al-Qamar 54:8

Muhṭiʿīna ila'l-dāʿ; yaqūlu'l-kāfirūna hādhā yawmun ʿasir "Straining their necks towards the caller. The disbelievers say, 'This is a hard day.'"

Root: ه-ط-ع. This root was treated in al-Maʿārij. The description the lexicographers give: to go quickly with the head raised and the eye fixed on a single point, the neck stretched forward.

Three elements are together in the word:

1. Speed — not walking but hastening. 2. The stretching of the neck — the body inclined forward, the head thrust out. 3. The fixing of the eye — the gaze does not leave a single point.

All three of its occurrences in the Qurʾān are in the same scene:

• "Their heads raised, hastening; their gaze does not return to them" (Ibrāhīm 14/43 — muhṭiʿīna muqniʿī ruʾūsihim).
• al-Qamar 54/8 — here.
• "They come hurrying towards you with necks outstretched" (al-Maʿārij 70/36).

And there is a tension that must be recorded. In the seventh verse the eyes are cast down (khushshaʿan abṣāruhum); in the eighth the gaze is fixed and the neck stretched out (muhṭiʿīn). The two descriptions appear to conflict.

The classical explanation is this: khushūʿ here describes the abasement, ihṭāʿ the compulsion. The eye is lowered, but the body is being dragged towards the call. There is no resistance, and no desire either. A person is going quickly to a place he does not want to go, unable to raise his eyes.

I transmit this explanation; it is widely reconciled in this way in the sources.

The sentence is in the imperfect: yaqūlu — "they say". The verbs around it (yakhrujūn, muhṭiʿīn) are on the same plane; the scene is told as it happens.

That the speaker is specified is worth recording. The verse does not say "people say", it says "al-kāfirūn say". This is not, then, a sentence everyone will say on that day; it is a sentence a particular group will say.

Elsewhere the Qurʾān says how the same day will be for the believers: "The greatest terror will not grieve them" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/103), "On that day you will see the believing men and the believing women, their light running before them" (al-Ḥadīd 57/12 — treated in al-Ḥadīd).

Root: ع-س-ر. Its concrete sense: hardship, difficulty. ʿUsr — straitness, distress. And its exact opposite is يُسْر.

This opposition was treated in detail in this commentary in al-Inshirāḥ (inna maʿa'l-ʿusri yusrā) and I do not repeat it.

But the encounter within the sūra must be recorded, and it is the most striking weave of words in it:

The sūra places the sentences "a hard day" and "a book made easy" inside the same text — and repeats the second four times.

I record this as my own reading. The opposition of the two roots is linguistic data; the presence of the two expressions in the same sūra is data of the text; the relation I set up between them is mine. And it is this: the sūra sets an ease and a hardship side by side and says which one comes first. What has been made easy is in hand now; the hard thing comes after. What joins them is the question of the refrain — "is there anyone who will remember?"

The difference between عَسِر and عَسِير. At al-Muddaththir 74/9 the same day is called yawmun ʿasīr. That verse was treated in al-Muddaththir. The difference is in the pattern: ʿasir is a quasi-participle, ʿasīr an intensive form; the second is heavier. The verse-ending has a share in the choice here — all the verses of this sūra descend to the sound r on short syllables, and ʿasīr does not sit on that pattern. I gave this in tabular form in the section on verse-endings above.