al-Raḥmān 55:37 commentary

55/37

فَإِذَا ٱنشَقَّتِ ٱلسَّمَآءُ فَكَانَتْ وَرْدَةً كَٱلدِّهَانِ

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."

ٱنشَقَّتْ — was split

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.

وَرْدَة — rose / red

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:

View	Sense	Its ground
Rose	The sky becomes like a red rose	The word's most widespread sense
A chestnut horse	In Arabic ward is also used of a horse of a reddish colour	A usage recorded by the lexicographers; the comparison is built on colour

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.

كَٱلدِّهَان — like dihān

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:

View	Sense
Molten oil	The look of boiling, running oil
Red leather	Dihān is also recorded in the sense of leather dyed red
Kinds of oil	The plural of duhn

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.

A note: the giving of the colour

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.