55. Sūrat al-Raḥmān

Seventy-eight verses. It takes its name from the first verse — and the first verse consists of a single word: ٱلرَّحْمَٰنُ.

This is one of the two sūras in the Qurʾān whose form is the most visible. The other is al-Mursalāt, where it was shown that a single sentence repeated ten times divides the text into nine sections. Here the same technique is worked at three times the density:

فَبِأَىِّ ءَالَآءِ رَبِّكُمَا تُكَذِّبَانِ

This sentence occurs thirty-one times in the sūra. The sūra has seventy-eight verses; that is, roughly two verses in five are the same sentence.

But the number of the repetitions is not what is distinctive about this sūra. What is distinctive is this: the refrain is not a verdict but a question. al-Mursalāt said "woe that day to those who deny" — a sentence of verdict, spoken about a third person. al-Raḥmān turns directly to the one addressed and asks: "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?" And it puts the question thirty-one times and answers it not once.

The second distinctive feature is in the language: the verb is in the dual — tukadhdhibān, "the two of you deny". And this dual is not confined to the refrain. The sūra is built on the dual from beginning to end: yasjudān, yaltaqiyān, lā yabghiyān, lā tantaṣirān, al-mashriqayn, al-maghribayn, al-baḥrayn, al-thaqalān, jannatān, ʿaynān, zawjān, mudhāmmatān. Even the rhyme of the sūra is the sound of this dual. I take this up in a separate section below.

The third distinctive feature is in the content: the sūra puts the Qurʾān's longest list of favours and its sharpest sentence on perishing inside the same text. The sentence "Everyone upon the earth passes away" (26) stands in the very middle of a list that counts fruit, dates, pearl, coral, ships, springs and gardens. And after that sentence too comes the same question: which favour do you deny?

The whole matter of the sūra is that these three stand together.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without it.

The sūra takes its name from the single word of its first verse. This is one of those cases in the Qurʾān where the first word of a sūra is also its name; but here there is something further: the name is a divine name.

The root and pattern analysis of the name al-Raḥmān was carried out in full in the section on al-Fātiḥa, in the discussion of the basmala, and is not repeated here. Three of the things recorded there are decisive for this sūra:

One. The name is on the pattern فَعْلَان, and this pattern conveys fullness and overflow (as in ghaḍbān, ʿaṭshān, jawʿān). Raḥmān is thus the one who brims and overflows with mercy, whose overflow spreads in every direction.

Two. Raḥmān is used of God alone. Raḥīm can be used of a human being as well (it is used of the Prophet at al-Tawba 9/128), but no human being is called raḥmān. The language has opened one of them to sharing and closed the other.

Three — and this is the most important for this sūra: as was recorded in the section on al-Fātiḥa, the Meccans resisted using this name. The Qurʾān records that resistance in its own text:

"When they are told, 'Prostrate yourselves to al-Raḥmān,' they say, 'And what is al-Raḥmān?'" (al-Furqān 25/60)

Now hold that verse in your hand and look at the opening of Sūrat al-Raḥmān. The sūra is built like an answer to the question: "al-Raḥmān. He taught the Qurʾān. He created man. He taught him clear speech." The name is spoken, and then whatever the bearer of that name does begins to be counted out. And the counting runs for seventy-eight verses.

This is the longest answer that can be given to the question "And what is al-Raḥmān?"

I record this as my own reading. The wording of the two verses is in the text, and the Meccan context of al-Furqān 25/60 was documented in the section on al-Fātiḥa; but I do not claim that there is a deliberate cross-reference between the two sūras.

A note on a widespread epithet. The phrase "the bride of the Qurʾān" is often used of this sūra and is transmitted as a hadith. I do not make this report a foundation: its chain is disputed and I cannot give a definite source. The formal features of the sūra can in any case be read from the text itself; it stands in no need of an epithet.

Here the situation differs from the one in al-Mursalāt: there is no agreement.

The majority count it Meccan. The style supports this: its centring on resurrection and the reckoning, the absence of any legal ruling, the short verse-endings on a single sound, the addressing of jinn and men together, the position of the one addressed as mukadhdhib (a denier).

A view calling it Medinan is also transmitted, and it is a minority. I cannot give the grounds of this view with attribution to a definite source; I therefore do not go into its detail.

Intermediate views are transmitted as well, holding part of the sūra to be Meccan and part Medinan. These too are a minority.

The preference in this commentary: the style of the text is the style of the Meccan sūras, and the view of the majority appears the stronger. This is not binding, and it does not change how the sūra is read — for there is not a single verse in it tied to a historical event.

The number of verses. In the widespread count it is seventy-eight. Differences of this kind can occur between the schools of verse-counting; but that the refrain occurs thirty-one times is not disputed, and the table below rests on this count.

Two things are immediately visible from the table, and both determine how the sūra is read:

One. Sixteen of the refrains — more than half — fall in the garden sections. In al-Mursalāt only one of the nine sections was a section of good news; here sixteen of the thirty-one sections are good news. The two sūras use the same technique and put the weight on opposite sides.

Two. The two garden sections receive exactly equal numbers of refrains: eight and eight. This symmetry does not look like accident, and I take it up in a separate section below.

Fa-bi-ayyi ālāʾi Rabbikumā tukadhdhibān "Then which of your Lord's favours do you deny?"

This sentence is the backbone of the sūra, and it raises four separate questions: where it occurs, what the word آلاء means, why the verb is dual, and what it means that it comes after the sections on punishment as well. I take up all four separately.

The table below shows each of the thirty-one repetitions, which verse it follows, and what the section in between recounts.

One — the sections do not shorten gradually; they drop all at once.

The finding recorded in the section on al-Mursalāt was this: there the lengths of the sections shortened step by step as the sūra advanced; the average of the first five sections was 4.4, that of the last five 2.0, and the sūra ended by "narrowing".

In al-Raḥmān it is not so.

The numbers run thus: the first section of al-Raḥmān is twelve verses. Of the remaining thirty sections, four are two verses and twenty-six are a single verse. After the first refrain the sūra climbs to the highest tempo available to it and stays there to the end.

The effect of this on the reading differs from that of al-Mursalāt, and the difference matters:

• al-Mursalāt accelerates. The reader notices the refrains growing more frequent; the text narrows as it moves towards something.
• al-Raḥmān does not accelerate — it holds steady. After the thirteenth verse the rhythm does not change: one verse, refrain, one verse, refrain. For sixty-five verses this tempo is never broken.

And this steadiness agrees with the content of the sūra. The subject of the sūra is an order that does not change: the sun runs by a reckoning, the balance has been set, the two seas do not overstep their limit, every day He is upon some task. The rhythm of the text does the same thing — it repeats without deviating.

I record this as my own reading. The numbers are drawn from the table and can be verified.

Two — the share of the refrain in the text.

In al-Raḥmān the number of verses other than the refrain is forty-seven. That is, the part of the sūra that delivers "new information" exceeds the refrain itself by only sixteen verses. The text repeats as much as it says.

Three — the privilege of the first twelve verses.

The one long section of the sūra is the opening. And this section has no refrain — for twelve verses the reader hears an unbroken list: teaching, creating, clear speech, sun, moon, najm, shajar, sky, balance, earth, fruit, dates, grain, fragrant herb.

The refrain enters only once the list has grown long enough. For the question to have any meaning there first had to be something to count. When the thirteenth verse asks "which favours", twelve verses of accumulation stand behind it.

After that each single item becomes on its own the subject of the same question. What the sūra does is this: first it piles up, then it asks item by item.

I record this too as my own reading.

This is the key word of the refrain and it needs to be dwelt on, because translation renders it with a single word ("favours") and the second branch of the word becomes invisible.

The word is a plural. The lexicographers do not settle on one form for its singular; the forms recorded are ilyun, alyun, ilā, alā. Even the singular of the word is thus disputed — while its plural is settled in the Qurʾān.

The first and dominant sense: favour. A good thing given, a bounty, a benefaction. The Qurʾān's own usage confirms this:

"Remember the ālāʾ of God, that you may prosper." (al-Aʿrāf 7/69) "Remember the ālāʾ of God, and do not go about the earth spreading corruption." (al-Aʿrāf 7/74)

In both verses the word comes with the command "remember". Ālāʾ is thus what is asked to be remembered — and therefore what can be forgotten. The name of a favour carries within it the possibility of being forgotten.

The second sense: a mark of power and might. Some exegetes have said that in the context of this sūra the word covers a wider field than "favour", and means "the signs that show God's power".

Here one must be honest, and I have to keep two things apart:

• The sense of the word in the dictionary is favour. The sense "mark of power" does not stand in the dictionary as a separate branch of the word.
• The reading "mark of power" is an extension drawn from the context. And its ground is strong: the refrain comes after the description of Hell as well. If Hell is not counted a "favour", the word must be covering something further in that context.

The second sense, then, arises not from the root of the word but from the structure of the sūra. I record it in this way and do not present it as a lexical datum. The section below will take up exactly this question.

A note on word order. The refrain says "ālāʾi Rabbikumā" — the favours are ascribed directly to the Lord. Not "which of the favours" but "which of your Lord's favours." And the name chosen is not Allāh but Rabb.

As recorded in the section on al-Fātiḥa, Rabb joins ownership and nurture in a single word: the one who owns by nurturing. What the refrain asks about is not something that comes from a donation but from a relation of nurture. And the last verse of the sūra will end with the same word: ismu Rabbika.

The one parallel to the refrain in the Qurʾān. The same pattern occurs once more in the Qurʾān — and there it is singular:

فَبِأَىِّ ءَالَآءِ رَبِّكَ تَتَمَارَىٰ — "Which of your Lord's ālāʾ do you dispute?" (al-Najm 53/55)

Setting the two verses side by side is instructive:

The difference in the verbs is worth dwelling on. Tamārī is Form VI from the root م-ر-ي: to be unable to be sure of a thing, to go back and forth, to wrangle. It is lighter than denial — doubt is not rejection. In al-Najm the one addressed hesitates; in al-Raḥmān he rejects. And when the one addressed hesitates the question is put once; when he rejects, thirty-one times.

I record this as an observation; I do not claim that there is a deliberate cross-reference between the two sūras. The wording of the two verses is in the text.

The most debated grammatical question in the sūra. The verb is dual: tukadhdhibān, "the two of you deny". And the pronoun is dual as well: Rabbikumā, "the Lord of you two".

The question is: who are these two addressees?

The text does not answer the question directly — but it holds the answer within itself. In the sūra man and jinn are named together in four separate places:

• 14-15: "He created man from dry clay that rings; and He created the jānn from a smokeless flame."
• 31: "O you two weights (al-thaqalān), We shall attend to you."
• 33: "O company of jinn and men!"
• 39: "On that day neither man nor jinn will be questioned about his sin."

The classical answer is therefore plain and rests on the text: the two addressed are men and jinn.

The views must still be given in full, because this answer has a difficulty of its own and the classical exegetes saw it.

The difficulty is real and should not be concealed: the dual pronoun is used before the two are named.

The answers given to this in the classical sources are these:

One. In Arabic the antecedent of a pronoun may be explained afterwards; this is a known usage, and it is easier still with things the one addressed already knows. That jinn and men are the two species under obligation was known to the Qurʾān's addressees.

Two. If al-anām at verse ten is taken as the antecedent, the difficulty disappears.

Three. The sūra as a whole is one piece; since the refrain is repeated thirty-one times, its first occurrence need not be read apart from the rest. When the one addressed is named at verse fifteen, this becomes clear retrospectively as well.

None of these three answers removes the difficulty entirely, but the three together keep the first view standing. And none of the alternative views has this much ground in the text.

The preference in this commentary: men and jinn. The ground is the sūra's own wording — al-thaqalān, maʿshara'l-jinni wa'l-insi, insun wa lā jānn. In three separate places the text names its own addressees. This preference is not binding, but it is markedly firmer than the others.

Once the preference is recorded the real question is this: what is this dual for?

It does two things, and both look to the sūra as a whole.

First: it widens the one addressed. The Qurʾān's forms of address are mostly "O mankind", "O you who believe", "O children of Adam" — that is, to the human species. This sūra carries the address beyond the species that is seen. As recorded in the section on al-Jinn, the word jinn, by reason of the concealment in its root, means "what is unseen from where we stand"; the addressee of the sūra thus takes in a side that man cannot see.

The consequence is this: the counting of the favours is not bounded by human experience. The things counted (sun, sea, garden) are things man knows; but the question is put to an addressee man does not know as well.

Second: it builds the form of the sūra. As I shall show below in the section on the sound structure, the ـانِ at the end of tukadhdhibān is the very rhyme of the sūra. The dual is thus not merely a grammatical choice; it is what fixes the sound of the sūra.

This is the place in the sūra that most needs dwelling on, and it determines what the refrain means.

Look at the table. The refrain comes after the following:

• After fruit, dates, grain and fragrant herb (13)
• After the perishing of everything (28)
• After the threat "We shall attend to you" (32)
• After the flame of fire and the nuḥās (36)
• After the splitting of the sky (38)
• After the guilty being seized by their forelocks (42)
• After Hell and the scalding water (45)
• And after the gardens, sixteen times

The same sentence, then — "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?" — comes immediately after the description of Hell, with no alteration whatever.

This says something about the extent of the word. Four separate answers can be given, and all four rest on the text.

The description of Hell is a piece of news, and news is about something that has not yet happened. The one addressed thus learns in advance what is going to happen to him.

In the section on al-Mursalāt this mechanism was treated in detail in the discussion of ʿudhran aw nudhran (77/6), and the principle recorded there was this: announcement is for removing the ground of excuse; the moment the warning is given, the excuse "I did not know" falls away. There this was shown as a word working against the one addressed.

This sūra shows the same mechanism from its other face: what works against him is at the same moment a kindness. For the removal of the ground of excuse means the granting of the chance to avoid. No one can avoid a chasm he cannot see.

On this reading the refrain asks: what kind of treatment is it, that I should tell you in advance what is going to happen to you?

The seventh and ninth verses of the sūra are about the balance: a measure that has been set, a limit that must not be overstepped, a weighing that must not be given short. And the forty-first verse of the sūra recounts the guilty being known by their marks and seized.

The two are the same thing. The setting of the balance and the working of the balance are not two separate events. That the guilty is recognised is the sign that the measure works.

And imagine a world in which the balance has been set but never weighs anything: there the existence of the balance ceases to be a favour. That the measure is a favour depends on its being made to work in the end.

On this reading the sections on punishment are not an appendix outside the list of favours; they are the completion of the first item on the list.

As recorded above, ālāʾ has a second reading that arises from the context: the marks of power. On this reading the refrain asks: "Which of your Lord's powers, which of His works, which of His proofs do you deny?"

This reading meets the sections on punishment without trouble — fire is a mark of power as much as a garden is. But it has a price: it weakens the word's proper sense in the dictionary (favour).

