Nūḥ 71:23

Wa qālū lā tadharunna ālihatakum wa lā tadharunna Waddan wa lā Suwāʿan wa lā Yaghūtha wa Yaʿūqa wa Nasrā

"And they said: On no account leave your gods; on no account leave Wadd, or Suwāʿ, or Yaghūth and Yaʿūq and Nasr."

What was called "a snare of the greatest" in verse 22 is this: a sentence.

No army, no torture, no exile. The notables of the people say something to the people: "Do not leave your gods."

And note: the sentence is a sentence of defence, not of attack. No argument is put forward against Noah; what he has brought is not even discussed. Only holding on to what already exists is commanded.

I record this as an observation: the Qurʾān gives the description "the greatest snare" not to an act of violence but to a call to conserve. Because what the call does is to close the discussion from the start.

Root و-ذ-ر: to abandon something, to leave it. This root has an interesting property: in Arabic its perfect form has fallen out of use; only the imperfect and imperative forms survive (yadharu, dhar). It is among the defective verbs.

The doubled شدّة at the end of the verb — tadharunna — is the heavy nūn of emphasis. In Arabic this suffix reinforces a command or a prohibition to the highest degree. Its English equivalent is "on no account", "never".

And now we come to the finest internal link in the sūra.

The same verb — the root و-ذ-ر — occurs three times in the sūra:

That is, the people's last word was "do not leave"; Noah's first prayer was "do not leave". The same verb, in two opposite directions.

I draw this link from the text of the sūra. The unity of the root is beyond dispute; that there is a deliberate echo between the two verses is my own reading.

A caution: This verb (tadhar, و-ذ-ر) and the andhir of the sūra's first verse (ن-ذ-ر) are not from the same root. The resemblance in sound is close. I record this distinction again because it is liable to be confused.

The plural of إله. The analysis of the word was made in the discussion of al-Fātiḥa (in connection with the basmala).

Note the structure of the sentence: first "your gods" is said generally, then five names are enumerated one by one. In rhetoric this is the structure called passing from the general to the particular (dhikru'l-khāṣṣ baʿda'l-ʿāmm), and it shows that those enumerated have a particular weight: these are the most held to among the gods.

Now we come to the section of the sūra about which there is most curiosity and in which the greatest care is needed. Let us write first what the Qurʾān says, then what the transmitted report says, then what is known from outside. Not confusing these three is more important than anything else in this discussion.

The Qurʾān says the following about these five names and says nothing else:

1. These are the things Noah's people were called on not to leave. 2. These are enumerated within the expression "your gods". 3. All five are made the subject, in the next verse (24), of the verdict "they led many astray" — either they themselves or those who called to them.

What the Qurʾān does not say: what they were (statues, animals, heavenly bodies), whose names they were, how they arose, how they were worshipped, and how these names passed from Noah's people to the Arabian peninsula. None of this is in the verse.

The inflection of the five names is not uniform, and this gives information grammatically:

Yaghūth and Yaʿūq resemble in form Arabic imperfect verbs (yaghūthu — he helps; yaʿūqu — he hinders / holds back). In Arabic a proper name on a verbal pattern does not take tanwīn. This is the grammatical explanation of the difference in the text of the verse and it is not disputed.

It is striking, moreover, that these two names are meaningful verbal roots in Arabic:

• Yaghūth, from the root غ-و-ث: to rush to help, to come to the rescue. (Istighātha — asking for help, from the same root.)
• Yaʿūq, from the root ع-و-ق: to hold back, to hinder. (ʿAwāʾiq — obstacles.)

That is, the two names resemble verbs meaning "he helps" and "he hinders": the one who brings benefit and the one who wards off harm. These are the two basic functions expected of a god. Whether this is the meaning of the names is not certain — but that they sound so to an Arabic ear is clear.

Wadd, for its part, comes from the root و-د-د: to love, to incline towards. From the same root come mawadda (love) and the divine name Wadūd.

This point was taken up in Sūrat al-Burūj (85/14) and a note was set down there: that the two words are from the same root is a datum of the language; but no ruling was issued as to whether this is coincidence or the trace within the language of an older idea of a "god of love". I preserve that note here too and do not repeat it.

