al-Raḥmān 55:24

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.