For this reason I do not adopt this reading on its own. The first and second answers meet the sections on punishment while keeping the word's sense of favour; the third is not needed. But the view is transmitted, and there is no sufficient reason to strike it out either.

Now I come to the real point, and I record this as my own reading.

The refrain does not change at all according to where it stands. After the garden and after Hell alike, the same thirty letters. The sūra makes not the slightest adjustment in the refrain to mark one section as "good" and another as "bad".

This is a choice, and the choice itself carries a judgement: the text refuses to divide what it recounts into favour and non-favour.

The natural human tendency is to divide. Fruit is a favour, Hell is not; the garden is a favour, the fire is not; what is given is a favour, what is taken is not. The sūra does not make this division, and it shows that it does not by repeating the same sentence thirty-one times.

And the sharpest instance of this is the twenty-sixth verse.

"Everyone upon the earth passes away" — this sentence is an announcement of loss. It speaks of the greatest thing a person will lose, himself. And after it, two verses later: "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?"

Perishing too enters the list.

This is the hardest and the most important sentence in the sūra. And it has no easy consolation. What it says is this: whether a thing is a favour is settled not by how it makes you feel but by where it comes from. If the source is one, the list is one too.

I record this as a reading; that the refrain does not change is a datum of the text that can be verified.

The two sūras use the same technique, and just for that reason their differences are instructive.

The last three rows of the table need to be taken separately.

The shared root. Both refrains are built from the root ك-ذ-ب. But one turns the root into a noun (al-mukadhdhibīn — the deniers, the name of a class), the other into a verb (tukadhdhibān — you deny, an act). A noun conveys fixity, a verb an occurring. al-Mursalāt therefore fixes an identity; al-Raḥmān asks about a behaviour. In the one the addressee has already been classified; in the other he is still being asked.

This difference settles the stance of the two sūras towards the one addressed. al-Mursalāt is a text of verdict — as recorded in the section on al-Mursalāt, no call to repentance was made there, no condition "if you believe", no way out was shown. al-Raḥmān asks a question, and to ask a question is to keep the one addressed still inside the conversation.

Time. The refrain of al-Mursalāt says yawmaʾidhin — the verdict has been deferred to that day. The refrain of al-Raḥmān has no adverb of time; the verb is imperfect and describes the present state: you deny. The one names a future outcome, the other a present attitude.

The closings — and a shared wording.

Now look at the last verses of the two sūras:

al-Mursalāt 77/50 — فَبِأَىِّ حَدِيثٍۭ بَعْدَهُۥ يُؤْمِنُونَ — "In what discourse after this will they believe?" The refrain of al-Raḥmān — فَبِأَىِّ ءَالَآءِ رَبِّكُمَا تُكَذِّبَانِ

Both sentences begin with the same two words: فَبِأَىِّ.

And their structures are the same: fa-bi-ayyi + a genitive construction + an imperfect verb. al-Mursalāt uses this pattern once, and in the sūra's last verse; al-Raḥmān thirty-one times, and at the end of every section.

More than this, the sentence types of the two sūras have changed places exactly:

al-Mursalāt delivers verdicts for forty-nine verses and ends with a question. al-Raḥmān asks a question for seventy-seven verses and ends with a verdict.

I record this shared wording and this inversion as an observation. I do not claim a deliberate cross-reference between the two sūras; the wording and the positions of the two sentences are in the text and can be verified.

One last point, and the most striking one concerning the form of the sūra.

The refrain is a question. And the sūra asks it thirty-one times and never once answers it.

There are structures in the Qurʾān that ask a question and answer it at once — such as "And what will make you know what the steep ascent is? It is the freeing of a neck" (al-Balad 90/12-13). Here there is nothing of the sort. The question is put, the text moves to the next verse, and then it is put again.

The meaning of this is: the place of the answer has been left blank in the text.

When a question is left blank, it is the reader who will fill the blank. Thirty-one times the sūra turns to the reader and waits.

It is widely said in the tradition that this repetition expects a response; and a report is transmitted that the hearers gave a spoken response after each refrain. Since I cannot give the chain and the source of this report with certainty, I do not attribute it to a source and do not make it a foundation. But that the blank is present in the text is an indisputable datum.

And the finding recorded on repetition in the section on al-Mursalāt — that repetition takes a thing out of the realm of possibility and makes it fixed — works here from another side. There what was repeated was a verdict; the repetition of a verdict produces inevitability. Here what is repeated is a question; and the repetition of a question makes answering impossible to defer.

I record this as my own reading.

The second great structural feature of the sūra lies here. And it cannot be separated from the question of the refrain — because the rhyme of the sūra and the grammatical form of the refrain are the same thing.

The verse-endings of the sūra run on the pattern long ā + a single consonant. The consonant is one of three letters: ن، م، ر.

The sūra is thus almost single-rhymed. And the reason for this singleness is simple: the rhyme comes from the refrain itself. Since tukadhdhibān is repeated thirty-one times, the dominant sound reaching the ear is already -ān; the remaining verses have fallen in with that sound.

The same phenomenon was recorded in the section on al-Mursalāt: there too the dominant sound after the fifteenth verse was the sound of the refrain (-īn/-ūn), and the finding recorded there was this — "the refrain does not stand like a sentence entering the text from outside; the text has come to resemble the refrain."

In al-Raḥmān this assimilation has gone further still. In al-Mursalāt there were three separate sound regions and three "islands"; here there is no island. For seventy-eight verses the sūra stands on a single sound.

Now the critical point.

In Arabic the ending ـَانِ is the ending of dual nouns and verbs. Jannatān (two gardens), yasjudān (the two prostrate), tukadhdhibān (the two of you deny).

The -ān sound that is the rhyme of the sūra is therefore not a rhyme chosen at random; it is the sound of the sūra's grammatical form.

The consequence is this: whoever listens to the sūra hears, before understanding the content, that he is listening to something twofold. Form and content have joined below the level of the words.

I record this as my own reading. That the ending is the dual ending and that the rhyme of the sūra is this sound are verifiable data of the language.

The list below gathers the dual verb forms and dual nouns in the sūra. The refrain itself (Rabbikumā tukadhdhibān — a dual pronoun and a dual verb) is not counted separately, since it is repeated thirty-one times.

And what is striking is this: between 62 and 66 three verses in succession consist entirely of dual words. The sixty-fourth verse is a single word, and that single word is a dual: mudhāmmatān.

The dual is not only in the grammar. The things the sūra counts also come in pairs:

The fifty-second verse of the sūra runs:

فِيهِمَا مِن كُلِّ فَٰكِهَةٍ زَوْجَانِ "In the two of them, of every fruit two kinds."

And another verse of the Qurʾān extends the same pattern to the whole of existence:

وَمِن كُلِّ شَىْءٍ خَلَقْنَا زَوْجَيْنِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ "And of everything We created two kinds — that you might take heed." (al-Dhāriyāt 51/49)

The word order of the two verses is almost identical: min kulli + noun + zawjān/zawjayn. The one for fruit, the other for everything.

And the note at the end of the verse of al-Dhāriyāt matters: "that you might take heed." Being in pairs is presented there as an occasion for reflection — not as a piece of biology.

The Qurʾān builds the same idea in one further place, more widely:

"Glory be to Him who created all the pairs, of what the earth brings forth, of themselves, and of what they do not know." (Yā Sīn 36/36)

The note in this verse, "of what they do not know", says that the concept is not confined to man's field of observation.

Now return to al-Raḥmān. The sūra is built on pairs from beginning to end — its rhyme is the ending of the dual, those it addresses are two, the favours it counts come in pairs, and where it arrives is two gardens and two gardens more. And at the fifty-second verse it pronounces this in a single sentence: min kulli fākihatin zawjān.

The sūra has thus turned the principle of al-Dhāriyāt 51/49 into the form of a text. It does not speak about pairedness; it speaks as a pair.

I record this as my own reading. The wording of the verses and the dual forms of the sūra are in the text; the connection I draw between them is an interpretation, and I do not attribute it to any classical exegete.

And one further note: this is not a numerical calculation. What Method forbids is claims resting on the reckoning of letters and numbers; here nothing is being reckoned. What is recorded is that one grammatical form dominates throughout the sūra — which can be verified by opening any muṣḥaf.

Al-Raḥmān · ʿallama'l-Qurʾān · khalaqa'l-insān · ʿallamahu'l-bayān

"al-Raḥmān · He taught the Qurʾān · He created man · He taught him clear speech."

One of the most unusual openings in the Qurʾān. It has three distinct features, and all three need to be taken separately: an opening without a verb, a sequence without connectives, and the order.

The first verse is a single word, and that word is a noun. No verb, no sentence, no connective.

This resembles none of the Qurʾān's customary openings. Sūras of the Qurʾān open with an oath (wa'l-ʿādiyāt, wa'l-mursalāt), with a command (iqraʾ, qul), with praise (al-ḥamdu lillāh), with the disconnected letters (alif lām mīm), with a piece of news (atā amru'llāh). Here there is none of this: there is only a name.

And the grammatical measure recorded for al-ḥamdu lillāh in the section on al-Fātiḥa holds here too, and works at a further extreme still:

A verbal sentence conveys ḥudūth (occurrence, renewal); a nominal sentence conveys thubūt (fixity, continuance).

Sūrat al-Raḥmān opens at the furthest point of this measure: there is not even a sentence, only a noun. The sūra begins not with an event but with a state.

What is it grammatically? The classical grammarians differ over the place of this word in the sentence:

No great difference of meaning arises, and I do not impose a preference. But the first view has one advantage and it should be recorded: the sūra as a whole is already built in the form "al-Raḥmān does the following". All seventy-eight verses can be read as the unfolding of the name in the first verse.

Now look at the beginnings of verses 2, 3 and 4.

None of them has a connective.

ʿAllama'l-Qurʾān · khalaqa'l-insān · ʿallamahu'l-bayān. There is no wāw and no fāʾ. Three verbs, side by side, unlinked.

In Arabic this is called فَصْل (faṣl): the ranging of sentences one after another without connectives. And this choice has a known consequence: faṣl establishes no temporal order between the sentences. Fāʾ conveys immediate succession, thumma conveys succession with an interval, wāw joins without conveying order at all. The total absence of a connective ranges the sentences as parts of a single whole.

This is half the answer to the question of order below, and I come to it now.

The order is this:

1. عَلَّمَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ — He taught the Qurʾān 2. خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ — He created man 3. عَلَّمَهُ ٱلْبَيَانَ — He taught him clear speech

Teaching is named before creating. Yet there is no teaching without a being to be taught.

This is an ordering that has been dwelt on from the classical period to the present, and it was recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq as well: in Sūrat al-ʿAlaq the order is reversed — creating first (96/1-2), then teaching (96/4-5). The same two verbs, in two sūras, in two different orders.

The explanations offered:

The fourth view is weak and clashes with the rest of the sūra: the fourteenth verse says "He created man from dry clay that rings" — there al-insān is plainly the species. To refer the same word in the same sūra to two different things is forced.

The first view is the soundest in point of word order and it takes in the other two as well: if there is no connective there is no claim of temporal order either. What the verses say is not "He first taught, then created"; it is "He is the one who teaches, who creates, who teaches."

The preference in this commentary is the first view, and it is not binding.

Once the preference above is recorded, a separate feature of the word order should be pointed out — and I present this as my own reading.

Look at the three verbs:

The same verb at the two ends. Creating in the middle.

The sequence is thus of an A–B–A structure. The creation of man stands between two verbs of teaching. In rhetoric such structures are a known arrangement, and their effect is this: the middle element is enclosed by the two on either side.

The reading that follows is this: man is created inside teaching. Before him lies a text that has been taught, behind him a faculty that has been taught; he himself stands between the two.

And the objects of the two teachings differ, and the difference is decisive:

The fourth verse makes the second possible. The Qurʾān cannot be taught to a being without clear speech. The two teachings are thus each other's condition: one prepares the content, the other the recipient.

Root: ع-ل-م. To know. As recorded in the discussion of ʿālamīn in the section on al-Fātiḥa, this root is also related to ʿalāma (a sign); on that account an ʿālam is "that by which something is known".

عَلَّمَ is of the form تَفْعِيل. This form has two functions at once here: transitivity (to know → to make known) and gradation (a thing done stage by stage). Form II in Arabic often conveys the repetition of an act and its spread over time. The verb is therefore not "conveyed information in a single stroke" but "taught" — a verb that conveys a process.

And there is something missing in the second verse: ʿallama'l-Qurʾān — taught it to whom?

It is not said.

This is the very technique recorded in the section on al-Mursalāt, where several examples of it were listed: sentences whose agent or object is not stated leave the possibilities open. So here too: to whom the Qurʾān was taught — to the Prophet, to man, to the angel — is not specified. When the pronoun arrives in the fourth verse (ʿallamahu) the one addressed becomes clear, but the second verse stays open.

One of the most important words in the sūra, and to understand it rightly one must look at the root.

Root: ب-ي-ن. This root was analysed in full in al-Bayyina and I do not repeat what was recorded there. The summary was this:

The centre of the root is the space between two things. Bayn conveys both "between" and "separation" — for what lies between two things is what joins and divides them at the same moment. And the sense of "clarity" is reached from here: a thing becomes visible only when it is separated from its surroundings. A mountain inside fog is invisible; when the fog disperses the mountain separates and appears. A bayyina is not merely clear; it is what makes clear.

And in that section the word bayān appeared in the list of derivatives thus: "clear expression, well-ordered speech" — with precisely this verse given as its example.

What is to be added here is this: in naming man's distinguishing attribute, the Qurʾān does not choose the word nuṭq (speech). The root نُطْق does occur in the Qurʾān, at al-Mursalāt 77/35 ("that day they do not speak"). But the word chosen here is not nuṭq but bayān.

The difference is decisive:

What was given to man is thus not "the faculty of making sounds"; it is the faculty of separating and of making what is separated visible.

And here stands the exact counterpart of a discussion resolved in another section of this commentary.

When 2/31-33 was treated in al-Baqara, the following was recorded:

Adam's standing before the angels is not established by worship — nor could it have been, since the angels already worship without interruption. The standing is established by knowledge, and specifically by one kind of knowledge: naming. And naming is no ordinary skill. To give a thing a name requires the following: distinguishing that thing from its surroundings; gathering its like into a category; attaching the category to a sound; and being able to use that sound when the object is not present.

Now set the two texts side by side.

In al-Baqara man's distinguishing attribute was fixed as naming, and the first condition of naming was counted as "distinguishing that thing from its surroundings".

In al-Raḥmān the name of what is given to man is bayān — and the root of that word is precisely to separate.

Two sūras name the same faculty with two different words. And beneath the two words lies the same operation.

That the verb is the same is no accident. The same table was drawn in the section on al-ʿAlaq, and it was shown there that the verb ʿallama does the same work in three places (al-Baqara 2/31, al-ʿAlaq 96/5, al-Raḥmān 55/2-4).

