al-Qalam 68:28-33

Qāla awsaṭuhum a-lam aqul lakum lawlā tusabbiḥūn — qālū subḥāna rabbinā innā kunnā ẓālimīn — fa-aqbala baʿḍuhum ʿalā baʿḍin yatalāwamūn — qālū yā waylanā innā kunnā ṭāghīn — ʿasā rabbunā an yubdilanā khayran minhā innā ilā rabbinā rāghibūn — kadhālika'l-ʿadhāb, wa la-ʿadhābu'l-ākhirati akbar, law kānū yaʿlamūn "The most balanced among them said: 'Did I not say to you, why do you not glorify God?' They said: 'Glory be to our Lord; we have indeed been wrongdoers.' Then they turned on one another, reproaching one another. They said: 'Woe to us! We have indeed been transgressors. It may be that our Lord will give us something better than it in exchange; to our Lord we now turn.' Such is the punishment. And the punishment of the hereafter is greater — if only they knew."

Root: و-س-ط. Middle, that which is in the middle. Wasaṭ — middle; awsaṭ — the most central.

And on the sense of the word there are two readings:

The second sense draws support from the Qurʾān's own usage: "We have made you a middle community" (al-Baqara 2/143 — ummatan wasaṭan). There wasaṭ is not an arithmetical middle; it means balanced, choice, good.

And the Qurʾān uses the same root once more in the sense of "the best": among the prayers, al-ṣalāt al-wusṭā (al-Baqara 2/238) — the middle, or the most excellent, prayer.

I prefer the second reading and the ground is the context: the man is the one in the group who says what is right; the information that he was "middle in age" would serve no purpose here. It is not binding; the two may also come together in the same man.

The most human sentence in the narrative. And the most useless one.

The man was right. He had warned them. And now he recalls his warning.

But note: the man is there too. He went to the garden with them. He shared in their whispering, or at least did not prevent it. And now he declares that he was right.

This is a finding I write as my own reading: the man who knew the right thing and said it but did not change the outcome is not presented in the narrative as one who has been saved. He too loses his garden. And he too is — in the thirty-first verse — inside the group that says "we have been transgressors".

The narrative does not count having spoken the truth sufficient on its own.

And this connects with the eighth verse of the sūra: "do not yield to those who deny." The man in the narrative had in a sense yielded too — he spoke, and then fell silent.

I record this link as my own reading; the verse does not say it, but the construction of the narrative is open to this reading.

The particle لَوْلَا with an imperfect verb conveys in Arabic urging and reproach: "if only you had done it", "why do you not do it".

سَبَّحَ — root س-ب-ح. And the concrete sense of the root is to swim: sabaḥa fi'l-māʾ — he swam in the water. The Qurʾān uses this sense: "each swimming in an orbit" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/33; in the frame of Yā-Sīn 36/40).

How does one get from swimming to tasbīḥ?

The explanation the lexicographers transmit is this: the swimmer moves through the water swiftly and without obstruction. Tasbīḥ is to remove God far from every kind of deficiency, to declare Him free of it — that is, to carry Him past and beyond every imputation of fault.

I transmit this explanation as the lexicographers transmit it; it carries no claim to certainty. But the root's sense of "swimming" is undisputed in the lexicons.

So what exactly was the tasbīḥ the men did not perform?

There is disagreement, and both views must be recorded:

I prefer the first view and the ground is the construction of the narrative itself: the man's warning must correspond to something, and the only omission explicitly recorded in the narrative is in the eighteenth verse. It is not binding.

And that the word tasbīḥ has been chosen is meaningful, as my own reading: "saying 'if God wills'" looks like a formula. Saying tasbīḥ states the substance of the matter — to declare God free of deficiency, that is, to acknowledge that nothing happens without His willing it.

So the point is not to utter a word but to recognise a fact. This is what was recorded in the discussion of the eighteenth verse.

And now they glorify God.

Subḥāna rabbinā — this was exactly what was wanted. But after the time for it has passed.

And immediately after, a confession: innā kunnā ẓālimīn — "we have indeed been wrongdoers".

ظَلَمَ — root ظ-ل-م. And the original sense of the root is to put a thing somewhere other than its place; ẓulma (darkness) is from this root too — light not being where it should be.

So wrongdoing is putting a thing somewhere other than where it belongs.

And this is exactly what had happened in the narrative: the poor man's due had been taken from the poor man's place and put in the place of the garden's owners.

Note the form of the verb: kunnā — "we were". A finding that looks back to the past, then. The men do not say "we did wrong"; they say "we have been wrongdoers" — they acknowledge not an act but a state.