Nasr, from the root ن-س-ر: an eagle, a bird of prey of the vulture kind. The word is a known bird name in Arabic.

For Suwāʿ it is hard to draw a clear meaning from an Arabic root; the root س-و-ع is related to "hour/time" but the connection is forced. I say nothing definite about the meaning of this name.

The most widely transmitted explanation of these names is this: they were the names of righteous men who lived among Noah's people. When these men died, statues of them were set up in the places where people gathered, in order to keep their memory alive; at the beginning these were not worshipped. But when that generation passed and the knowledge was forgotten, later generations began to worship the statues.

This explanation rests on a report transmitted, with an ascription to Ibn ʿAbbās, in al-Bukhārī's section of exegesis on Sūrat Nūḥ. The report is very widely relayed in the exegetical literature.

One must be honest about this report:

• The source of the report is sound and it is early.
• But the report is the word of a Companion (mawqūf); it is not transmitted as a saying ascribed to the Prophet. This does not make it worthless, but neither does it place it at the same degree of certainty as the Qurʾān.
• There is a wide body of detail circulating around the report (which man belonged to which tribe, how the statues were made, which tribe worshipped which idol) and these details diverge from one another. The further one descends to the level of detail, the more the reliability falls.

The mechanism the report describes, however, is worth attention and is important in itself:

1. Men worthy of respect live and die. 2. Monuments are set up for their memory — at this stage there is no worship. 3. A generation passes. 4. The next generation does not know why the monument was set up; it only sees that respect is shown. 5. Respect turns into worship.

The most important link in this series is the fourth: the loss of knowledge. Shirk is described not as a deviation that appears all at once but as the result of a loss of memory. The first generation knows what it is doing; the third does not.

I record this as a process observable within history. The forgetting of how a practice began and the sacralising of the practice itself is a recurring phenomenon in the history of religions — and it is not confined to a single religion or society.

There are records that some of these names were genuinely in use in pre-Islamic Arabia, and these are not dependent on Islamic sources:

• It has been recorded by researchers that the name Wadd occurs as a divine name in South Arabian inscriptions.
• The names Yaghūth and Yaʿūq are found within pre-Islamic Arab personal names — names on the pattern "ʿabd + divine name", such as ʿAbd Yaghūth, are an indication that the name belonged to an object of worship. Such names are found in inscriptions and in Arabic poetry and genealogical records alike.
• It is transmitted that the name Nasr is associated with the Yemen region.

I relay these data in broad outline; the reading and dating of each inscription is a matter for specialists, and in the details researchers may reach differing conclusions. What is certain is this: these names are not names the Qurʾān invented; they are names its addressees knew.

The Qurʾān mentions these names as the gods of Noah's people. The transmitted report and the historical data, on the other hand, present them as the idols of Arabia. How is the distance between the two closed?

The explanation given for this in the classical sources is that the names were carried from generation to generation after the flood and finally reappeared among the Arab tribes. This is an explanation resting on transmitted report.

Another reading is also possible and, while not classical, does not run against the text: the Qurʾān may here be describing worship of the same type by using names the Arabs knew — that is, the emphasis is not on the historical continuity of the names but on the continuity of the behaviour.

I issue no definite ruling. The verse's own work is not to establish a genealogy; it is to name a stance.

The most enduring side of this verse is how shirk is presented as a conservative reflex.

The notables of the people do not say "our gods are true". They say "do not leave them". What is put forward is not an argument but continuity: this came down to us from our forefathers, let us preserve it.

The Qurʾān names this reflex elsewhere: "We found our forefathers upon a religion, and we are following in their footsteps" (al-Zukhruf 43/22-23). And it gives this answer: "Even if their forefathers understood nothing and were not rightly guided?" (al-Baqara 2/170).

The measure here is this — and this measure favours no side: that a thing is old does not show it to be right; nor does its being new. What the verse criticises is not attachment to tradition but putting tradition in the place of discussion. The notables of the people did not even examine what Noah brought; they only closed the door.