And the conclusion that follows is central for this sūra:

In al-Baqara man's privilege lay in naming, and in that section this note was entered: "knowledge is a privilege, and like every privilege it is open to being misunderstood."

al-Raḥmān carries this a step further. In the fourth verse bayān is given to man — the faculty of distinguishing and of being able to state what he has distinguished. And nine verses later, the man who uses that faculty is asked: تُكَذِّبَانِ — do you deny?

Takdhīb is a verb of speech. To deny one must speak; to speak one must have clear speech.

The sūra thus gives man a faculty, and the refrain of the sūra makes the worst possible use of that faculty. The instrument given in the fourth verse is turned against him in the thirteenth.

I record this as my own reading. That the two words (bayān, tukadhdhibān) stand where they do in the sūra, and that both belong to the field of language, is data of the text; the connection I draw between them is an interpretation.

The sum of the four verses is this: an instrument of distinction has been placed in man's hand.

And the nature of the instrument is two-sided. As recorded in the section on al-Baqara, an open-ended capacity can also learn wrongly. So too with clear speech: a faculty that distinguishes can also make wrong distinctions. The same instrument both separates truth from falsehood and artificially divides things that are alike.

The concrete counterpart of this is not hard to find: the most widespread abuse of language is not the lie but the false distinction. Giving two names to the same thing, one name to two different things, drawing the category to suit an interest. The measure recorded for the root farq in the section on al-Mursalāt works here too: the act of separating is in itself neither good nor bad; its worth depends on what is separated from what, and why.

Al-shamsu wa'l-qamaru bi-ḥusbān · Wa'l-najmu wa'l-shajaru yasjudān

"The sun and the moon are by a reckoning · the najm and the tree prostrate."

The first pair of the sūra and its first dual verb are here. Two verses, four beings, two pairs.

These two are regularly named together in the Qurʾān, and almost every time in a context of measure and time. As recorded in the section on al-Shams:

In the Qurʾān's description of nature the sun is not an element of warmth or beauty; it is first of all a clock.

And one of the verses given there as evidence for that finding was precisely this one.

Root: ح-س-ب. To count, to reckon. Its derivatives: ḥisāb (the Turkish hesap is this same word), muḥāsaba, ḥasīb, iḥtisāb.

On the structure of the word حُسْبَان the lexicographers say two things:

In meaning the two come out at the same place: the sun and the moon are bound to a reckoning; they do not move at random.

And the word has a second use that must be recorded: the same word occurs once more in the Qurʾān, and there it names a disaster sent down from the sky:

"…He may send upon it a ḥusbān from the sky, so that it becomes slippery ground." (al-Kahf 18/40)

The same word names in one place the order of the sky, in another a punishment descending from the sky. This is no contradiction; it is the direct consequence of the idea beneath the root. Beneath ḥusbān lies "having been reckoned". An orbit that has been reckoned is reckoned; so is a blow that has been reckoned.

I record this as an observation about the language; the wording of the two verses is in the text.

The particle bāʾ. The bāʾ in bi-ḥusbān is read either as one of accompaniment (muṣāḥaba) or as adverbial (ẓarfiyya): "together with a reckoning" or "within a reckoning". Both give the same result. The sentence is a nominal one and has no verb — again thubūt: the sun and the moon do not "move by a reckoning" but "are by a reckoning." The quality is part of their being, not of their behaviour.

Root: س-ج-د. To bend, to put the forehead to the ground, to submit.

And here comes the first dual verb of the sūra. Yasjudān — "the two prostrate". The sound of the sūra is established in this verse.

A note is needed on this use of prostration. The Qurʾān speaks in several places of the prostration of beings other than man, and presents it not as a movement but as a state of being subject. On what is meant there are two classical explanations: the first, that the prostration is a visible submission such as the turning of a shadow or the bending of a plant; the second, that prostration is used in the sense of "being subject to the law of creation". The two do not exclude each other.

The first real disagreement in the sūra is here, and the word is disputed.

Root: ن-ج-م. This root was analysed in al-Ṭāriq, and what was recorded there is decisive here:

Its proper sense is to appear, to become visible. The najm (star) took this name not because it flickers in the sky but because it appears out of the darkness. The same root is used for a plant coming up from the soil: najama — it grew, it came up, it appeared. And nujūm/tanjīm — an instalment; each instalment appears when its time comes.

The root itself thus covers both fields: what appears in the sky and what appears from the earth are alike najm. The disagreement arises from this.

The majority of the classical commentaries adopted the second reading, and this was recorded in the section on al-Ṭāriq as well. The ground is the shajar beside the word: in Arabic najm and shajar are a settled pair dividing the plant world in two — what has no stem and what has one.

And there is a further ground for this sūra, which I record as my own reading: the sūra is built on pairs from beginning to end. The fifth verse gives a pair from the sky (sun and moon); if the sixth gives a pair from the earth (grass and tree), the sequence is complete in point of structure and of content alike. On the "star" reading the sixth verse would have paired an earthly object with a heavenly one, which runs against the logic of pairing in the rest of the sūra — all the pairs in the sūra are two things of the same kind (two seas, two easts, two gardens, two springs).

The inclination in this commentary is towards the second reading, and it is not binding. al-Ḥajj 22/18 is a serious ground for the first reading and cannot be struck out; but in that verse nujūm is plural and is counted as an item distinct from shajar, whereas here it is singular and attached to the same verb as shajar.

The fifth verse states the reckoning, the sixth the prostration. The two are two names for one thing: being bound to an order.

And there is a difference of form between the two verses:

• Verse 5 is a nominal sentence: bi-ḥusbān. A fixed quality.
• Verse 6 is a verbal sentence: yasjudān. An act that continues.

For the heavenly bodies a state is used, then, and for the plants an act. I record this as an observation about the word order.

Wa'l-samāʾa rafaʿahā wa waḍaʿa'l-mīzān · Allā taṭghaw fi'l-mīzān · Wa aqīmu'l-wazna bi'l-qisṭi wa lā tukhsiru'l-mīzān

"And the sky He raised, and He set the balance · that you should not transgress in the balance · and perform the weighing with equity, and do not give the balance short."

One of the strongest ideas in the sūra — perhaps in the Qurʾān — is here. Three verses, and within them the word مِيزَان three times.

This subject has already been approached from two directions in this commentary: in al-Muṭaffifīn short measure (taṭfīf) and the background of precisely these verses was treated; in al-Qāriʿa the mawāzīn (the balances of the hereafter) were taken up. I do not repeat what was recorded in the two, and I rely on both below. The work to be done here is to unpack the verse's own word order.

The seventh verse carries two verbs, and the two are within the same sentence, joined by a single wāw:

رَفَعَهَا — He raised it وَوَضَعَ — and He set

The two verbs are each other's opposite. Rafʿ is raising; waḍʿ is setting, lowering, laying down. One thing upward, one thing downward.

And the verb waḍʿ comes once more three verses later:

وَٱلْأَرْضَ وَضَعَهَا لِلْأَنَامِ (10) — "and the earth He set down for the creatures."

The table comes out thus:

The balance stands between the sky and the earth — in the order and in the verb alike. The sky has been raised, the earth has been set down, and between the two the balance has been set.

I record this observation about the word order as my own reading; that the verbs and objects stand where they do in the verses is data of the text.

Now the real matter. The three occurrences of mīzān in the three verses stand in three different grammatical positions, and the sequence of the positions traces a descent.

What the three rows recount is this:

In the first row the balance is the object of a divine act — the thing set. In the third row that same balance is in a position to be the object of a human act — the thing given short. The middle row is the transition between the two: the balance is now a field, a place one stands inside.

The three verses thus bring the same word down from a cosmic position to a merchant's table. And they do it in three steps.

I record this as my own reading. The grammatical positions are beyond dispute and can be verified from any source of iʿrāb; the interpretation that the three positions form a descent is mine.

If one looks closely there is one further word in the ninth verse, and it is not mīzān:

وَأَقِيمُوا۟ ٱلْوَزْنَ بِٱلْقِسْطِ — "perform the weighing with equity."

وَزْن and مِيزَان are from the same root (و-ز-ن) but are different things:

• مِيزَان — as recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa, it is a noun of instrument on the mifʿāl pattern (originally miwzān, the wāw having turned into yāʾ). The balance, that is, the instrument itself.
• وَزْن — it is a verbal noun. Weighing, that is, the act itself.

And the distribution of the imperatives is striking:

Two prohibitions, then, concern the instrument and a single command the act. The command in the middle, the prohibitions on either side.

I record this as an observation about the word order. And I add this reading as my own: the keeping of the instrument is said with two prohibitions and the doing of the weighing with a single command — because if the instrument is broken the command becomes impossible to carry out at all.

Root: ق-و-م. As recorded in the discussion of mustaqīm in the section on al-Fātiḥa: to stand, to be set upright, to be straightened. Qiyām, qawm, maqām, istiqāma are from the same root.

إِقَامَة (Form IV) — to raise a thing to its feet, to set it up, and from there to do it without deficiency, to make it continuous. In the section on al-Baqara this distinction was treated in the discussion of iqāmat al-ṣalāt: to "perform" the prayer and to "establish" it are not the same thing.

The same distinction holds here. The verse does not say "zinū" (weigh); it says "aqīmu'l-wazna" — raise the weighing to its feet. Weighing is thus not an operation but an order that has to be kept standing.

Root: ق-س-ط. This word was analysed in detail in al-Jinn, and the table drawn there completes this one. What was recorded there:

Qisṭ — a share, a portion; and from there justice. What is interesting about the root is its contrariety: qasaṭa = he corrupted the share, he deviated; aqsaṭa (Form IV) = he removed the deviation, he did justice. The root carries a single sense — to corrupt a share — and Form IV serves to undo that sense.

And in that section precisely this verse was given as an example of the settled use of qisṭ in the Qurʾān.

What is to be added here: the proper sense of qisṭ is a share. To say "weigh with equity" is therefore to say "give every man his share to the measure of his share". Justice here is not an abstract virtue but an operation of apportioning.

And the finding recorded for the word ʿadl in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn echoes here: the proper sense of ʿadl is equivalence, and ʿidl names the counterweight loaded on one side of a camel — the concept of justice itself, that is, arose from the image of a scale. The same conclusion holds for qisṭ: the word comes from the image of a division.

Root: ط-غ-ي. This root was analysed in full in al-ʿAlaq and was put to work in the sections al-Nāziʿāt and al-Layl. I do not repeat what was recorded there. The summary:

The proper, concrete sense of the root is water passing its limit, overflowing. The evidence is the Qurʾān's own usage: "When the water overflowed (ṭagha'l-māʾ), We carried you in the running ship" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/11) — there the word carries no moral sense whatever, only the water's passing of its bound. Ṭughyān is a being's passing of its own limit. Water becomes a flood when it passes its bed; flooding water is no longer water that feeds but water that destroys. The same water, in the same quantity, is life so long as it stays within its bed. And the emblem of the root in the Qurʾān is Pharaoh: "Go to Pharaoh; he has transgressed" (al-Nāziʿāt 79/17). The furthest point of ṭughyān is to put oneself in the position of a lord.

Now apply this definition to the verse and see what happens.

The word the Qurʾān uses for Pharaoh, for Thamūd, for the man who thinks himself sufficient, is used here for a man standing at a set of scales.

As recorded in the section on al-Nāziʿāt, the work that sūra does is "to turn the story of one person into an attribute": ṭaghā is used first of Pharaoh (79/17), then becomes a measure (79/37). al-Raḥmān turns the same word in another direction: it attaches the attribute to an operation.

And when the two texts are read together this comes out: to declare oneself a lord and to give two grams short on the scales are named by the same word in the Qurʾān's lexicon. Both are a passing beyond the limit; the difference between them is one of scale, not of kind.

This is the linguistic ground of the diagnosis made in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn, and it was pointed to there as well: that sūra said "the quantity does not change the name of the act". al-Raḥmān gives the name.

Root: خ-س-ر. This root was taken up in al-ʿAṣr and was treated together with this verse in al-Muṭaffifīn. What was recorded there:

Its proper sense is diminution and loss; and this sense has settled in Arabic particularly in the field of trade and weighing. The usual renderings have picked up an emotional colouring; the Arabic khusrān is a cold balance sheet. And the verb is of إفعال (Form IV): akhsara — to bring another to loss. In al-ʿAṣr man is inside the loss (fī khusr); in al-Muṭaffifīn man brings another to loss (yukhsirūn).

And here exactly the same verb occurs: لَا تُخْسِرُوا۟.

It was recorded in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn that these two verses (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/3 and al-Raḥmān 55/9) are together adduced as evidence for the root's settling in trade. What is to be added here is a difference of mood:

The last row matters. al-Muṭaffifīn says "they give short" and does not say what they give short. al-Raḥmān gives the object, and the object is surprising: what is given short is the balance.

You are not giving the goods short — you are giving the balance short. The word looks deliberately chosen, because what is in fact diminished is the goods; the verse says that what is damaged is the measure.

I record this as my own reading. That the object is al-mīzān is data of the text.

The أَلَّا at the head of the eighth verse is a combination of an + lā, and it is read in two ways:

There is a difference in meaning, and it is not small. On the first reading the balance was set for a purpose; on the second, the setting of the balance brought a command with it.

Both readings are defensible and I do not impose a preference. But I record this: the first reading presents the setting of the balance as an act of founding an order; the second as an act of address. And the sūra as a whole supports both — it both enumerates a cosmic order and speaks directly to the one addressed.

Now I come to why these three verses are among the strongest ideas in the sūra — perhaps in the Qurʾān.

This finding was briefly recorded in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn:

The verses name the balance in the same sentence as the raising of the sky. Mīzān is thus set down not as an instrument of trade but as a part of the order of the universe.

Here I need to unfold that finding, because the matter is not a comparison.

What the verse does is not a metaphor. A metaphor is the carrying of an image taken from one field into another: to say "justice is like a balance" is a metaphor. The verse does not say this.

The verse uses a single word and spreads that word across two fields at once. Between the mīzān of the seventh verse and the mīzān of the ninth there is no "like". The same word, wholly unaltered, descends from the sky to the marketplace.

The meaning of this is: the verse does not count the measure as two separate things standing in two separate places; it counts it as two appearances of one thing.

And this is completed by the finding recorded for the word ʿadl in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn:

The balance is not the metaphor of justice; it is the source of the word for justice. The man who breaks the balance is not breaking an instrument; he is breaking the model of justice itself.

al-Raḥmān carries this a step further: the man who breaks the balance is breaking something named in the same sentence as the raising of the sky.

And now something must be recorded that looks to the sūra as a whole.

The word ṭughyān occurs in the eighth verse: to pass beyond the limit.

And in the twentieth verse the sūra will use another word for the same idea, of the two seas: لَّا يَبْغِيَانِ — "they do not overstep against one another."

