al-Wāqiʿa 56:7

Wa kuntum azwājan thalātha "And when you become three classes."

The sūra's main sentence. The six verses up to here were the temporal frame of this clause.

Root: ز-و-ج. Zawj — one that is paired, that has a fellow; and on its own it is used in the sense of "spouse".

The fine point of the word in Arabic is this, and it is often confused: zawj means each single member of a pair, not the pair itself. One shoe of a pair is a zawj, a man who has a wife is a zawj, a woman who has a husband is a zawj. The English word "pair" indicates both together; the Arabic zawj indicates one of them.

From here the word widens to the sense "kind, sort, class": a thing's being together with its like makes it a class.

This verse was already mentioned in the section on al-Takwīr. There four views were tabulated for the word zuwwijat (81/7) and the first ("like was brought together with like") was preferred; one of the grounds was precisely this verse: azwājan thalātha — three groups, three "pairs". The preference made there is not repeated here, only recorded.

What is proper to this place is this: why is the word not aṣnāf or firaq but azwāj?

I propose a reading and state that it is my own. The word azwāj defines the group by the likeness within it: the members of a class are one another's fellows. Firqa, by contrast, brings division forward, and ṣinf brings ranking forward.

And this fits what the sūra is doing. The sūra does not divide people from outside; it says that each has come together with its own like. The separation is made not by a hand from outside but by likeness itself.

Al-Takwīr 81/7 supports this reading; but I present it as a reading, not as a claim.

Kuntum — "you became". Again the perfect, again for a future event. This usage was treated at the first verse; I do not repeat it.

But there is something more here: the address is in the second person plural. The scene, recounted in the third person up to this point, turns to "you" at the very moment of the division.

This is the iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address) treated in the sections on al-Humaza, al-Muṭaffifīn and al-Insān. Its function here is plain: the reader, who has been standing outside the scene as a spectator, is placed among those being divided in the sentence of division.

And note: which group he belongs to is not said. "You become three classes" — which of the three you are is not stated. The rest of the sūra sets the three tables before you separately and does not make the choice.

The measure recorded in the section on al-Māʿūn holds here too: "The sūra is an instrument of diagnosis, and a diagnosis is made first upon oneself."

The Qurʾān mostly divides people into two: faith/denial, abrār/fujjār, aṣḥābu'l-yamīn/aṣḥābu'sh-shimāl, the one given from the right/the one given from the left.

In the section on al-Muddaththir a finding from al-Inshiqāq was relayed: it was stated that the right/left distinction is "absolute and leaves no third category".

Al-Wāqiʿa shows the limit of that finding, and this must be recorded explicitly, since otherwise the two sections would appear to contradict one another.

There is no contradiction, and the reason is this: al-Wāqiʿa does not break the twofold distinction either. The third group is not a middle way set over against the second group (the left); it is an upper slice drawn out of the first group.

The text itself shows this:

• The eighth and ninth verses set up the pair: right and left.
• The tenth verse opens no new side; it names those who go ahead of the right side.
• After the forty-first verse there is no third table of punishment — on the side of the Fire there is a single group.

The division, that is, is this: the side of salvation is divided in two, the side of punishment is not.

And this is the same asymmetry as was identified in the section on al-Muṭaffifīn. This was recorded there: "there is extra detail on the side of good, none on the side of evil" — and it was stated that a difference of degree is established between the abrār and the muqarrabūn, while the fujjār remain a single group. There, moreover, al-Wāqiʿa was pointed to directly for that finding.

Now that pointing finds its answer and is completed in both directions:

The same name, in two sūras, at the same work. Independently of one another the two sūras set up two ranks on the side of the good and give the upper rank the same name.

This is a verifiable textual datum. I establish no relation of arrangement or of revelation between the two sūras.