وَجَآءَ فِرْعَوْنُ وَمَن قَبْلَهُۥ وَٱلْمُؤْتَفِكَٰتُ بِٱلْخَاطِئَةِ · فَعَصَوْا۟ رَسُولَ رَبِّهِمْ فَأَخَذَهُمْ أَخْذَةً رَّابِيَةً
Wa jāʾa Firʿawnu wa man qablahu wa'l-muʾtafikātu bi'l-khāṭiʾa · Fa-ʿaṣaw rasūla rabbihim fa-akhadhahum akhdhatan rābiya "And Pharaoh, and those before him, and the overturned cities brought the offence. They disobeyed the messenger of their Lord, and He seized them with a mounting seizure."
This is an ordinary construction in Arabic; but its being chosen is meaningful. The verse does not say "they committed an offence" or "they did wrong". It says "they brought the offence."
To bring is to carry something from one place to another. The offence, that is, is depicted as an object carried and set down before us. And it is counted who brought it: Pharaoh, those before him, the overturned cities. Three separate parties bringing the same load.
| Reading | Who | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| The peoples before Pharaoh | Noah, ʿĀd, Thamūd and the rest | The pronoun in qablahu refers back to Pharaoh; the sūra has already enumerated Thamūd and ʿĀd |
| Those about him | With the reading qibalahu: "those who were at his side", his army and his subjects | A variant reading is transmitted; the sense shifts to Pharaoh's entourage |
The existence of the variant reading is recorded in the sources. Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I give no name.
The first reading is the more widespread and fits the movement of the sūra better: the sūra is making a list and completes the list by saying "and those before him". Everything not enumerated is covered by a single expression.
The concrete sense of the root is to turn, to turn inside out, to turn a thing from the direction it faced to another. It has two great branches:
- ٱئْتَفَكَ (Form VIII) — it was overturned, it was turned upside down.
- ٱلْمُؤْتَفِكَة — a place overturned.
- إِفْك (ifk) — slander, fabrication, a lie. The exact sense of the word: speech turned from the direction of truth.
- أَفَّاك — one who fabricates much falsehood. "Woe to every sinful liar" (al-Jāthiya 45/7).
- مَأْفُوك — one whose mind has been turned about.
And the Qurʾān reserves the most famous use from the second branch for an episode of accusation: "Those who brought the ifk are a group among you" (al-Nūr 24/11).
In Arabic, to lie is to turn speech. A lie is to take something true and change its direction; the word itself carries that movement.
And the same root is used for the overturning of cities: al-muʾtafikāt — settlements turned about, turned upside down.
What stands in this verse, therefore, is this: the cities of those who turned speech were themselves turned.
I record this link as a linguistic datum lying in the root of the words — the shared root is not in dispute and is recorded in the lexicons. The conclusion I draw from the relation between the two senses is my own; I ascribe it to no exegete.
And there is a support inside the sūra as well. The word at the end of the same verse is ٱلْخَاطِئَة — an offence, a deliberate sin. And in the root sense of khāṭiʾa too there is a deviation: خ-ط-أ, to miss the mark, to swerve from what is right. There are two words in the verse, that is, and both are words of direction: one conveys a turning, the other a missing.
Al-Muʾtafikāt is plural, and the singular occurs in the Qurʾān too: "And the overturned city He cast down" (al-Najm 53/53).
In the classical sources and among the majority of the exegetes it is said that what is meant is the cities of the people of Lot. The ground is the Qurʾān's own expression:
"When Our command came, We turned it upside down and rained upon it stones of baked clay." (Hūd 11/82)
The expression there is "jaʿalnā ʿāliyahā sāfilahā" — "We made its top its bottom". The physical inversion of the city is stated outright, that is. Read as the name of this event, al-muʾtafikāt fits exactly.
In another verse the people of Lot and the people of Midian are named side by side and al-muʾtafikāt occurs in the same list (al-Tawba 9/70). This shows that the word can cover more than one settlement.
What must be recorded: the Qurʾān gives neither the names of these cities, nor their number, nor their location. In the literature of transmitted reports and in later sources names and numbers are mentioned; I do not relay them, because they are not of the same degree of certainty as the text of the Qurʾān. This is the same note that was entered for Iram in the section on al-Fajr and for Thamūd in the section on al-Shams.
| Word | Sense | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| خَطَأ (khaṭaʾ) | An unintended mistake, an act not done on purpose | The Qurʾān gives a separate ruling on this: "There is no sin upon you for what you have done by mistake" (al-Aḥzāb 33/5) |
| خِطْء / خَطِيئَة (khiṭʾ / khaṭīʾa) | Deliberately taking the wrong road, swerving knowingly | "To kill them is a great offence" (al-Isrāʾ 17/31) |
The same root carries both the unintended mistake and the deliberate swerve. The shared core is failing to hit the mark; the difference lies in whether the failure is willed.