In the section on al-Muṭaffifīn the sūra's "words of limit" were gathered in a table: muṭaffif (he clips at the edge of the limit), fājir (he tears the limit), muʿtad (he crosses the limit), mīzān/ṭughyān (he overflows the limit). That table can be drawn for al-Raḥmān too, and it comes out wider:

And the conclusion that comes out of the table is this: in the sūra the ruling not to pass the limit is given for nature in the declarative mood and for man in the imperative.

The sun is by a reckoning — this is a statement. The seas do not overflow — this is a statement. But of man it is said "do not transgress" — this is a command.

The difference is this: man is the only being that can overflow. There is no possibility of the sea crossing the barrier; that is why what is set up about it is a description, not a prohibition. About man a prohibition is set up, because the possibility exists.

I record this as my own reading; the distribution of the moods is data of the text, and was shown in the table.

First: where the measure stands.

Today the concept of measure is fragmented, the exact opposite of the unity the sūra sets up. The laws of physics are one field, commercial law another, morality a third. The three have no common name.

The verse holds all three in one word. And this has a practical consequence: breaking the measure becomes visible not as a technical infringement but as a choice concerning the order itself.

Second: the keeping of the instrument.

It was recorded above: two prohibitions take the instrument as their subject and a single command the act. This distinction is especially sharp for today.

To make an error in an operation and to break the measure itself are different things. The first can be corrected; the second makes correction impossible, because correcting also requires the same instrument. If a set of scales weighs wrongly, no check made with those scales is of any use.

Its counterparts today are not confined to scales: when a measurement, an examination, an audit or a count is itself corrupted, every correction made in that field carries the same corruption. This is why the prohibition is placed on the instrument.

Third: the scale of transgression.

That the word ṭughyān is used both for Pharaoh and for the man at the scales is the most uncomfortable side of the sūra, and the discomfort is in place.

As recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq: "transgression is not the possession of something bad; it is the carrying of something good beyond its own limit." The man who gives two grams short on the scales possesses nothing bad. What he possesses is an instrument, and the instrument is good. The one thing he does is to shift the limit of the instrument a millimetre in his own favour.

And the word puts that millimetre in the same pan as Pharaoh's sentence.

Wa'l-arḍa waḍaʿahā li'l-anām · Fīhā fākihatun wa'l-nakhlu dhātu'l-akmām · Wa'l-ḥabbu dhu'l-ʿaṣfi wa'l-rayḥān

"And the earth He set down for the creatures · in it are fruit and palms with sheathed clusters · and grain with its husk, and fragrant herb."

After the sky, the earth. And the sūra's first refrain will come after these three verses.

It was recorded above: this is a repetition of the waḍaʿa of the seventh verse. The balance and the earth are set down by the same verb. And the sky is raised, while the two are set down.

The earth is thus established not as the opposite of the sky but as the partner of the balance. I record this as an observation about the word order.

Root: أ-ن-م. The word is very rare in the Qurʾān — it is recorded as occurring in this pattern only in this verse — and its exact extent is disputed.

The second view is of further importance because it solves the grammatical problem of the refrain, and it was entered in the table in the discussion of the dual form above. But the extent of the word in the dictionary does not make this necessary.

I do not impose a preference. And there is a point that must be recorded: whichever view is taken, the earth has been set down for someone. Beside the verb there is a lām — the lām of specification.

In the section on al-Baqara this matter was treated in the discussion of lakum ("for you") at 2/29, and the note recorded there holds here as well: that a thing is "for you" does not mean that it is "your property".

Root: ف-ك-ه. It was treated in the discussion of fawākih in the section on al-Mursalāt. What was recorded there: beneath the root lie pleasure and delight; fukāha — jesting, agreeable conversation; fākih — cheerful. Fruit took this name because it is not a necessary food: one lives without eating it, but eating it adds pleasantness.

And note: the verse names fruit before grain. Not the necessary (grain) but the surplus (fruit) has been put first. I record this as an observation about the word order.

Root: ك-م-م. To cover, to wrap, to enclose.

• كِمّ — the husk, the sheath that keeps the date cluster inside it. Its plural is أَكْمَام.
• كُمّ — the sleeve of a garment. The part that encloses the arm.
• كِمَامَة — the muzzle put on an animal's mouth.

The single idea beneath the root: a wrapping that covers a thing over.

And the choice of the word is meaningful: in naming the palm it is not its fruit that is named but the sheath that keeps the fruit hidden. The favour is counted, that is, in its still unopened state.

The finding recorded for the word janna in the section on al-Baqara — that the root (j-n-n) means to cover, and that janna means "a garden that covers the soil with its trees" — echoes here. The idea of covering will come up in more than one place in this sūra.

Root: ع-ص-ف. This root was treated in al-Fīl and taken up on its verbal side in al-Mursalāt. What was recorded there:

ʿAṣf is the part of a crop other than the grain — stalk, leaf, husk, chaff. The dry residue left in the field after the harvest and scattered by the wind. And from the same root comes ʿāṣif: a violent, scattering wind. The root carries the idea of being scattered within it.

And in the section on al-Fīl precisely this verse was pointed to:

Its clearest occurrence in the Qurʾān is in Sūrat al-Raḥmān: "grain together with its husks, and fragrant plants" (al-Raḥmān 55/12). There ʿaṣf is the worthless part beside the grain. Even while a favour is being counted, grain and husk are kept apart.

What is to be added here is this: the verse does not say "al-ḥabbu wa'l-ʿaṣfu" — it says ذُو ٱلْعَصْف, that is, "grain, the possessor of the husk". The husk comes as a quality of the grain, not as an item of its own.

And read together with Sūrat al-Fīl this says something. In al-Fīl an army was turned into "chewed-up ʿaṣf": into the worthless part. Here the same word stands beside a favour: the husk of the grain, a part of the grain.

The same thing is in one place an end and in another a part of a favour. The difference lies in what it stands beside. The husk itself does not change; beside the grain it is counted a favour, left alone in the field it becomes scattered residue.

I record this as my own reading. That the word in the two verses is from the same root, and where it stands in the two contexts, is data of the text.

Root: ر-و-ح. Beneath this root lies a wide family: rūḥ (spirit), rīḥ (wind), rāḥa (rest), rawḥ (relief), rayḥān.

On the meaning of the word there are two views:

The first view is the more widespread, and the word order supports it too: the verse has counted fruit, palms and grain — all things eaten. If the last item is not something eaten, the list is adding one thing more: scent.

And this completes the logic of the list. The three verses run in this order:

The list begins with pleasantness, descends to necessity, and rises to pleasantness again. Staple food in the middle, and at the two ends two things that are not required.

I record this as my own reading. The order of the words is in the text; the structure I draw from that order is an interpretation.

And this may be added: ʿaṣf is the only item in the list that man does not eat. The animal's share is counted inside man's list of favours.

A note on a variant reading. It is recorded that there is a difference of recitation in the vowelling of the last word of this verse (al-rayḥānu / al-rayḥāni). The difference changes the word's connection within the sentence but does not change the item counted. I do not name an imam, because I cannot give one with certainty.

The analysis of the refrain was made in a separate section above; I do not repeat it. Here only two points particular to this first occurrence:

One. This refrain comes after a section of twelve verses — the longest section in the sūra. And the list behind it contains the following: a name, three verbs, sun, moon, najm, shajar, sky, balance, earth, fruit, palm, grain, husk, fragrant herb.

At the first asking, then, a list of fourteen items stands before the one addressed. The question covers not one of them but all of them at once.

Two. And the difficulty recorded above in the discussion of the dual form stands here: the dual pronoun (Rabbikumā) occurs here for the first time, but men and jinn will be named in the following verse. This difficulty is not concealed; the three answers given were entered in the table above.

Khalaqa'l-insāna min ṣalṣālin ka'l-fakhkhār · Wa khalaqa'l-jānna min mārijin min nār

"He created man from dry clay that rings like pottery · and He created the jānn from a smokeless flame."

The second section of the sūra, and two verses long. Two species, two substances, two sentences — and the sentences are in exactly the same pattern:

خَلَقَ + ٱلْـ[species] + مِنْ + [substance]

The repetition of the pattern does a piece of work: the two species receive equal treatment. As recorded in the section on al-Jinn, "the jinn are not the opposite of man but his parallel: two species under obligation, from two different substances." The word order of the verses makes this visible.

And note: the second verse has a وَ, the first does not. The second verse is thus attached to the first; the two are the halves of a single announcement.

Root: ص-ل-ص-ل. This is one of the muḍāʿaf rubāʿī roots of Arabic — a four-letter root built by doubling a two-letter core.

And this type of root was analysed in this commentary in al-Zilzāl. What was recorded there:

Doubled roots in Arabic do one piece of work: they describe a repeated, back-and-forth, oscillating movement and the sound that movement makes.

And the first item in the list of examples given there was precisely this word: "صَلْصَلَ — to ring, the clinking of dry clay (ṣalṣāl, al-Raḥmān 55/14)."

On the meaning of the word the lexicographers record two branches:

The comparison in the verse supports the first branch: ka'l-fakhkhār — "like pottery". The distinguishing feature of pottery is not that it smells but that it is fired and gives out a sound. The verse itself thus says which branch it means.

But the second branch cannot be struck out either, because the Qurʾān uses the same word elsewhere together with precisely that expression:

"We created man from dry clay, from moulded mud." (al-Ḥijr 15/26) — min ṣalṣālin min ḥamaʾin masnūn

There ṣalṣāl stands beside ḥamaʾ masnūn (clay given shape, clay that has undergone change). The Qurʾān has thus used the word with two different comparisons in two different places.

The Qurʾān does not use one single word for the substance from which man was made. The words form a series, and each seems to name a different stage:

The direction of the series is towards dryness: dust, wet clay, sticky clay, moulded mud, dried clay.

A note: I do not present this series as a description of stages. The Qurʾān uses these words in different sūras, in different contexts, and nowhere ranges them in an order. The ordering is an arrangement of mine and is not a claim.

Root: ف-خ-ر. Fakhkhār — clay fired in the kiln, pottery.

A second family of words comes from the same root, and it is striking: فَخْر (boasting), فَخُور (one who boasts much), مُفَاخَرَة (competition in boasting). The Qurʾān uses the word fakhūr as a censured attribute: "God does not love any conceited boaster" (Luqmān 31/18).

The two words share the same consonants. The link the lexicographers draw between the two is disputed, and I do not present it as a settled etymology.

But this observation can be recorded, and I record it as my own reading: the word chosen for the substance from which man was made is built of the same letters as the name of the fault against which the Qurʾān warns man most. This is not a proof but a nicety; and even as a nicety it becomes visible only when attention is paid to the sound-fabric of Arabic.

The work of the comparison. Ka'l-fakhkhār — "like pottery". Pottery has two properties, and both fit the context: it gives out a sound and it breaks. The verse does not state the second; but the sūra will state it twelve verses later: "Everyone upon the earth passes away" (26).

Root: م-ر-ج. And here is one of the tightest internal links of the sūra; I record it now and will complete it at the nineteenth verse.

The idea beneath the root: to mingle and to let loose. The two go together, and the reason is plain — things let loose become mingled.

• مَرَجَ — he let loose, he set free; he mingled. Maraja'l-dābba — he turned the animal loose into the pasture.
• مَرْج — meadow, pasture. The place where an animal is turned loose. In Turkish the borrowed words merc/mera ("pasture") are connected with this root.
• مَرِيج — mingled, tangled together. In the Qurʾān: "They are in a confused affair" (Qāf 50/5 — fī amrin marīj).
• مَارِج — the active participle: what mingles, what has been let loose.

A mārij is thus not a kind of fire; it is a state of fire. The word describes the confusion and freedom of the flame — a flame attached to nothing, unsettled, restless.

The choice of this word for the jinn is meaningful. Man from a substance that is dried, hardened, given shape; the jinn from a substance that is mingled, let loose, shapeless. The substance of the one is fixed, that of the other restless.

As recorded in al-Jinn, this verse is one of two pieces of information the Qurʾān gives about the substance of the jinn; the second is al-Ḥijr 15/27 (min nāri's-samūm — smokeless, scorching fire). And the measure recorded in that section holds here as well:

The Qurʾān does not speak of the jinn's shapes, their numbers, or where they live. This silence is no accident. The word jinn is not a definition but a boundary marker.

This verse stays within that boundary: it gives the name of a substance and says nothing else.

Two details are worth pausing over:

One. For man a comparison is given (like pottery), for the jinn none. A comparison rests on something the one addressed knows. Everyone knows pottery; there is no second object to describe the "mārij" state of a flame.

Two. For the jinn the source of the substance is further specified: min mārijin min nār — "a mārij of fire". Two mins, one upon the other. The substance is thus narrowed twice: from fire, and from a particular state of fire.

I record these as observations about the word order.

The verse names man first. Yet the Qurʾān says elsewhere that the jinn were created earlier:

"And the jānn We created before, from scorching fire." (al-Ḥijr 15/27) — wa'l-jānna khalaqnāhu min qabl

The order in time, then, favours the jinn, the order of the verse man. This is exactly the situation in the first four verses of the sūra, and the measure recorded there holds here as well: the order of mention is not the order of occurrence. The sūra is addressing man, and it puts man first.

Rabbu'l-mashriqayni wa Rabbu'l-maghribayn

"Lord of the two easts, and Lord of the two wests."

A section of one verse — the first section of this length in the sūra.

This construction was entered in a table in al-Maʿārij, together with the plural form that occurs there. I do not repeat what was recorded there; I recall the table and the explanation and confine myself to showing the difference.

The table drawn in the section on al-Maʿārij was this — the Qurʾān uses these two words in three different numbers:

And the explanation of the classical exegetes was recorded there:

- Singular: east and west as directions; the two basic bearings. - Dual: the sun's two extreme points of rising and setting in the summer and winter months. This is a phenomenon that can be seen with the eye. - Plural: the point of rising shifts a little every day of the year; the points of rising are therefore many in number.

And one further note was entered there which must be repeated here: this is not a claim of scientific miracle. What is described is no modern discovery; for a people living in the desert and reading the horizon like a calendar it is a phenomenon visible to the naked eye and known in that period as well.

Setting the two verses side by side shows what the number changes:

And the most striking difference of word order here: the repetition of the word رَبُّ.

The verse does not say "the Lord of the two easts and the two wests". It says "the Lord of the two easts and the Lord of the two wests". The word occurs twice.

In al-Maʿārij, by contrast, a single Rabb carries both governed terms.

Two explanations are given for this repetition:

Both are possible and they do not exclude each other. But I record this and present it as my own reading: this sūra is a text built on pairs from beginning to end, and in precisely this verse the two halves of the pair are made the objects of separate ownership. Within the sūra's own logic the repetition meets the meaning before it meets the sound.

And a note on sound must be entered here.

As recorded above in the section on the sound structure, all the verse-endings of the sūra are on the pattern long ā + a single consonant: -ān, -ām, -ār.

This verse falls outside that scheme. Al-maghribayn — there is no long ā; there is the -ayn form of the dual ending.

