فَهَلْ تَرَىٰ لَهُم مِّنۢ بَاقِيَةٍ
This is the sūra's second question; but it is of an altogether different kind from the question in the third verse.
- Verse 3: "And what made you know what al-Ḥāqqa is?" — a question that cannot be answered. The knowledge of the one addressed does not reach that far.
- Verse 8: "Do you see any remnant of them?" — a question whose answer lies with the one addressed himself. He need only look.
The sūra places the two questions deliberately in different places. The first is about the future and cannot be answered. The second is about the past, and its answer is plain: no.
And here the evidential structure of the sūra becomes visible. It supports the unanswerable question (the resurrection) with a question whose answer is known (the destructions of the past).
هَلْ is an interrogative particle in Arabic; but here it asks no real question. The grammarians call this use a rhetorical question of denial: a negation framed as a question. "Do you see?" = "You do not see."
The difference is this, and it was recorded in the section on al-Māʿūn as well: a plain statement gives information; a question draws the one addressed into the matter. Had it been said "nothing remained of them", the hearer would have heard it and passed on. When a question is asked, he is obliged to look for himself.
And there was a place for him to look. As was recorded in the sections on al-Shams and al-Fajr, the Mecca-Syria caravan route passed through the homelands of destroyed peoples; the ruins were there to be seen. The question is not an abstract one.
مِّن بَاقِيَةٍ — the min here is redundant (zāʾida), and its function is totality: to make the negation general.
The same phenomenon was treated in the section on al-Ṭāriq: "mā lahu quwwatun" = "he has no strength"; "mā lahu min quwwatin" = "he has not any strength".
So too here: the question is not "do you see a remnant?" but "do you see any remnant at all?" The particle opens the scope of the negation to its limit.
| Solution | Sense |
|---|---|
| A verbal noun (like ʿāfiya, ʿāqiba) | "A lasting, a continuing" — "nothing of them lasted" |
| The attribute of an omitted noun | "A remaining soul", "a remaining person" — "no one of them was left" |
| General | "A remaining thing" — person, trace, work, descendant; all of it |
All three have been maintained in the classical sources and the practical difference between them is limited. The third reading is the most comprehensive and accords best with the totalising function of min: without specifying a kind, the sūra sweeps away everything.
Verse seven: fa-tara'l-qawma fīhā ṣarʿā — "you see the people there laid low." Verse eight: fa-hal tarā lahum min bāqiya — "do you see any remnant of them?"
The same verb, in two consecutive verses. In the first the one addressed sees something: bodies laid out. In the second he looks for something and does not find it.
And the distance between the two seeings is time. The seventh verse is the immediate aftermath of the event; the eighth verse is today. In the first there are corpses; in the second there is nothing at all.
In two steps, that is, the sūra does this: it shows the destruction, and then it shows the permanence of the destruction. That a people is wiped out is an event; that nothing at all remains of that people is a result.
I record this as my own reading. Its ground is the use of the same verb in two consecutive verses from two different perspectives in time.
The wording of the verse is absolute. But the Qurʾān itself records in many places that among the destroyed peoples those who believed were saved: "Until, when Our command came and the oven boiled over…" (Hūd 11/40); and for ʿĀd: "We saved Hūd and those who believed with him by Our mercy" (al-Aʿrāf 7/72).
The classical explanation is this: the subject of the verse is those who were destroyed, not those who were saved. The pronoun "of them" refers back to those who overstepped and denied. Those who were saved stand outside the destruction to begin with.
This explanation fits the text and creates no contradiction within the Qurʾān. I content myself with recording it.