This form shows the depth of the confession, as my own reading: to say "I did wrong" is to acknowledge an act; to say "I have been a wrong sort of man" is to acknowledge oneself. The second is heavier.

Root: ل-و-م. To reproach, to blame. Lawm — reproach; lawwāma — one who reproaches much (al-nafs al-lawwāma at al-Qiyāma 75/2).

In Form VI: mutual reproach.

And this scene comes immediately after the confession. The order is worth noting:

1. The one who warned recalls his warning (28) 2. Glorification and confession (29) 3. Blaming one another (30) 4. Confession again (31)

So they oscillate between confession and blame.

This is a finding I record as my own reading: it is the most familiar shape of behaviour after a disaster. First acceptance, then a search for someone responsible, then acceptance again. Unable to carry the weight of the offence, the mind tries to distribute it outwards.

And a note from the discussion of al-Baqara echoes here: for the verb fa'ddāraʾtum fīhā (you cast it upon one another) at 2/72 this finding was made: "In a single sentence the social scene of a murder whose author cannot be found is drawn — everyone pushes the crime onto someone else."

The difference in al-Qalam is this: there the offence was being covered up; here the offence has been admitted but cannot be apportioned.

وَيْل — wayl. Treated in the discussions of al-Humaza and al-Māʿūn: destruction, punishment, and a cry of anguish.

طَغَىٰ — root ط-غ-ي. Treated in the discussion of al-Fajr; I do not repeat it here. In summary: the concrete sense of the root is water overflowing its vessel; ṭughyān is the crossing of a limit.

And the second confession uses a different word from the first:

The two words name two distinct faults, as my own reading: the one states the offence committed against the poor man (wrongdoing), the other the attitude taken towards God (transgression).

And the order is meaningful: first what was against a human being, then what was against God. So it had been throughout the narrative — first the decision to keep out the poor man, then the oath without exception.

One further observation: the word ṭāghīn is from the same root as the word used in Sūrat al-Fajr for the destruction of peoples. The men in the narrative name themselves in the language of peoples that were destroyed.

And at the end of the narrative there is a sentence of hope. This sets the narrative apart from the other accounts of destruction.

عَسَىٰ — "it may be that". A verb in Arabic conveying expectation.

بَدَّلَ — root ب-د-ل. To change, to put another in place of a thing. Badal — that which takes a thing's place.

رَٰغِبُون — root ر-غ-ب. And the concrete sense of the root is breadth: raghīb — wide. Raghba is to turn towards a thing and to want it.

And the preposition matters: rāghibūna ilā — "we turn towards…". In Arabic raghiba fī (he desired a thing) and raghiba ʿan (he turned away from a thing) are opposites. Here ilā is used: a turning towards.

But was this repentance accepted?

The Qurʾān does not say. And its not saying is worth noting.

The classical exegetes differ on this:

I adopt no preference. The text is silent, and its silence may have a function.

But this must be recorded, as my own reading: that the narrative ends with a hope leaves a door open for the sūra's addressees — the rich of Mecca. Had the narrative ended "and they were destroyed", the example would have been closed. Ending as it does, the example stays open.

And the narrative closes with a verdict: kadhālika'l-ʿadhāb — "such is the punishment."

The brevity of the sentence is striking. A narrative running to sixteen verses is summed up in four words.

And then a comparison: wa la-ʿadhābu'l-ākhirati akbar — "the punishment of the hereafter is greater."

That is, the whole disaster related in the narrative — a garden gone in a single night, the shock of the morning, the mutual recriminations — is positioned as a small example.

لَوْ كَانُوا۟ يَعْلَمُونَ — "if only they knew".

The sentence has no apodosis. In Arabic the answer to a law condition is sometimes left unsaid, and this is left for the hearer to complete.

If they had known, what then? It is not said.

This gap is the same technique recorded for al-ghāshiya in the discussion of al-Ghāshiya: what is not said becomes limitless.

Now we can gather up why the narrative is in this sūra.

The seventeenth verse had already made the link: "We tried them… as We tried." The narrative, then, is a comparison.

And the elements of the comparison correspond one by one:

Five items, five correspondences. The narrative is the portrait in the form of a story.

And in the Meccan context this is a direct mirror, as my own reading: Mecca was a city grown rich by trade; there was an order in which wealth was directly bound to social standing. The narrative takes aim at that order's most invisible assumption: the assumption that what you own is yours.

And the scale of the narrative matters: what is related is not the destruction of a people but a family's garden. Not, that is, a disaster on the scale of Noah's flood.

This brings the narrative closer. When a people is destroyed the reader does not see himself in that people. But the loss of a garden can happen to anyone.