And what is striking is this: the verse in which this exception occurs is the verse whose subject is twoness.

I record this as my own reading and do not count it a proof. But the observation can be verified: the one marked deviation in the sūra's sound scheme is found in the verse that speaks of two extreme points.

Maraja'l-baḥrayni yaltaqiyān · Baynahumā barzakhun lā yabghiyān

"He let the two seas loose, and they meet · between them is a barrier, and they do not overstep against one another."

These two verses stand at the centre of one of the claims most often advanced about the Qurʾān in the last half-century. For that reason two pieces of work will be done here and kept apart: first what the words say, then why the claim is rejected.

This will be the order, because without knowing what the verse says one cannot even discuss whether a claim about it is true.

Root: م-ر-ج. This root occurred four verses earlier, in the fifteenth verse, in the form مَارِج, and was analysed there. I do not repeat it; the summary:

The idea beneath the root is to mingle and to let loose; the two go together, because things let loose become mingled. Marj — pasture, the place where an animal is turned loose. Marīj — mingled (Qāf 50/5).

And here is one of the tightest internal links in the sūra:

The same root, four verses apart, for fire and for water. The jinn were created from the let-loose state of fire; the two seas were let loose. I record this as an observation about the weave of words; that the two words are from the same root and where they stand in the sūra is data of the text.

On the sense of the verb in this verse there are two readings:

Both are defensible and they do not conflict. The rest of the verse meets both: the seas meet (there is contact), but they do not overflow into one another (the mingling is not complete).

The inclination in this commentary is towards the first reading, and it is not binding. The ground is the word order: had the verse said "He mingled", it would then have said "they do not mingle", which produces a tension. The reading "He let loose" agrees with the sentence that follows: they have been set free, but freedom is not limitlessness.

And this is the most important question about the verse. The Qurʾān itself gives the answer.

The Qurʾān uses the same expression elsewhere too — and in one place it says explicitly what it means:

وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَرَجَ ٱلْبَحْرَيْنِ هَٰذَا عَذْبٌ فُرَاتٌ وَهَٰذَا مِلْحٌ أُجَاجٌ وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَهُمَا بَرْزَخًا وَحِجْرًا مَّحْجُورًا "It is He who let the two seas loose: this one sweet and quenching, that one salt and bitter. And between the two He set a barrier and an impassable partition." (al-Furqān 25/53)

This verse is decisive. The same verb (maraja), the same object (al-baḥrayn), the same word (barzakh) — and in addition what the two seas are is stated: one sweet, one salt.

The same distinction is drawn in one further place:

"The two seas are not alike: this one sweet, thirst-quenching, easy to drink; that one salt and bitter. Yet from each of them you eat fresh meat and bring out ornaments to wear." (Fāṭir 35/12)

And a third:

"…and who set a partition (ḥājiz) between the two seas…" (al-Naml 27/61)

The Qurʾān's "two seas", then, are not two salt seas; they are fresh water and salt water.

And this is what the majority of the classical exegetes understood from this verse. The explanations recorded:

The first explanation is the one with the strongest evidence from within the Qurʾān, and it is the one adopted in this commentary. It is not binding, but in the face of al-Furqān 25/53 and Fāṭir 35/12 the second explanation has no separate ground.

Root: ل-ق-ي. This root was treated in the section on al-Mursalāt in the form alqā (Form IV — to leave, to cast). Here it is in ٱفْتِعَال (Form VIII): إِلْتَقَى — to meet one another, to come together.

Form VIII conveys reciprocity here: it is not that one comes to the other; the two come to each other.

And the verb is imperfect: yaltaqiyān — "they are meeting", a state that continues. Not a single meeting; an unbroken contact.

There is a nicety in the word order. The clause yaltaqiyān comes without a connective — maraja'l-baḥrayni yaltaqiyān. In grammar this counts as a circumstantial clause (ḥāl): "He let them loose — while they meet." The meeting is thus not a consequence of the letting loose but a condition present within it.

The origin of the word is disputed. Some of the lexicographers count it a foreign entrant into Arabic and attach it to a Persian word; others accept it as Arabic. I do not speak with certainty.

Its meaning, on the other hand, is beyond dispute: the barrier, the screen, the intervening zone between two things.

The word occurs in three places in the Qurʾān, and seeing the three together shows the field of the word:

The third is decisive. The same word is used for the barrier between two waters and for the interval between death and resurrection.

The shared idea is this: a barzakh is the between that prevents two things from passing into one another. In the water it is spatial, in death temporal — but its function is the same: to prevent crossing.

And in English the word has been borrowed only in its second sense (barzakh, the state between death and resurrection). The first sense — an ordinary "interval, barrier" — is missing from the borrowed use, and this makes the verse harder to read.

And here is the most important word of the verse.

Root: ب-غ-ي. This root was treated in al-Baqara at 2/90, and what was recorded there was this:

بَغْيًا — the root b-gh-y: to pass the limit, transgression; and envy. The verse names the cause of the refusal explicitly: "begrudging that God should bestow of His bounty on whichever of His servants He wills." … Like pride, envy too is born of a comparison.

Now note this: the word is a moral word.

In al-Baqara the reason a people rejected the revelation was named baghy. The Qurʾān regularly uses the same root for injustice, wrongdoing and aggression.

And in this verse the same word is used of two seas.

The verse does not say "they do not mingle", nor "they do not pass into one another". It says "they do not commit baghy against one another" — that is, "they do not encroach on each other's right", "they do not pass their bounds".

This is the sūra's most consistent choice, and it is not accidental. As recorded above, the sūra is built from beginning to end on words of limit: in the eighth verse man is told lā taṭghaw (do not transgress), in the twentieth the seas are said lā yabghiyān (they do not transgress). Both are words of limit, and both belong to the field of morals.

The difference is in the mood:

The seas are given no command; what they do is reported. Man is given a command.

And the meaning of this difference was recorded above: man is the only being that can overflow. By describing the sea with a moral word the verse sets a measure before man — even water stands at its limit.

I record this reading as my own. That the two words belong to the field of morals and that the moods differ are verifiable data of the text.

Now I come to the second piece of work, and it must be said plainly, because there is a claim widely advanced about this verse and it is rejected in this commentary.

The claim is this: the verse announced in advance a phenomenon that modern oceanography discovered in the twentieth century — that bodies of water of differing density, salinity and temperature do not mingle when they meet but form a transition zone between them. The word barzakh describes this transition zone, and lā yabghiyān the waters' not mingling with one another. The verse is therefore a scientific miracle.

I reject this claim and set out the grounds one by one.

It was shown above: al-Furqān 25/53 and Fāṭir 35/12 define the two seas as fresh water and salt water. This is an explicit exegesis of an implicit word, and it comes from within the Qurʾān.

And that fresh water stands for a while without mingling where it pours into salt water is not something seen with a microscope or a measuring instrument. It is seen with the naked eye.

At the mouth where a river pours into the sea, the water keeps a difference of colour and texture for a long stretch. It is seen in the gulf where the Euphrates and the Tigris empty, at the mouth of the Nile, at every river mouth in the world. And the Arabian peninsula is surrounded by sea; those addressed were seafarers and knew river mouths.

The phenomenon described in the verse, then, is a phenomenon its first addressees knew. To suppose that a text says something unintelligible to its first addressees runs against the logic of address itself — this measure was recorded in al-ʿAlaq as well, in the discussion of the word ʿalaqa, and it holds here unchanged.

Barzakh is "the barrier between two things". The word contains no density, no salinity, no temperature, and no thickness of a transition zone.

And the word's third use in the Qurʾān settles this: at al-Muʾminūn 23/100 the same word is used for the interval between death and resurrection. There it has no physical content whatever.

To load a word with a technical content it never carries in its other uses is not exegesis but attribution.

It was shown above: baghy is the word the Qurʾān uses for injustice and transgression; at al-Baqara 2/90 it names the reason a people rejected the revelation.

Had the verse wished to describe the physical behaviour of the waters it had far more suitable words at its disposal than this one — such as lā yakhtaliṭān (they do not mingle). The word chosen is not that.

The verse says by its choice of word, then, that it is not giving a physical description. What is described is a behaviour: standing at one's limit.

It is often said in the claim: "modern science discovered that the seas do not mingle."

This is not what oceanography says. Different bodies of water do mingle — only they mingle slowly, and between them lies not a sharp line but a gradient of transition. What is called a halocline or a pycnocline is not a wall but a curve; and along that curve the exchange of water continues.

The claim, that is, loads the verse with a technical content on the one hand and describes that content wrongly on the other.

And note: the verse does not say "they do not mingle." The verse says "they meet" (yaltaqiyān) — contact, that is, is granted. Then it says "they do not transgress". The two together do not deny mingling; they state that neither swallows the other.

What the verse says and what the claim says are not the same thing.

The principle recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq holds here unchanged and needs repeating:

To tie the truth of a verse to a current scientific description is to make that verse a partner in the fate of that description. Scientific descriptions change, become more detailed, and are sometimes abandoned. This is to make the text fragile in the very act of trying to defend it.

And the last ground, the most important.

Where does this verse stand? Inside an enumeration of favours. Before it come the sun, the moon, the plant, the balance, fruit, palms, grain; after it will come pearl, coral and ships. And then comes the question: "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?"

The verse is not giving a lesson in geography. It counts the holding of a limit as a favour.

And the next verse says this explicitly: "From the two come forth pearl and coral." What is recounted, that is, is the benefit of the water's holding to its limit, not its mechanism.

To turn the verse into a report of a discovery makes its work within the sūra invisible — which is the very finding recorded for ʿalaqa in the section on al-ʿAlaq.

• The meaning of the words is given and not diminished: two bodies of water have been let loose, they meet, between them is a barrier, and they do not overstep one another's bounds. This is the plain sense of the verse and is beyond dispute.
• A reader who notices that this description recalls a phenomenon in modern oceanography may take that association, for his own part, as an occasion for reflection.
• But this cannot be presented as the verse's claim and cannot be turned into a proof of miracle. The rule of Method that "no hunting for scientific miracles is done" exists precisely to preserve this distinction.

Yakhruju minhuma'l-luʾluʾu wa'l-marjān

"From the two come forth pearl and coral."

A section of one verse. And the benefit of the two seas is stated here.

And this word has raised a question in the classical commentaries: pearl and coral come out of salt water; they do not come out of fresh water. Yet the verse says "from the two".

The answers given in the classical sources:

And the Qurʾān itself touches on this matter:

"Yet from each of them you eat fresh meat and bring out ornaments to wear." (Fāṭir 35/12) — wa min kullin taʾkulūna laḥman ṭariyyan wa tastakhrijūna ḥilyatan talbasūnahā

The verse of Fāṭir uses the same expression: min kullin — "from each". The Qurʾān's own usage is thus consistent, and the matter is a choice of word order, not an error of fact.

I do not impose a preference. The first answer is the soundest, since it rests on a settled usage in Arabic.

The lexicographers do not speak with certainty about the origin of the word. It occurs in several places in the Qurʾān and almost every time in a context of ornament.

And there is a nicety in the place of the word in this verse: the pearl is the one thing coming out of the sea that is not eaten. In the preceding group of verses rayḥān (scent) did the same work: an item beyond need enters the list.

The sūra, that is, does not define a favour as "a thing that is useful".

The origin of the word is disputed. Some lexicographers say it entered Arabic from outside; others count it Arabic. I do not speak with certainty.

Two views are recorded about its meaning as well:

Both are transmitted and I do not impose a preference. The second view takes the occurrence of the two words in the same sentence as a gradation; the first takes them as two distinct objects.

A note on sound. The word begins with the same consonants as the verb three verses earlier (maraja): م-ر-ج. I do not claim that there is an etymological link between them — the origin of the word is disputed in any case. But the repetition of the sound is something audible in the text: maraja'l-baḥrayn … al-marjān. I record this as an observation about the sound.

And an internal ring: the word marjān will come once more in the sūra, at verse 58 — ka-annahunna'l-yāqūtu wa'l-marjān. What comes out of the sea returns in the description of the garden as a comparison.

Wa lahu'l-jawāri'l-munshaʾātu fi'l-baḥri ka'l-aʿlām

"And His are the ships raised up, running on the sea like mountains."

Root: ج-ر-ي. This root was treated in al-Ḥāqqa, and precisely this verse was given there as an example. What was recorded there:

The same root names in the Qurʾān the ship that goes on the water, the river that runs in the garden and the body that moves in the sky (al-jawāri'l-kunnas at al-Takwīr 81/16). The single idea the root carries is the continuity of movement.

ٱلْجَوَارِ is the plural of jāriya: "the ones that run". And note: the name chosen for the ship describes not its build but its movement.

Root: ن-ش-أ. To bring a thing into being, to raise, to elevate. Nashʾa (coming into being), inshāʾ (constructing), munshiʾ (the one who constructs) are from the same root.

And there is a variant reading here, and it changes the meaning:

Both are transmitted. I do not name an imam, because I cannot give one with certainty. And the two recitations do not cancel each other, as was recorded for Mālik/Malik in the section on al-Fātiḥa: neither cancels the other; together the two widen the meaning. The ship is both built and spreads its sails.

Root: ع-ل-م. And there is a weave of words here that must be recorded.

عَلَم — a sign, a mark, a token; and from there a mountain or a high thing set up as a road-marker. Its plural is أَعْلَام.

As recorded in the discussion of ʿālamīn in the section on al-Fātiḥa, this root carries both the sense of knowing and that of sign; and an ʿālam means "that by which something is known".

Now go back to the head of the sūra: the second and fourth verses began with عَلَّمَ — the same root.

The same root: a verb of teaching at the opening of the sūra, a noun of signs at the twenty-fourth verse. And the link between the two lies in the root itself: knowing and the sign come from the same place; a thing is known only by its sign.

I record this as an observation about the weave of words; that the root is shared is a verifiable datum of the language, and the connection I draw between them is a reading.

And the most striking word of the verse is here.

Until now the sūra has counted what He does: He taught, He created, He raised, He set, He let loose. Here there is no verb; there is a declaration of ownership: wa lahu — "and His are".

And the thing owned is the one man-made object in the sūra's list of favours.

The sun, the moon, the plant, the sea, the pearl — none of them is man's work. The ship is something man makes; the verse itself says so (munshaʾāt — constructed).

And in spite of this the verse ascribes the ship to God.

I record this as my own reading: the sūra takes into the list an object man counts as the product of his own hand, and attaches its ownership elsewhere. The measure recorded for lillāh in the section on al-Fātiḥa works here too — "it reminds you where the person you thank got the very possibility of doing that good. The last link of the chain always comes out at the same place."

The timber of the ship, the sea, the wind, and the hand that built it — none of these is man's invention.

Kullu man ʿalayhā fān · Wa yabqā wajhu Rabbika dhu'l-jalāli wa'l-ikrām

"Everyone upon it passes away · and there abides the face of your Lord, possessor of majesty and honour."

This is the axis of the sūra.

