al-Ḥāqqa 69:1-3

Al-Ḥāqqa · Ma'l-Ḥāqqa · Wa mā adrāka ma'l-Ḥāqqa "Al-Ḥāqqa! What is al-Ḥāqqa? And what made you know what al-Ḥāqqa is?"

Root: ح-ق-ق. The concrete sense of the root is a thing's being fixed, finding its place, turning out to be real. Its derivatives show the centre of the root:

• حَقَّ ٱلْأَمْرُ — the matter came true, became settled. "The word of your Lord came true against them" (Yūnus 10/33) — that is, it was realised, it found its place.
• ٱلْحَقّ — the real; and at the same time a right, that is, a claim fixed upon someone. What English covers with two separate words is a single word in Arabic: truth and what is due.
• حَقِيقَة — the thing itself, its very substance; the opposite of the figurative.
• ٱسْتَحَقَّ — he deserved it, he was entitled to it. That is, "he made it fixed upon him".
• أَحَقّ — more entitled, having the better right.
• حُقّ — the place where the lid of a box seats exactly; the hollow into which a thing settles precisely. The most concrete form of the root shows here: to seat exactly.

This last item matters. At the core of the root there is not a verdict but a seating: a thing's coming exactly into the place opened for it. Ḥaqq is not a notion suspended in the air; it is what has come to rest in its place. This is why the same root yields both "the real" and "a claim": both settle upon their owner.

And its opposite shows the same thing: بَاطِل (bāṭil). Buṭlān means to come to nothing, to be annulled, to be left void. The opposition of ḥaqq and bāṭil is therefore not the opposition of correct and incorrect; it is the opposition of what stands and what disperses.

Ḥāqqa is an active participle, feminine: that which comes true, that which is established as right. But the classical explanations differ over what exactly it realises, and all three are possible in terms of the language:

The third explanation is worth pausing over, because it fits the structure of the sūra to a surprising degree.

What the sūra recounts throughout is a contention: peoples deny, the news comes true. "Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa" (4). "They disobeyed the messenger of their Lord" (10). "We know that among you there are deniers" (49). There is, that is, a claim and a counter-claim in the sūra; and al-Ḥāqqa is the moment at which one of the claims puts down the other.

I do not say that I prefer this explanation — all three arrive at the same place, and I can see no evidence that would require a choice among them. But the fit the third makes with the content of the sūra is worth recording.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa this finding was made: al-qāriʿa is not the name of a disaster but the name of a movement — the one that strikes, that hits. And it was recorded there that the same three-step opening occurs once more in the Qurʾān (here).

We can now set the two sūras side by side. The pattern is identical:

The place where the difference lies is the last row, and it settles the whole direction of the two sūras.

Al-Qāriʿa names the event from its felt side: a blow, an impact, a sudden contact. What the word addresses is the skin, the ear. And accordingly Sūrat al-Qāriʿa goes on to give two images: moths and wool.

Al-Ḥāqqa names the event from its verified side: a piece of news turning out true. What the word addresses is a mind that has already said something. And accordingly Sūrat al-Ḥāqqa goes on to recount two cases at law: peoples who denied, and news that was confirmed.

The same day, then, is named in two sūras from two different places: one by its striking, the other by its coming true. And this shows that the naming is not arbitrary: each name says in advance what its sūra is going to do.

I record this as a reading I have drawn from the comparison of the two sūras. Its ground is the fit between the roots of the two names and the content of what follows them; and that fit is plain in the text.

The rule recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa holds here as well: in Arabic, repeating the noun where a pronoun would have served conveys magnification (tafkhīm) and the instilling of dread (tahwīl). In none of the three verses is a pronoun used; the whole word is repeated each time.

But there is a difference between the two sūras, and it needs to be recorded.

In al-Qāriʿa the word never occurs again after the first three verses. The sūra says its name three times and lets it go.

So it is in al-Ḥāqqa too — the word ḥāqqa likewise never occurs again in the sūra after these three verses. But the sūra does not let the word go; it does not let its root go. The root returns in the fifty-first verse as ḥaqqu'l-yaqīn. Al-Qāriʿa says its name and falls silent; al-Ḥāqqa says its name, keeps its root in reserve, and brings it back at the end.

I record this difference as an observation; the distribution of the two words within their sūras is a datum that can be verified.

This pattern was treated in detail in the section on al-Humaza, and the rule recorded there was this:

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the rule was tested twice and worked both times. It works in al-Ḥāqqa too: the perfect is used in the third verse, and an explanation follows.

But the kind of explanation is striking, and here again the two sūras part.

Al-Qāriʿa answered its question with two similes (people like moths, mountains like wool). The answer, that is, was a description.

Al-Ḥāqqa answers its question with history: "Thamūd and ʿĀd denied al-Qāriʿa…" The answer, that is, is a record.

This difference arises from the kind of the two names. The answer to "what is the one that strikes?" may well be what the blow is like. But the answer to "what is the one that comes true?" is what has come true before. The sūra offers past events as the proof of a future one.

This is a form of argument, and it explains the whole of the sūra's first part: the proof that al-Ḥāqqa will come to pass is that smaller ḥāqqas have come to pass already.

Iltifāt. Adrā-ka — "you". The telling has been running in the third person and turns all at once to the second person singular. This device was treated in the sections on al-Humaza and al-Qāriʿa; its function is the same. The sūra's later turns to the second person singular are worth recording too: "fa-tara'l-qawma" (7), "fa-hal tarā" (8), "ʿarsha rabbika" (17), "fa-sabbiḥ bi'smi rabbika" (52). While it narrates, the sūra stops and looks at the one listening.