al-Raḥmān 55:1-4

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.