In the middle of favours counted for twenty-five verses, with no preparation whatever, these two sentences arrive. And after them — with no softening at all — the refrain: "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?"

The grammatical construction of the two verses differs, and the difference carries the meaning:

And this choice looks carefully made.

The verse does not say "sa-yafnā" (it will pass away). It says فَانٍ — an active participle, that is, an adjective. Perishing is not an event that will occur in the future; it is a quality carried now.

The measure recorded for la-wāqiʿ in the section on al-Mursalāt works here too:

In Arabic a nominal sentence conveys thubūt. The occurrence is stated not as a future event but as a quality already fixed in the present.

And for the other side a verb is used: yabqā — "abides", "goes on abiding". The imperfect conveys unbroken continuance.

The verse thus gives transience as an adjective and permanence as a verb. The one has fastened onto the being, the other is an act that goes on.

فَنَاء — root ف-ن-ي. To be used up, to come to an end, to be no more. The concrete use of the word is a thing's running out — water being used up, a lifetime being completed.

بَقَاء — root ب-ق-ي. To remain, to be left over, to continue. From the same root come baqiyya (what remains, what is left over) and abqā (more lasting).

The two are regularly used as opposites in the Qurʾān:

"What is with you runs out; what is with God abides." (al-Naḥl 16/96) — mā ʿindakum yanfadu wa mā ʿinda'llāhi bāq

And the verse treated in the section on al-Aʿlā sets up the same pair: "Rather, you prefer the life of this world; yet the hereafter is better and more lasting" (al-Aʿlā 87/16-17).

Whose is the pronoun? There is a feminine pronoun in the verse (ʿalayhā) but its antecedent is not in this verse.

The first view is the sounder — the tenth verse had said "and the earth He set down for the creatures", and this is the antecedent of the pronoun in the verse.

And the word مَنْ is worth pausing over. In Arabic man is used of those possessed of reason, mā of those not. The verse says man — what is directly covered, that is, is beings possessed of reason: men and jinn.

Two reasons are given for this in the classical explanations: either because the address is to those under obligation in any case, or because all living things are meant by way of taghlīb (naming the predominant and including the rest with it).

And the choice has a consequence: the verse does not say "everything", it says "everyone". The announcement of perishing is directed not at stone and mountain but at the one who can hear it.

I record this as an observation about the word order.

Root: و-ج-ه. This word was treated in two separate places in al-Baqara, and I must rely on both.

The first, at al-Baqara 2/112:

أَسْلَمَ وَجْهَهُۥ — "he submitted his face". In Arabic wajh (face) can stand for the whole — the face is the most visible and most recognisable part of a person. That submission is with the whole and not with a part is said by this word.

The second, at al-Baqara 2/115:

فَثَمَّ وَجْهُ ٱللَّهِ — "there is the face of God". Although wajh means "face", it can cover the whole and the act of turning. The widespread understanding here is "the direction to which God's good pleasure is turned" or "the aspect of turning towards Him". What the verse says: God cannot be confined to a place. What the verse does not say: that direction has no importance at all.

Now let us apply these two notes to this verse.

At al-Baqara 2/112 wajh was used of man and covered the whole: he who submits his face has submitted himself.

At al-Baqara 2/115 wajh was used of God, and as recorded there the word carries the sense of aspect and turning.

In this verse too the same word is used of God, and the classical understandings are these:

The first understanding is the most widespread, and the word order supports it too: the verse sets up a contrast — "everyone upon it perishes, the face of your Lord abides". If the two sides of the contrast are beings, the second side must answer to a being as well.

But the second understanding cannot be struck out either, and it has been defended in the classical commentaries; the usage of al-Baqara 2/115 itself gives it a ground.

I do not impose a preference. Nor do the two exclude each other: His Essence abides, and what has turned towards Him takes a share of that abiding.

This construction occurs twice in the sūra: here (27) and in the last verse (78). Seventy-one verses lie between them, and the two set up the frame of the sūra. I shall take up this frame separately at the last verse below.

ٱلْجَلَال — root ج-ل-ل. Greatness, loftiness, magnitude. Jalīl (lofty), ajall (loftier), jalāla are from the same root. The concrete core of the root is greatness and weight; and in Arabic this greatness gives rise to distance and awe.

ٱلْإِكْرَام — root ك-ر-م. This root was treated in al-ʿAlaq in the discussion of al-akram. I do not repeat what was recorded there; beneath the root lie generosity, valuing, showing honour.

And the pattern matters: إِكْرَام is the verbal noun of Form IV — it conveys, that is, an act: the showing of honour. Not karam (an attribute) but ikrām (an act).

On the meaning of the construction there are two readings:

The first reading is the more widespread and agrees with the sūra as a whole: from beginning to end the sūra counts acts of honouring.

And the real force of the construction lies in the two words pulling in opposite directions:

The two words are joined in a single construction. And the balance recorded in the section on al-Fātiḥa for the sequence of al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm and Māliki yawmi'l-dīn is here compressed into one construction:

Had only mercy been heard: responsibility would have melted away. Had only the reckoning been heard: despair would have been born. When the two are set one after the other a balance emerges.

In al-Raḥmān this balance is built not one after the other but side by side: dhu'l-jalāli wa'l-ikrām.

And now I come to the real question: why are these two verses here?

The sūra is an enumeration of favours. What has been counted over twenty-five verses is this: the knowledge taught, the man created, the clear speech given, the sun, the moon, the plant, the sky, the balance, the earth, fruit, palms, grain, scent, two species, two horizons, two seas, pearl, coral, ships.

After all of them have been counted the verse arrives: "everyone upon it passes away."

Both the owner of the favours counted and most of the favours counted fall under this ruling.

And then the refrain: "Which of your Lord's favours do you deny?"

Above, in the section on the refrain, this was recorded as the hardest sentence in the sūra. Here I complete it.

Two readings are possible and neither runs against the text:

First reading: the refrain covers not verse 26 but verse 27. What is the favour, that is, is not the perishing but the existence of what abides. The verse states the loss first, then what remains; and the refrain looks to what remains.

This reading is a comforting one and is defensible; the two verses are a single section, and the refrain comes after the whole of a section.

Second reading: the refrain covers both at once. And on this reading the perishing itself enters the list.

The second reading has a ground in the text, and it must be recorded: nowhere in the sūra is the refrain attached to only a part of a section. It comes after a section and asks about the whole of that section. There is no sign in the text for keeping the twenty-sixth verse outside this scope.

And when the second reading is taken, what the verse says becomes this: perishing is not a deficiency but a part of an order. This is what the sūra has been counting from the start — the reckoning of the sun, the limit of the balance, the barrier of the sea. Perishing too is a limit: that everything has a bound.

I record this second reading as my own reading and do not strike out the first. There is not enough ground in the text for a definite preference between them.

Imagine a list all of whose items are transient, and whose heading is "favours".

This is what the sūra does, and it is disquieting. Fruit rots, ships sink, pearls are lost, seas dry up, man dies. The sūra counts all of these and in the middle declares transience in a single sentence.

And the everyday counterpart of this is: the worth of a thing is not measured by its duration.

This runs against intuition. A person ties worth to duration — what lasts is counted solid, what passes counted empty. The verse does not accept this measure. What passes is a favour too; that it passes does not take it out of the category of favour.

And the reverse is true as well: to take what passes for something lasting is what takes it out of the category of favour. For when the thing supposed to be lasting slips away, what remains is only loss.

By setting the two verses side by side the sūra separates these: one side perishing, one side abiding. The confusion arises from putting the one in the place of the other.

Yasʾaluhu man fi'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ, kulla yawmin huwa fī shaʾn

"Whoever is in the heavens and the earth asks of Him; every day He is upon some task."

A section of one verse, but it carries two separate sentences.

Root: س-أ-ل. To ask, to request. In Arabic the same verb does both jobs.

And there is a ring within the sūra here:

The same root, ten verses apart, in two opposite positions. In the twenty-ninth verse the created ask; in the thirty-ninth they are not asked.

I record this as an observation about the weave of words.

And the verb is imperfect, conveying continuance: yasʾaluhu — "they ask, they are asking". An unbroken state of request.

مَن — again the particle used of those possessed of reason, just as in verse 26. But here the scope is explicitly widened: "in the heavens and the earth".

One of the short sentences of the Qurʾān that has been most dwelt upon.

شَأْن — root ش-أ-ن. This root was treated in ʿAbasa, and precisely this verse was given there as an example. What was recorded there:

State, business, condition, a matter of importance. The Turkish words şan and şe'niyet are borrowings from this root. … That the word comes indefinite is for magnification: "such a concern that…". It is not defined, its boundary is not drawn.

And here too the word is indefinite: فِى شَأْنٍ — "upon some task". The indefiniteness does the same work: the task is not named, not bounded.

The word order of the sentence. There are two details:

One. Kulla yawmin has been brought forward. In Arabic an element brought forward conveys emphasis or restriction; here the fronting of the adverb of time stresses continuance: every day, without exception.

Two. The sentence is a nominal one: huwa fī shaʾn — "He is upon some task". There is no verb. Again thubūt: this is not something He does but a condition He is in.

Care is needed here, because the verse is open to two misreadings at once.

What the verse says: the divine act continues without interruption. The idea of a god who sets things up and withdraws, which the Qurʾān rejects elsewhere, is excluded here too. The finding recorded for the name Rabb in the section on al-Fātiḥa is the same:

The name Rabb excludes the idea of a God who sets things up and withdraws. Nurture is not a work done once and finished; it requires continuance. … Rabb is the name of an order that is working; not of a clock that has been wound and abandoned.

What the verse does not say: that God Himself changes. In the classical tradition of theology this distinction has been scrupulously kept: what changes are His works, not His Essence. The verse does not say "every day He is someone else"; it says "every day He is upon some task". The subject of the sentence is He, its predicate a position.

The things listed in the classical commentaries as to what the "shaʾn" is are these, and they are an illustration, not a limitation: to give life, to give death, to give, to take, to raise, to lower, to forgive, to requite.

And note: all of these come in opposed pairs. The weave of pairs running through the whole sūra appears here too.

There is no connective between the two sentences of the verse, and this establishes a relation between them.

The first sentence: everyone asks of Him. The second sentence: every day He is upon some task.

The link is this, and it is often drawn in the classical commentaries: the requests are unceasing; the response is unceasing too. The verse sets countless tasks over against countless requests.

And there is one further reading that comes out of this, which I record as my own reading: the sūra has been recounting a fixed order from the start — the sun runs by a reckoning, the balance has been set, the sea does not pass its limit. This verse says that that fixity is not stillness. The order does not err, but the owner of the order is not motionless.

Fixity and stillness are not the same thing. The orbit does not err, but the planet does not stop.

Here the sūra turns. For thirty verses favours had been counted; from the thirty-first verse to the forty-fourth what is counted is something else.

And the refrain does not change.

Sa-nafrughu lakum ayyuha'l-thaqalān

"We shall attend to you, O you two weights!"

Root: ف-ر-غ. This root was treated in al-Inshirāḥ, and precisely this verse was given there as an example. What was recorded there:

Its two uses in the Qurʾān illuminate the root: "And the heart of Moses' mother became empty" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/10) — here fārighan means emptied within. And "O you two weights! We shall set about attending to you" (al-Raḥmān 55/31) — the sa-nafrughu here comes from the verb "to become empty" but its sense is "we shall be free of other business and turn wholly to this". To be emptied is at the same time to become able to turn wholly to something. Emptiness is not a state in itself; it is the precondition of the next turning.

A note needs to be added here, because the expression is difficult at first sight.

The sentence says literally "we shall be free for you". And this is a settled idiom in Arabic for turning wholly to a task: faraghtu li-fulān — "I have given myself over to so-and-so, I shall attend to him now". The nearest rendering in English is "your turn will come" or "we shall now deal with you".

One further note is needed, and the classical commentaries enter it too: the expression does not say that God is occupied with some other business and will move to this when He has finished that. Indeed two verses earlier it was said "every day He is upon some task". The idiom is Arabic's own manner of expression and conveys a time, not an occupation.

The سَـ at the head of the verb — the particle of the future. It conveys the near future. The time will come, that is, and it is not distant.

In the muṣḥaf this word is written in the form أَيُّهَ, without the alif at its end (normally ayyuhā). The same spelling is found in two other places in the Qurʾān: al-Nūr 24/31 (ayyuha'l-muʾminūn) and al-Zukhruf 43/49 (ayyuha'l-sāḥir).

This is a feature of the writing, and in recitation the end of the word drops in any case when it is joined to what follows (waṣl). It does not change the meaning.

Root: ث-ق-ل. This root was treated in al-Insān, and precisely this word was entered in the list there. What was recorded there:

أَثْقَال (athqāl) — weights, burdens (al-Zilzāl 99/2). مِثْقَال (mithqāl) — the weight of a thing, a unit of weight (al-Zilzāl 99/7-8). ٱلثَّقَلَان (al-thaqalān) — "the two weights"; the Qurʾān uses this name for men and jinn (al-Raḥmān 55/31). The root's work in the Qurʾān is measuring. A weight is what is weighed.

And here that finding falls exactly into place.

The eighth verse of the sūra had set a balance. The thirty-first verse names those it addresses "the two weights".

The balance and what is to be weighed, in the same sūra.

I record this as my own reading. That the roots of the two words are distinct (و-ز-ن and ث-ق-ل) but that both belong to the field of weighing is a verifiable datum of the language; the connection I draw between them is an interpretation.

And the finding recorded for mawāzīn in the section on al-Qāriʿa completes this connection: there what was weighed were deeds, and the balance is in the hereafter. In al-Raḥmān the balance has been set on the earth, and what is to be weighed has been named as well.

The classical explanations are of three kinds:

All three are transmitted and they do not exclude each other. The second explanation is the one most in keeping with the sūra as a whole: the sūra has set a balance, drawn a limit, and declares a reckoning. Weight is the name of responsibility.

And note: this is the first place in the sūra where the one addressed is named by a dual noun. Since the thirteenth verse a dual pronoun had been used; the dual name of the addressee is given here.

Yā maʿshara'l-jinni wa'l-insi ini'staṭaʿtum an tanfudhū min aqṭāri'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍi fa'nfudhū; lā tanfudhūna illā bi-sulṭān

"O company of jinn and men! If you have the power to pass out through the bounds of the heavens and the earth, then pass; you will not pass except by a sulṭān."

A note of method must be entered at the outset concerning this verse. This verse is often used with the claim that it points to space travel. That interpretation is not entered into in this commentary, and the grounds will be written briefly below under a separate heading. First I look at what the words say.

Root: ع-ش-ر. The core of this root is the number ten (ʿashara), and from there the sense of being together is reached:

• عَشِيرَة — a body of kin, a clan.
• مُعَاشَرَة — to live together, to get on together.
• مَعْشَر — a body of people gathered together, an assembly.

