يَوْمَئِذٍ تُعْرَضُونَ لَا تَخْفَىٰ مِنكُمْ خَافِيَةٌ
Yawmaʾidhin tuʿraḍūna lā takhfā minkum khāfiya "On that day you are brought forward; nothing hidden of you stays hidden."
The concrete sense of the root is to set a thing crosswise, to spread it out before someone, to display it. ʿArḍ means "breadth" (the opposite of ṭūl, length). When you turn a thing broadside, its wide face comes towards you; it becomes visible.
- عَرْض ٱلْجَيْش — the review of an army. The soldiers drawn up in line and marched past the commander. It is one of the most concrete uses in Arabic and throws direct light on this verse.
- عَرَضَ عَلَيْهِ — he presented it to him, offered it, showed it.
- مَعْرِض — a place of exhibition. The idea of a "display".
- عَارِض — that which comes crosswise; a cloud stretching broadside across the horizon. It occurs in the Qurʾān: "When they saw it as a cloud coming broadside towards their valleys…" (al-Aḥqāf 46/24) — while the destruction of ʿĀd is being recounted.
- عَرَض — transient goods, the goods of this world. "You desire the transient goods of this world" (al-Anfāl 8/67); "the transient gain of the life of this world" (al-Nisāʾ 4/94).
Note the last item. The same root yields both being marched past in review and the goods of this world. The link the lexicographers make is this: ʿaraḍ is what does not last, what comes and goes — it passes before you, it does not stay in your hand.
In Arabic, that is, the goods of this world and being marched past come from the same root: both are transient. I record this as a linguistic datum; I issue no firm judgement on the historical development of the root.
The verb is passive. Tuʿraḍūna — "you are brought forward". The person does not show himself; he is shown. This is part of the sūra's series of passives and accords with the finding recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq: in these sūras there is little that man does with his own hand; in the scenes of the resurrection, it is done to him.
Root: خ-ف-ي. To hide, to cover, to conceal. And the sentence is of the ishtiqāq structure: verb and subject from the same root. "Nothing hidden stays hidden."
This is the same grammatical device as waqaʿati'l-wāqiʿa in the fifteenth verse. The sūra uses this device twice, and both times at the densest moments of the scene of the resurrection.
مِنكُمْ — "of you". What is hidden, that is, is within you. The verse does not say "nothing stays hidden"; it says "nothing hidden of you stays hidden". The place of the hiddenness is specified: the person himself.
خَافِيَة is again on the fāʿila metre and can again be read in two ways: as a verbal noun ("a hiding") or as the attribute of an omitted noun ("a hidden thing"). Both come out at the same place.
A note on the variant readings. It is transmitted that the verb is also read in the يَخْفَىٰ (masculine) form. The sense does not change; the feminine of the word khāfiya is a matter of wording. Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I give no name.
This verse says the same thing as two verses treated earlier in this commentary — but all three say it with a different verb. Setting the three side by side shows how the reckoning is described:
| Al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/10 | Al-Ṭāriq 86/9 | Al-Ḥāqqa 69/18 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expression | حُصِّلَ مَا فِى ٱلصُّدُور | تُبْلَى ٱلسَّرَآئِر | لَا تَخْفَىٰ مِنكُمْ خَافِيَة |
| Verb | It was sifted out | It was tested, tried | It does not stay hidden |
| Concrete field of the root | Farming — winnowing on the threshing floor | Weaving — testing a cloth by wearing it | Covering — the lifting of a veil |
| Kind of operation | Separating | Testing | Coming to light |
| Who/what undergoes it | What is in the breasts | Secrets | The person himself |
In the sections on al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Ṭāriq these two verses were already compared, and this conclusion was recorded: "The one is separating, the other testing. Together they give two stages of a reckoning."
In al-ʿĀdiyāt there is winnowing, in al-Ṭāriq wearing to the test. In al-Ḥāqqa nothing is done at all — the veil merely lifts. The verb is negative: "it does not stay hidden". What is conveyed, that is, is not an act but the impossibility of an act.
The first two are preparation, the third is the result. And what follows in al-Ḥāqqa shows what that result does: in the nineteenth verse people are divided in two.
I record this threefold comparison as my own reading. The link between al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Ṭāriq had already been made in the section on al-Ṭāriq; the third link is added by me. The wordings of the three verses and the senses of the roots are, for their part, data that can be verified.
In the twelfth verse the sūra had spoken of the ear: "a retaining ear." Now in the eighteenth it speaks of visibility.
- In this world: the reminder comes, and an ear either retains it or does not. And this is an operation subject to choice — the verse says "an ear", after all, not "ears".
- On that day: everything is visible, and this is not subject to choice. The verb is passive, the verdict is a negation.
The distinction recorded in the section on al-Takāthur is exactly at work here: "Knowledge is a matter of choice; seeing is not. A person may choose not to know something… But he cannot choose not to see what is set before his eyes."