al-Taghābun 64:3

Khalaqa'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍa bi'l-ḥaqq, wa ṣawwarakum fa-aḥsana ṣuwarakum, wa ilayhi'l-maṣīr

"He created the heavens and the earth with truth; He gave you form and made your forms good. And to Him is the coming home."

The verse consists of three sentences, and among the three there is a great change of scale:

1. The heavens and the earth — the whole universe. 2. Your forms — an area as small as a human face. 3. To Him is the coming home — the whole of time.

From the cosmos to the face, from the face to the final outcome. And this is the continuation of the movement that began in the preceding verse: the sūra goes back and forth continuously between the widest and the nearest. This oscillation will settle entirely on the "near" at the end of the sūra (in verses 14-17).

Root: ح ق ق. The concrete sense of the root is a thing's being in its proper place and being fixed; ḥaqqa'l-shayʾ — a thing came to pass, became fixed. The broad analysis of this root was done in al-Ḥāqqa; I do not repeat it here.

The bāʾ here conveys muṣāḥaba (accompaniment) or mulābasa (adherence to a state): the creating took place as something adhering to "truth".

What does that mean? At least two things:

• Not purposeless. Creation is not a game or a waste. The Qurʾān rejects this openly in many places: "We did not create the heaven and the earth and what is between them as a game" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/16).
• Not arbitrary, but measured. Ḥaqq is what is fixed and in place. Creation was done with an order, and that order is not an alterable preference.

And this reservation sets up a precondition for the whole sūra: a reckoning is meaningful only in a purposeful creation. In a purposeless universe there could be no such thing as taghābun — coming off worse in a bargain — because coming off worse requires the existence of a value. The verse lays here the ground of the claim made in the ninth verse.

Root: ص و ر. And this root must be carefully distinguished from the root treated in al-Tīn.

Ṣūra is a thing's outward appearance, form, shape. Taṣwīr is the work of giving form. From the same root come muṣawwir (the one who gives form; it occurs in the Qurʾān as one of the names of God, at al-Ḥashr 59/24), taṣawwur (setting up the form of a thing in the mind), and the words Turkish has borrowed from this root: tasvir (depiction), suret (image), tasavvur (conception).

The pattern: Form II (ṣawwara). This form, as was recorded in al-Bayyina in connection with muṭahhara, conveys intensity and comprehensiveness: to form from beginning to end, in detail.

In Sūrat al-Tīn the following sentence was treated:

لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ فِىٓ أَحْسَنِ تَقْوِيمٍ "We have surely created the human being in the finest constitution." (al-Tīn 95/4)

I do not repeat the analysis made there; I recall it: تَقْوِيم is a Form II verbal noun from the root ق و م (qāma → qawwama → taqwīm: straightening, setting right, giving form, appraising value); and aḥsan answers both to aesthetic beauty and to fitness for the work — the reading "the most serviceable order" is also possible. It was also recorded there that the second element of the construct coming indefinite (aḥsani taqwīmin) conveys magnification.

Now let us compare the two expressions. The roots are different, and the difference is meaningful.

Two differences need dwelling on.

The first difference: structure and appearance. Taqwīm has to do with how a thing is built — backbone, balance, upright stance, working order. Taṣwīr, by contrast, with how it looks. Sūrat al-Tīn takes the human being as a structure and says that this structure can be spoiled (thumma radadnāhu asfala sāfilīn). Al-Taghābun takes the human being as an appearance and says that this appearance has been given.

The second difference, and to my mind the more important: plural and possession. The verse does not say al-ṣūra or ṣūratan; it says صُوَرَكُمْ — "your forms". Two things are said at once:

• Plural: not a single mould. Forms differ; the verse does not make the difference singular.
• Possession: the form has been made yours. What is given is at the same time what is your own.

And now look at the sentence structure of the verse: wa ṣawwarakum fa aḥsana ṣuwarakum. The verb comes twice. First "He gave form", then "He made your forms good". The second sentence is not a repetition of the first; it adds a qualification on top of the first.

That is, the verse says: form was given — and the form given was given well.

The practical consequence of this must be stated while staying within the verse's own limits. The verse lays down no standard of beauty; it says nothing about which face is beautiful and which ugly. What it says is more basic: form is given not as a defect but as a piece of work well done. And along with the possessive suffix: each one's own, for himself.

It is possible to turn this into a point bearing on the present, but without exaggeration. In an environment where appearance has turned into a measure of worth and this measure is worked constantly by comparison, what the verse does is to take the measure out of comparison: ṣuwarakum is plural and each one of them is inside the qualification aḥsan. No room has been left for comparison. This makes a quiet link with the idea of "mutual loss in the bargain" that will be set up in the ninth verse of the sūra — because coming off worse begins with measuring value in the wrong place.

مَصِير — root ص ي ر: to turn from one state into another, to arrive, to end up being that. The verb ṣāra in Arabic does not mean "became" but "came to be in that state"; it contains a process and an arrival.

Maṣīr is on the pattern of a noun of place: the place arrived at. And its being chosen as the verse-ending is meaningful — because the word conveys not a place but a result.

This word will occur twice in the sūra: here (3) and in the tenth verse (wa biʾsa'l-maṣīr — "what an evil arrival"). The difference between the two sums up the whole structure of the sūra:

• In verse 3 al-maṣīr is neutral: the coming home is to Him. The same for everyone.
• In verse 10 biʾsa'l-maṣīr: the arrival that is evil. For some.

That is, the coming home is one; the place arrived at is not. Two groups that set out on the same road do not go to the same place.