The use here is the second, and the ground is inside the verse itself: the verse says that they "brought" the offence. A thing that is brought cannot be unintended. And the next verse says "they disobeyed the messenger" — and disobedience requires intent.
Khāṭiʾa here, like the other fāʿila words of the sūra, is read as a verbal noun: "error, sin, wrong" — the act itself.
And the word will occur once more in the sūra: "None but those who offend eat it" (69/37) — there al-khāṭiʾūn is the plural active participle of the same root. What is brought in the ninth verse, that is, the sūra gives back to the bringers in the thirty-seventh: those who brought the offence will eat what the offence earns.
The link the lexicographers make is this: the ʿaṣā is what holds gathered fibres together; and ʿiṣyān is to break away from the gathering. In Arabic the expression "to split the staff" (shaqqa'l-ʿaṣā) is used in the sense of breaking away from the community. I transmit this explanation; I do not present it as a settled etymological judgement.
The singular "messenger". The verse speaks of three separate parties (Pharaoh, those before him, the overturned cities) but of a single messenger: rasūla rabbihim — singular.
- A singular used generically: "the messenger of each of them"; a singular noun in Arabic can convey a class.
- The shared message of the messengers: a separate messenger came to each, but what they brought was one; and so they are named as a single messenger.
The second explanation accords with the Qurʾān's own emphasis: the messengers differ, the call is one.
"The messenger of their Lord". The verse does not say "the messenger of God", it says "the messenger of their Lord". In the section on al-Fajr the eight occurrences in that sūra of the word Rabb in that sūra were set out in a table, and the word's burden of "nurture, care, ownership" was recorded.
Its function here is this: the authority rebelled against is not a foreign authority. It is the party that fed and raised them, that ordered their affairs. The rebellion is not against a stranger but against the one who cares for them.
And the pronoun is hum: rabbi-him — their Lord. The bond between the one who sent the messenger and those who rebel is made within the verse.
أَخْذَة — Root: أ-خ-ذ. To take, to hold, to seize. Here it comes as an absolute object (akhadhahum akhdhatan): the verb is reinforced by its own verbal noun.
In the sections on al-Qāriʿa and al-Inshiqāq the function of this construction was recorded: the absolute object conveys that the act took place fully. And here the verbal noun has taken an attribute as well, so that the quality of the act is specified.
The image the verb carries is capture: the catching of something that flees. It carries the assumption of flight within it.
- رَبَا — it increased, it swelled. "You see the earth barren; and when We send down water upon it, it stirs and swells." (al-Ḥajj 22/5)
- رَبْوَة — a hill, a raised place. "We settled them on a height." (al-Muʾminūn 23/50)
- رِبًا (ribā) — usurious increase. The exact sense of the word is "increase"; ribā is the increase added on top of the principal.
The seizure described in the verse is a "mounting" seizure: one that passes the measure of the offence, that swells, that adds on top. And this is also the word the Qurʾān uses for ribā.
Can a link be made between these two uses? I think it can, but I record it as my own reading and with caution: what increases in the hand comes back increased in the requital. The Qurʾān itself frames this idea plainly elsewhere: "God wipes out ribā and makes the alms grow" (al-Baqara 2/276) — there too the same root works in two opposite directions.
I do not present this as a claim of wordplay. What I record is that the sense of the root is not in dispute in the lexicon, and that the Qurʾān uses the same root both for wealth that increases and for punishment that increases.
An alternative reading. Some exegetes explain rābiya as "severe, heavy"; this is a natural extension of "increasing" and does not go anywhere different in meaning.
Three steps. And these three steps hold for the peoples enumerated earlier as well: Thamūd and ʿĀd also denied (4), and they too were destroyed (5-6).
The sūra, that is, first gave two examples in detail (Thamūd, ʿĀd — down to the duration of the wind), then reduced all the rest to a single formula. A passage from the particular to the rule.
And note: there is no name in the tenth verse. "They disobeyed, and He seized." Who they were no longer matters; what matters is the mechanism at work.