al-Wāqiʿa 56:4-6

Idhā rujjati'l-arḍu rajjā · Wa bussati'l-jibālu bassā · Fa-kānat habāʾan munbaththā "When the earth is shaken with a shaking, and the mountains are crumbled to a crumbling — and become scattered dust…"

Three verses, three stages: shaking → crumbling → dispersal. And all three move in the same direction: from the whole to the piece, from the piece to dust.

Rujjat and bussat — both passive. Who shakes, who crumbles: not stated.

This is a settled choice in the Qurʾān's descriptions of the resurrection and was treated in detail in the section on al-Takwīr (kuwwirat, inkadarat, suyyirat, sujjirat — all passive). The measure recorded there holds here too; I do not repeat it.

What is proper to this place is that both verbs take an absolute object. Rujjat rajjā, bussat bassā. The verb is reinforced, that is, by its own verbal noun.

In Arabic the absolute object can do three things: emphasis (taʾkīd), specification of kind (stating the sort of the act), specification of number (how many times). Here, since it comes indefinite and takes no attribute, the emphatic reading comes forward: "when it is shaken and shaken again".

And its coming in two verses one after the other sets up a rhythm: rajjā… bassā. Two long -ās, two doubled verbs, two absolute objects. The ear hears two blows in succession.

Root: ر-ج-ج. To shake violently, to move back and forth, to agitate.

• رَجْرَجَة (rajraja) — agitation, trembling. The reduplicated form of the word (rajraj) describes the shaking of water or of the ground.
• ٱرْتَجَّ (irtajja) — it was agitated; and figuratively: irtajja ʿalayhi'l-kalām — his speech became confused, his tongue tangled. It is used of mental agitation too.
• رَجَاج — one who is weak, without strength; some lexicographers attach this to the sense "tremulous".

The Qurʾān uses this root only here. For the shaking of the earth other roots occur elsewhere:

Four verbs, four separate movements. The difference between them should not be overstated — they all describe the same event, and in Arabic the semantic fields of these words run into one another. But it is also plain that the choices are not arbitrary: each sūra has chosen the verb that suits its own scene.

The verb al-Wāqiʿa chooses is agitation, and this accords with the two following verses: a thing that is agitated separates what is inside it. The earth is agitated, the mountains crumble, the dust separates out.

I record this as my own reading.

Root: ب-س-س. And the lexicographers differ over the sense of this root:

The first sense follows necessarily from the context, because the next verse gives the result: dust. For a thing to become dust it must be crumbled, not driven.

The majority of the classical exegetes prefer the first sense. Those who maintain the second mean the mountains being driven from their places, and this too is an image that occurs in the Qurʾān (wa suyyirati'l-jibāl, al-Nabaʾ 78/20). But in that case it becomes hard to connect with the "dust" of verse 6.

I state my preference — the first sense; it is not binding.

In the section on al-Humaza the root ح-ط-م was treated in detail, and the core recorded there was this: to break, to shatter, to crumble — to break something hard and whole into debris. As a name of the Fire, Ḥuṭama had been chosen as the counterpart of that man's act of "gathering": the place the gatherer comes to is the place that scatters.

Now let us set the two roots side by side — and let me first draw a boundary: ب-س-س and ح-ط-م are separate roots. I establish no derivational link between them. The comparison I make is at the level of sense.

And the real link is not here. The real link is in the sixty-fifth verse of this sūra:

"Had We willed, We would have made it chaff." (56/65) — law nashāʾu la-jaʿalnāhu ḥuṭāmā.

The root ح-ط-م is already present in this sūra, that is, and it is exactly the same root as in al-Humaza. This verse was already mentioned in the section on al-Humaza.

A pairing thus arises within the sūra:

• Verse 5: the mountains are bassed — in a scene of the resurrection.
• Verse 65: the crop becomes ḥuṭām — in a sentence of proof, with the qualifier "had We willed".

Both are "crumbling". Their difference is this: the first will happen, the second could happen but does not.