The choice of word is meaningful. The verse does not say "O jinn and men"; it says "O company of jinn and men" — it joins the two species into a single company.

The address, that is, is made to the two groups not separately but together. And this confirms the content of the dual form in the refrain.

Note the order: here the jinn come first. Yet at 14-15 man came first, and at 39 man will come first again. The order is not fixed.

In the classical commentaries this is explained by saying that the jinn's attempt to approach the bounds of the heavens was a known matter — verses 8-9 of Sūrat al-Jinn recount this, and it was treated in al-Jinn.

Root: ق-ط-ر. Quṭr — the side, the edge, the flank, the region of a thing. Its plural is أَقْطَار.

In Turkish the borrowed words kutur ("diameter") and kıta ("continent") are connected with it; beneath the word lies the idea of the distance from one end of a thing to the other.

The verse does not say "through the inside of the heavens and the earth", then; it says "through the edges, the bounds, of the heavens and the earth." What is at issue is going outside an area.

Root: ن-ف-ذ. To pass through the inside of a thing and come out the other side, to pierce through.

• نَفَذَ — it passed, it pierced through. Used of an arrow: it pierced the target and came out the other side.
• نَافِذ — in force, in effect (a ruling being nāfidh).
• مَنْفَذ — a passage, an opening.
• نُفُوذ — penetration: working into, the passing of influence (the Turkish nüfuz is this word).

The root's proper idea: to come out on the other side of a barrier. And note: the verb describes not going but passing through. Not covering a distance but crossing a limit.

The verb occurs three times in the verse, in three different moods:

This is the Qurʾān's settled pattern of challenge. The same structure was treated in the section on al-Mursalāt:

فَإِن كَانَ لَكُمْ كَيْدٌ فَكِيدُونِ — "If you have a stratagem, then try it against Me!" (al-Mursalāt 77/39)

And the measure recorded there holds here too: the imperative here is not a permission but a demonstration of incapacity. "Do it if you can" is said in the knowledge that it cannot be done.

Root: س-ل-ط. To prevail, to have mastery. Sulṭān, saliṭa, taslīṭ are from the same root.

On the meaning of the word there are two views, and both rest on the Qurʾān's own usage:

The second view is strong in point of usage within the Qurʾān. The word sulṭān occurs many times in the Qurʾān in the sense of "proof", and generally in the form "they have no sulṭān sent down to them", showing the groundlessness of a claim.

And the two views do not exclude each other, because the idea beneath sulṭān in Arabic is single: the warrant to prevail. A proof prevails, and so does a power.

I do not impose a preference. I record only this much: the verse does not declare an impossibility, it sets a condition — and says that the condition is not met. It does not say "you cannot pass"; it says "you can pass only by such a thing".

It has been debated to which time the verse belongs:

The first view is the strongest in point of context and the majority of the classical commentaries adopt it. That the next verse says "a flame of fire will be sent against you, and you will not be able to defend yourselves" looks like the suppression of an attempt at flight.

The inclination in this commentary is towards the first view, and it is not binding.

This verse was already cited in al-Jinn, and the connection drawn there is completed here. What was recorded there:

This idea is expressed in the Qurʾān by an explicit sentence of challenge as well, and its addressees are again the jinn and men: "O company of jinn and men! If you can pass beyond the bounds of the heavens and the earth, then pass. You can pass only by a power." (al-Raḥmān 55/33) The same two species, the same matter: the attempt to go outside the domain. al-Jinn 72/12 is like the answer to that challenge — the jinn have given the answer for themselves: we cannot pass.

The Qurʾān issues a challenge in one sūra, then, and in another the party challenged gives the answer.

Giving this verse the sense of space travel is a widespread reading, and it is not adopted in this commentary. The grounds, briefly:

One. The verb of the verse is not travel but nufūdh — to pierce through a limit. A vehicle that goes into space has not pierced through the "bounds" of the heavens; it is moving inside them.

Two. The verse is a challenge, and the function of a challenge is to show incapacity. It is not a sentence announcing a possibility but one declaring an impossibility. To draw a success out of the verse is to turn the mood of the sentence upside down.

Three. The context is punishment. The next verse says "a flame will be sent against you". This is the account not of a technological forecast but of the suppression of an attempt at flight.

Four. To load the word sulṭān with senses like "fuel" or "thrust" rests on none of its uses in the Qurʾān.

Five. The principle of method recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq holds here too: to tie a verse to a current description is to make it a partner in the fate of that description.

In this commentary the meaning of the words is taken as sufficient for this verse.

Yursalu ʿalaykumā shuwāẓun min nārin wa nuḥāsun fa-lā tantaṣirān

"There will be sent against you a flame of fire and nuḥās; and you will not be able to defend yourselves."

The verb is passive: it is sent, and who sends it is not stated. This choice was treated in detail in the section on al-Mursalāt, and the measure recorded there holds here as well: the scene is built without an agent; what happens is looked at, not who does it.

The sense given by the lexicographers: pure, smokeless flame. The bare, burning part of fire.

A difference of recitation is recorded in the vowelling of the word (shuwāẓ / shiwāẓ). It does not change the meaning. I do not name an imam.

The meaning of this word is disputed, and there are two views:

The second view has an advantage in point of word order, and it should be recorded: since shuwāẓ is described as "smokeless flame", the arrival of "smoke" immediately beside it forms a pair. And the sūra is built on pairs from beginning to end.

The advantage of the first view is that it is the settled sense of the word.

I do not impose a preference. Both have been defended in the classical sources.

Root: ن-ص-ر. To help. ٱنْتِصَار (Form VIII) — to help oneself, to defend oneself, to take one's own revenge.

Form VIII functions here as reflexive: the help does not come from outside; what is at issue is a person's helping himself.

And the verb is dual again: تَنتَصِرَانِ. The sound of the sūra continues.

A nicety in the word order: the verse does not say "you will not be helped". It says "you will not be able to defend yourselves". What is recounted, that is, is not the cutting off of help from outside but the exhaustion of a person's own resource.

And this is the continuation of the challenge two verses earlier: there it was said you will not pass, here it is said you will not defend yourselves. The two sentences say the same thing: nothing is left on the side of ability.

Fa-idha'nshaqqati'l-samāʾu fa-kānat wardatan ka'l-dihān

"And when the sky is split open and becomes a red rose like molten oil."

Root: ش-ق-ق. This root was analysed in full in al-Inshiqāq, where the different roots the Qurʾān uses for the splitting of the sky (sh-q-q, f-ṭ-r, f-l-q) were taken up as a division of labour. I do not repeat it.

Briefly: shaqq is the splitting of a thing within its own wholeness — a division in two, a cracking.

Root: و-ر-د. Beneath this root lies a wide family: ward (rose), wurūd (coming to water), mawrid (the place where water is drawn), wārid (the one who comes).

On the sense of the word here there are two views:

The two views come out at the same place: the colour is red. The difference lies in the object from which the comparison is taken.

Root: د-ه-ن. Oil, to oil. Duhn — oil. Mudhin — a flatterer, a fawner (it occurs in the Qurʾān as mudhinūn).

Three views are recorded on the sense of the word here:

All three are transmitted. And two things are common to all three: red colour and fluidity.

And the force of the comparison lies here. In the seventh verse of the sūra the sky was something raised — fixed, standing above. Here it is likened to something fluid.

The verse recounts, that is, not the collapse of the sky but the change of its state: what was solid and fixed becomes fluid and red.

I record this as my own reading. Where the words of the two verses (rafaʿahā / ka'l-dihān) stand in the sūra is data of the text.

Colour rarely occurs in the Qurʾān's scenes of the resurrection. The stars are effaced, the mountains are scattered, the sky is split — but the colour is mostly not stated.

Here it is stated: red.

And within the sūra as a whole this is striking: this is a sūra that uses colours. In the sixty-fourth verse the gardens will be dark green (mudhāmmatān), in the seventy-sixth the cushions will be green (rafrafin khuḍr). And the sky red.

I record this as an observation.

Fa-yawmaʾidhin lā yusʾalu ʿan dhanbihi insun wa lā jānn

"On that day neither man nor jinn is questioned about his sin."

This verse looks as though it conflicts with other verses of the Qurʾān, and the matter has been debated since the classical period.

For the Qurʾān also says explicitly that there will be questioning:

"By your Lord, We shall question them all about what they used to do." (al-Ḥijr 15/92-93)

And there is another verse running in the same direction as this one:

"The guilty are not questioned about their sins." (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/78)

The explanations given:

The third explanation is the strongest in point of word order and comes out of the text itself: the thirty-ninth verse says "he is not questioned", the forty-first says "they are known by their marks". Even though the two are separated by two consecutive refrains, they are parts of the same scene.

The inclination in this commentary is towards the third explanation, and it is not binding. The first explanation is widespread in the classical sources too and is not struck out.

A very similar matter was treated in the section on al-Mursalāt, and the explanations given there are worth recalling here. The verse there was: "This is the day on which they do not speak; nor are they permitted to offer excuses" (77/35-36).

The work the two verses do is not the same, and the difference matters:

In al-Mursalāt the guilty cannot speak. In al-Raḥmān the guilty is not asked.

And read together the two produce a silence: on the one side no permission to answer, on the other no need to ask.

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

Both words are indefinite: insun, jānnun — "a man", "a jinn". There is no definite article.

And an indefinite coming with a negation conveys comprehensiveness in Arabic: "no man and no jinn at all."

The ruling is therefore without exception.

And note the order: here man comes first. In the thirty-third verse the jinn came first. The sūra does not fix the order.

Yuʿrafu'l-mujrimūna bi-sīmāhum fa-yuʾkhadhu bi'l-nawāṣī wa'l-aqdām

"The guilty are known by their marks; and they are seized by the forelocks and the feet."

Root: ع-ر-ف. This root was analysed in detail in al-Mursalāt in the discussion of ʿurfā, and what was recorded there is decisive here:

The core of the root is to know, to recognise — but this is a kind of knowing different from ʿilm: to recognise a thing because one has seen it before.

And the verb is passive: yuʿrafu — "they are known", and who knows them is not stated.

The lexicographers differ over the root of the word: some attach it to the root و-س-م (to brand; it became sīmā by a transposition of letters), others to the root س-و-م. I do not speak with certainty.

Its meaning is beyond dispute: the mark on the face, the appearance, the distinguishing sign.

This word was briefly mentioned in al-Qalam: "سِيمَا (sīmā) — the mark on the face, appearance. It survives in Turkish as sima."

The word's uses in the Qurʾān give a table:

And between two of the verses there is an exact identity of structure:

al-Baqara 2/273: تَعْرِفُهُم بِسِيمَٰهُمْ — "you know them by their mark" (of the poor) al-Raḥmān 55/41: يُعْرَفُ ٱلْمُجْرِمُونَ بِسِيمَٰهُمْ — "the guilty are known by their mark"

The same verb, the same particle, the same noun. In one place a poor man hiding his need, in the other a guilty man. Both are read from the face.

I record this as an observation about the weave of words; the wording of the two verses is in the text.

In recounting that day the Qurʾān regularly looks at faces. This was treated in detail in two places in this commentary.

In ʿAbasa the last five verses were taken up: "On that day some faces are bright — laughing, rejoicing at good news. And on some faces there is dust; a darkness covers them." And the finding about word order recorded there was this:

| Structure | Adjective — musfira, ḍāḥika, mustabshira | Sentence — ʿalayhā ghabara, tarhaquhā qatara |

The good faces were recounted with an adjective, then, and the bad ones with a sentence: in the one the quality came from the face itself, in the other from something settling upon it.

In al-Qiyāma the two tableaux of faces (nāḍira/nāẓira and bāsira/fāqira) were treated, and this was recorded:

The same subject, the same adverb of time, a single word different in the same place — in Arabic this is called muqābala, and its effect is this: the difference between the two groups is presented not as a difference of treatment coming from outside but as two different fillings of the same sentence.

This verse of al-Raḥmān follows a third path, and the difference should be recorded.

ʿAbasa and al-Qiyāma recount the face as a state; al-Raḥmān uses the face as an instrument of recognition.

There the face was the sign of an outcome; here the face is an identity document. And this establishes the verse's link with the verse before it: no question is asked, because the face already says it.

ٱلنَّوَاصِي — the plural of nāṣiya. This word was analysed in detail in al-ʿAlaq, and precisely this verse was cited there. What was recorded there:

The forelock is the foremost and highest part of the head. A man who grows proud lifts his head; and what comes forward when he lifts it is the forelock. And when it is held, the head must go wherever the one holding it wills. - Hūd 11/56: "There is no living creature but He holds it by its forelock." — This verse establishes the matter at the root: the mastery is already in fact in His hand. - al-Raḥmān 55/41: "The guilty are known by their marks, and they are seized by the forelocks and the feet." Read together with these two verses, the threat of al-ʿAlaq becomes this: a man who has forgotten that he is held by the forelock is reminded that he will be seized by the forelock.

What is to be added here: the feet.

In al-ʿAlaq and in Hūd there was only the forelock. Here there are two points: forelock and foot.

The two are the two ends of the body — the highest and the lowest. To hold a person at these two points is to hold him entirely; no place in between is left unheld.

And expressing a whole by naming its two ends is a known usage in Arabic.

I record this as an observation about the word order.

And I add one further reading, as my own: the forelock is the seat of pride (recorded in the section on al-ʿAlaq); the foot is the seat of walking. The two points held are thus the places where a person lifts his head and where he walks. Both are indices of a will.

Hādhihi jahannamu'llatī yukadhdhibu bihā'l-mujrimūn · Yaṭūfūna baynahā wa bayna ḥamīmin ān

"This is the Hell that the guilty deny · they go round and round between it and scalding water."

The last piece of the sūra's section of punishment, and two verses long.

A demonstrative of nearness. And this does a piece of work in the word order.

Until now the sūra had not spoken of Hell; there had been a flame of fire, a splitting sky, guilty men seized, but the name of Hell had not occurred. Here the name is given — and it is given with a near demonstrative.

Hell is named, that is, not as something recounted at a distance but as something pointed at. A scene has been set up and entered.

And here is one of the tightest internal rings of the sūra.

The verb is from the root ك-ذ-ب — the root of the refrain.

The verb of the question asked thirty-one times comes back here inside a declarative sentence.

And the verb is imperfect: yukadhdhibu — "they deny", "which they keep denying". Even while standing before Hell, the act of denying is recounted in the present.

This is the very technique treated at al-Mursalāt 77/29: there too it was said "go on towards what you used to deny", and the verb carried a form of continuing action.

And the word order here does this: the refrain kept asking "which do you deny?" and gave no answer. The forty-third verse gives one of the answers: this.

I record this as my own reading. That the root is shared and where the two verbs stand in the sūra is data of the text.

Root: ط-و-ف. To turn about a thing, to circle. From the same root come طَوَاف (ṭawāf), طَائِفَة (a party — a group that circulates) and طُوفَان (ṭūfān — the water that encircles).

