comparison. Not a contradiction but a division of labour: what resembles nothing is the event itself; what is likened is the appearance of the people. The nature of the resurrection cannot be described; but the state people will be in on that day can be.

Interpreting the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān. The same root, in the same sense, occurs in the account of al-Khiḍr in Sūrat al-Kahf: "You have done a most munkar thing" (al-Kahf 18/74) and "You have done a nukr thing" (al-Kahf 18/71). There too the sense runs towards "unheard-of, hard to take in".