I record this as my own reading and add the following: the sūra uses the same idea twice — once as a description of the resurrection, once as a possibility that does not operate in everyday life. The crumbling at the resurrection, that is, is the generalised form of a possibility that does not come about in the field each year.

هَبَاء — root: ه-ب-و. Habāʾ is the fine dust suspended in the air; especially the motes seen in a beam of sunlight coming through a window.

This description is the common description of the classical lexicons, and it was already mentioned in the section on al-Zalzala when the word dharra was treated: one of the explanations given there for "mote" was "the dust seen in sunlight", and it was recorded that the Qurʾān calls that thing habāʾ.

The particular feature of the word is this: habāʾ can be seen only if there is light. In the dark the room may be full of dust and it is not seen. It appears when a beam of light comes in.

This is a linguistic datum. The reading I build upon it is mine and is not binding: the mountains turn into something so small that it can be noticed only under a particular light. The choice of word does not merely say "dust"; it says a dust that has come down to the threshold of visibility.

The Qurʾān uses this word once more:

"And We shall turn to whatever work they did and make it scattered dust." (al-Furqān 25/23) — fa-jaʿalnāhu habāʾan manthūrā.

The two verses must be set side by side, because the same word is used of two different objects:

A note: munbathth and manthūr are separate roots; both mean "scattered" but they are not the same word. The same note was entered for the same distinction in the section on al-Insān and is preserved here. I establish no derivational link between them.

The link I make is at the level of sense: the Qurʾān describes the heaviest thing (a mountain) and the least visible thing (the work a person does) with the same word. Both become dust.

Root: ب-ث-ث. To spread, to scatter, to disperse. In the section on al-Qāriʿa the root's occurrences in the Qurʾān were listed, and the conclusion recorded there was this: "the word is not negative in itself; it conveys scatteredness. Whether the scatteredness is good or bad depends on what is scattered."

Now we can complete that finding — because the root's third pattern is here.

And the difference is in the grammar, and it is a meaningful difference.

Mabthūth and mabthūtha are passive participles: passive. There is one who scatters, and they are what is scattered. This was particularly stressed in the section on al-Qāriʿa: "not what disperses but what is dispersed."

Munbathth, however, is an active participle of Form VII. In Arabic this form conveys muṭāwaʿa — that is, the resulting state of an act: you break a thing (kasartuhu), and it breaks (fa'nkasara). There is an agent but he is not seen; what is seen is the outcome the act has left in the body.

The verse does this, then: the mountains were crumbled (bussat — passive, there is an agent), and as a result they became scattering dust (munbathth — muṭāwaʿa).

The فَ at the head of the clause confirms this too: fa-kānat — "and so it became". Cause and effect.

A grammatical chain is thus set up between the two verses: a passive verb → a muṭāwaʿa. The act done, and the state the act leaves behind.

I record this as my own reading; the grammatical value of the patterns is, for its part, a linguistic datum.

In the section on al-Ḥāqqa this was recorded: in the Qurʾān's scenes of the resurrection the mountains generally undergo their change in place. And in the section on al-Muzzammil a table was given. Rather than repeat both, I state al-Wāqiʿa's place in that table:

Al-Wāqiʿa's description is the most extreme in the table. Being set moving (al-Ṭūr 52/10), being scattered (Ṭāhā 20/105), becoming carded wool (al-Qāriʿa 101/5), becoming a heap of running sand (al-Muzzammil 73/14) — in all of these the mountain is still a thing. In al-Wāqiʿa it comes down to the threshold of visibility: dust that can be made out in the light.

And this serves the sūra's purpose. As was recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa, the lightening of the mountains there was preparing a balance. Here the mountains' being reduced to next to nothing prepares a classification: one verse later people will be divided into three groups.

In both sūras, that is, the mountains do the same work: changing what is to be measured. When the heaviest body in the world is removed, there remains something else whose weight is to be measured.

I record this as my own reading.