And the choice of the word is striking. The Qurʾān uses this root in the descriptions of the garden as well (yaṭūfu ʿalayhim — they are waited on, served); and the circling of the Kaʿba is named with this word too.

Here, though, there are two things circled: Hell and scalding water. And the one who circles is not the one who serves but the one who is made to circle.

Word order: بَيْنَهَا وَبَيْنَ — "between it and…". Bayna is repeated twice. The movement is thus not around a place but between two points — a going and returning.

And this sets up a contrast with the twentieth verse of the sūra. There, between two things, there was a barrier and there was no crossing. Here, between two things, there is an unbroken going and returning and no halt.

I record this as my own reading. The bayna structure in the two verses is data of the text.

حَمِيم — root ح-م-م. Heat. Ḥamīm is used in Arabic of two opposite things: very hot water and a close friend. The second sense comes from the metaphor of warmth.

ءَان — root أ-ن-ي. This word was analysed in al-Ghāshiya, and precisely this verse was cited there. What was recorded there:

Āniya, when used of water, means "having reached boiling point". The point, that is, at which heat has come to ripeness. This is a curious working of the language: the word carries in itself no negative, indeed rather a positive core — to come to its proper state. The evil is not in the word but in the thing that comes to its proper state. The "ripening" of water is its becoming undrinkable.

And this verse was cited directly there: "The Qurʾān builds the same idea with another word as well: 'They are made to go round between it and scalding water' (al-Raḥmān 55/44). The ānin there is from the same root."

A note on word order to be added here: both words are indefinite — ḥamīmin ānin, "a scalding water". There is no definiteness. And the indefinite can here do the work of magnification, as was recorded for shaʾn in ʿAbasa.

The last thirty-two verses of the sūra are on a single subject and have a structure of their own; I therefore take them up in a separate section.

The structure is this: two separate pairs of gardens are described.

• The first pair opens at the forty-sixth verse: وَلِمَنْ خَافَ مَقَامَ رَبِّهِۦ جَنَّتَانِ — "And for him who fears the station of his Lord there are two gardens."
• The second pair opens at the sixty-second verse: وَمِن دُونِهِمَا جَنَّتَانِ — "And beyond those two there are two further gardens."

In all, then, four gardens, in two pairs.

Look at the distribution of verses in the two sections:

The two sections are exactly equal. The same number of verses, the same number of refrains, the same number of descriptions.

And this symmetry is what makes the comparison possible. Because the two sections are of the same length, the verses in the same position can be set opposite one another: 48 ↔ 64, 50 ↔ 66, 52 ↔ 68, 54 ↔ 76, and so on.

I record this as an observation about the structure; the numbers are drawn from the table and can be verified.

What the relation between the two sections is depends on a single word: دُون.

And in Arabic this word expresses two different things:

The majority of the classical commentaries adopted the first reading, and the whole comparative interpretation rests on it. The ground is the word's widespread use in Arabic in the sense of "lower" (dūna dhālika — "lower than that").

The second reading has been defended too and is not struck out; when dūn conveys place it means "on this side, nearer", and the difference is then not in degree but in position.

The inclination in this commentary is towards the first reading, and it is not binding. On two grounds:

One. This is the widespread use of the word.

Two — and this matters more: the descriptions themselves establish a difference. As I shall show below, there are systematic differences between the two sections, and some of them support the reading of degree.

But here one must be honest, and I must record a weakness in the classical interpretation.

Most of the classical commentaries, having read dūn as "lower", then interpreted every detail according to that reading. Every difference was counted as evidence that the second pair is lower.

This method does not work equally well at every detail. Let us look at them one by one:

One — the fruit. In the first pair there is "of every fruit two kinds" (52); in the second pair "fruit, dates and pomegranate" are counted (68).

The first is comprehensive, the second enumerated. To say "of every fruit" is to set no limit; to count three items is to set a limit. This difference is clear and supports the reading of degree directly.

Two — the water. In the first pair the springs are "running" (tajriyān, 50); in the second they are "gushing" (naḍḍākhatān, 66).

Root: ن-ض-خ. To gush, to well up and overflow. The lexicographers record a difference of degree between naḍḥ and naḍkh, and count naḍkh the stronger.

The classical explanation is this: a running spring is water that has a bed and can be used; a gushing spring is water that has not yet entered a bed. Running water is more serviceable than gushing water.

This explanation is defensible but not beyond dispute. Gushing can also convey abundance, and taken by itself does not look like a deficiency. The difference of degree comes here not from the description itself but from the word dūn.

I record this plainly.

Three — the couches. In the first pair, "couches lined with brocade" (54); in the second, "green cushions and fine carpets" (76).

In the first the lining is named — and a point often repeated in the classical commentaries is this: the lining is the inner side; what must the outer face of a couch be, whose inner side is brocade? The description, that is, implies more than it says.

In the second pair the outward look is described: green, fine.

This difference too is defensible, but again it comes not from the description but from which side of the thing is described.

مُدْهَآمَّتَانِ (64). This word means dark, green to the point of blackness — and it is a colour that comes from abundance of water.

This detail, then, conveys for the second pair not a deficiency but a richness. That a garden should be green to the point of blackness is the sign that it has not gone without water.

The classical interpretations are seen to strain in tying this detail to a difference of degree, and the strain is justified: colour by itself is no index of deficiency.

I record this and present it as my own assessment:

The difference of degree between the two pairs rests essentially on the word دُون, not on the sum of the descriptions. Some of the descriptions support that reading (the fruit above all), some stand neutral (water, couches), and some can be read in the opposite direction (colour).

This does not strike out the classical interpretation — the widespread sense of the word dūn is a strong enough ground. But to count each description one by one as "evidence of inferiority" is to say more than the text gives.

Now I come to the most important point of this section, and I record it as my own reading.

By setting two pairs of gardens side by side the sūra does something, and what it does is independent of the details.

Consider it this way. The sūra could have given a single tableau of the garden — as in al-Mursalāt, a single four-verse tableau of good news. It does not. It gives two, of the same length, in the same pattern, one after the other.

And to put two things in the same pattern one after the other automatically sets up a comparison. The reader sees the two side by side and looks for the differences; he cannot help looking.

What establishes the difference of degree, then, is the structure itself, before any of the details.

The finding recorded for muqābala in the section on al-Qiyāma works here too:

The same subject, the same adverb of time, a single word different in the same place — in Arabic this is called muqābala, and its effect is this: the difference between the two groups is presented not as a difference of treatment coming from outside but as two different fillings of the same sentence.

In al-Raḥmān muqābala is used not to make two sides opposite but to grade two sides. In ʿAbasa and al-Qiyāma the two tableaux were contraries: the garden and Hell, the shining face and the face covered with dust. Here the two tableaux are on the same side: both are gardens.

And this has a consequence: the sūra says that the reward is graded — and instead of saying it in a sentence it shows it by setting two tableaux side by side.

The Qurʾān states this principle explicitly in other places as well: "See how We have favoured some of them over others. And the hereafter is greater in degrees and greater in favour" (al-Isrāʾ 17/21).

But al-Raḥmān does not say it; it does it. And doing instead of saying is the method the sūra has used from the beginning: the sūra does not say "everything is a pair", it speaks in the dual.

Wa li-man khāfa maqāma Rabbihī jannatān "And for him who fears the station of his Lord there are two gardens."

This expression occurs once more in the Qurʾān in exactly the same form, and it was treated in al-Nāziʿāt:

"But as for him who feared the station of his Lord and restrained the soul from its craving — the garden is his abode." (al-Nāziʿāt 79/40-41)

And three explanations of the construction maqāmu Rabbihī were tabulated there; I do not repeat them. The summary: God's watching (a person's knowing that he stands under watch), the station at which one will stand for the reckoning, and the servant's own position. The conclusion recorded there was: "The first and second views do not exclude each other, and both come to the same thing: a person's knowing that he is under watch and under reckoning."

And in the section on al-Nāziʿāt precisely this verse was pointed to: "The two verses carry exactly the same expression and both give the same result: the garden."

There is a difference to be added here, and it should be recorded.

In al-Nāziʿāt two conditions and one garden; in al-Raḥmān one condition and two gardens.

I record this as an observation; the wording of the two verses is in the text. I do not claim a deliberate cross-reference between the two sūras.

خَافَ — root خ-و-ف. Fear. And the Qurʾān distinguishes this root from khashya: khawf conveys a more general drawing back, khashya a reverent fear resting on knowledge. Here khawf is used.

Note: what is feared is not the punishment but the "station". The verse does not say "he who fears the punishment of his Lord". It says "he who fears the station of his Lord" — the fear, that is, is directed not at a penalty but at a position.

جَنَّتَان — dual. And in the classical commentaries the reason for this has been debated:

The fourth explanation should be recorded separately because it rests on the sūra as a whole, and it is the one found most consistent in this commentary. But the others have been defended too and are not struck out.

And I add this, as my own reading: the first three explanations try to account for why the dual is there by giving a cause. The fourth turns the question around — there is almost nothing singular in the sūra; had something non-dual been said, that is what would have needed explaining.

Dhawātā afnān

ذَوَاتَآ — the dual of dhāt: "the two that possess".

On the sense of the word أَفْنَان there are two views, and the two come from two different roots:

Both are transmitted and I do not impose a preference. Nor do the two exclude each other: a garden of many branches is a garden of many kinds.

A note on word order: the verse consists of a single two-word construction, and its subject is the jannatān of the preceding verse (46). The sentence continues, that is, although the refrain has come between.

This is the general feature of this section and it must be recorded: the refrain does not break the sentences. The subject of the forty-sixth verse, the qualifier of the forty-eighth, the fīhimā of the fiftieth, the fīhimā of the fifty-second — all are attached to the same pair. Eight refrains come between, and the grammatical bond does not break.

I record this as an observation about the structure.

Fīhimā ʿaynāni tajriyān "In the two of them are two springs, running."

عَيْن — root ع-ي-ن. In Arabic this word means eye and spring; one word answers to both. The reason is plain: both are an opening that brings water out of a surface.

This was treated in the section on al-Mursalāt in the discussion of ʿuyūn (springs); I do not repeat it.

تَجْرِيَانِ — again the root ج-ر-ي, the same as al-jawār (the ships) in the twenty-fourth verse. As recorded in the section on al-Ḥāqqa, the single idea the root carries is the continuity of movement.

A ring within the sūra: the same root is used at the twenty-fourth verse for the ship on the sea and at the fiftieth for the spring in the garden.

Fīhimā min kulli fākihatin zawjān "In the two of them, of every fruit two kinds."

This verse was taken up above in the section on the sound structure together with al-Dhāriyāt 51/49; I do not repeat it.

زَوْج — root ز-و-ج. And the working of the word in Arabic is worth dwelling on: zawj in Arabic means one half of a pair, not the pair itself. A man is a zawj, and so is his wife. The feminine zawja (a female spouse), borrowed into Turkish as zevce, exists in Arabic too, but the principal usage applies zawj to both parties.

The conclusion that follows: zawjān — "two zawjs", that is, the two halves of one pair. The verse does not say "two kinds"; it says two parts of one whole.

I record this distinction as a note on the language.

Muttakiʾīna ʿalā furushin baṭāʾinuhā min istabraq, wa janā'l-jannatayni dān "Reclining upon couches lined with heavy silk; and the fruit of the two gardens is near to gather."

مُتَّكِـِٔين — root و-ك-أ. To recline, to lean. ٱتِّكَاء (Form VIII) — to lean on something and take one's ease.

The real information the word carries is a posture: reclining is a state beyond standing and beyond sitting — the posture of one who is in no hurry and is not going anywhere.

بَطَآئِن — its singular بِطَانَة. The lining, the inner face. Its opposite is ظِهَارَة (ẓihāra) — the outer face.

The same word occurs once more in the Qurʾān, in a figurative sense: "Do not take as biṭāna any but your own" (Āl ʿImrān 3/118) — that is, as confidants, an inner circle. The idea beneath the word is the same: the unseen inner side.

إِسْتَبْرَق. Heavy silk, brocade. That the word entered Arabic from outside is widely recorded by the lexicographers; it is attached to a Persian word. I do not speak with certainty, but its being counted of foreign origin is widespread.

And the classical observation recorded above belongs here: the verse names the lining, not the face. If the inner side is brocade, what is one to think about the outer?

This is a technique of description and it must be recorded: the text implies what it does not say by what it does say. The same technique is seen in other descriptions in the Qurʾān.

وَجَنَى ٱلْجَنَّتَيْنِ دَانٍ — "and the fruit of the two gardens is near to gather."

جَنَى — root ج-ن-ي. To collect, to gather. Janā is fruit ready to be gathered.

And note: this root does not share its consonants with the word janna — janna is from the root ج-ن-ن (to cover), while janā is from ج-ن-ي. The two roots are distinct; but their standing side by side in the verse produces a repetition of sound: janā'l-jannatayn.

I record this as an observation about the sound, not as an etymological link.

دَانٍ — root د-ن-و. To be near. Dunyā (the nearest) is from the same root.

This expression was cited in al-Ḥāqqa, and the connection drawn there is completed here. There, in treating al-Ḥāqqa's description of "a lofty garden whose fruits hang low", this was recorded:

The place itself lofty, its produce low. The height, that is, does not distance the person from his produce. A parallel within the Qurʾān: "And the fruit of the two gardens is near" (al-Raḥmān 55/54); "Its shades close over them, and its fruits are made to hang low" (al-Insān 76/14).

What is to be added here: two states stand side by side in the verse — reclining and the fruit being near. The two recount one thing: no one has to sit up in order to reach.

Fīhinna qāṣirātu'l-ṭarfi lam yaṭmithhunna insun qablahum wa lā jānn

A note on method is needed first. The note entered at 2/25 in al-Baqara on the descriptions of the garden holds for this whole section and must be repeated here:

مُتَشَٰبِهًا — "resembling one another". A note used of the fruits of the garden in the sense of "like what is in this world but not the same". This determines how all the descriptions of the hereafter are to be read: the account has to be given by way of things the one addressed knows — because language can find no material other than human experience. That the descriptions are sensory follows not from what is described being sensory but from there being no other way of recounting it.

This note holds for all the descriptions of garden, couch, spring, fruit and spouse, and is assumed in the analyses below.

فِيهِنَّ — a plural pronoun. And there is a grammatical question here: since the gardens are two, why is a plural pronoun (fīhinna) used rather than a dual one (fīhimā)?

The classical explanations:

All three are transmitted and I do not impose a preference.

قَٰصِرَٰتُ ٱلطَّرْف — "those who restrain their glances"

Root: ق-ص-ر. To shorten, to limit, to hold within a bound.

• قَصْر — a palace, a mansion. A structure closed about and bounded. This word was treated as a measure in the section on al-Mursalāt.
• قَصِير — short.
• تَقْصِير — to leave deficient, to fall short.
• مَقْصُورَة — shut into a place, set apart.

And here is one of the most elegant weaves of words in the sūra: