al-Qiyāma 75:16-19

Lā tuḥarrik bihī lisānaka li-taʿjala bih · Inna ʿalaynā jamʿahū wa qurʾānah · Fa-idhā qaraʾnāhu fa'ttabiʿ qurʾānah · Thumma inna ʿalaynā bayānah "Do not move your tongue with it to hurry it. Its gathering and its recitation are Ours. When We recite it, follow its recitation. Then its explanation too is Ours."

The sūra was telling a scene of the resurrection. In the fifteenth verse the verdict was given. And in the sixteenth, all at once, with no transitional sentence, comes an instruction addressed to the Prophet.

The grammarians call this a جُمْلَة اعْتِرَاضِيَّة (jumla iʿtirāḍiyya) — a parenthesis: a piece inserted into the telling with no grammatical link to what precedes or follows it.

In the classical commentaries the reason for these verses is explained thus: as the revelation was coming down, the Prophet, anxious not to forget or not to miss it, was repeating the words simultaneously; the verses forbid this. This explanation is widespread in the sources and agrees directly with the wording of the verse (moving the tongue).

But the real question is this: why was it put here?

The answer stands in the twentieth verse, and in a single root:

Verse 16: li-تَعْجَلَ bih — to take it in haste. Verse 20: bal tuḥibbūna'l-عَاجِلَة — you love what is at hand in haste.

The same root: ع-ج-ل.

The parenthesis is tied to the sūra by one word: haste. And the manner of the tie is striking — because the two hastes are not the same:

That is, the sūra sets two hastes from the same root side by side. One is well-meant, the other not; but both make the same mistake: trying to seize the result before its time.

I offer this as my own reading; the presence of the root in the two verses is a datum of the text and can be counted.

And this reading explains why the parenthesis does not stand there like a parenthesis. The subject of the sūra is the relation man builds with time: a man who in the fifth verse wants to break open his front, who in the sixth asks for a date, who in the twentieth loves what is at hand. The sixteenth verse shows the same matter in a flawless addressee and in its most innocent form.

The root ح-ر-ك: motion, stirring. Form II (ḥarraka): to set moving. (In Turkish the borrowed words hareket, "movement", and hareketli, "lively", come from this root.)

The imperative is in the prohibitive mood: "do not move."

The concreteness of the description is striking. The verse does not say "do not hurry"; it says "do not move your tongue". What is forbidden is named not as an attitude but as a movement of muscle. This kind of concreteness in the Qurʾān was recorded for ʿabasa (he frowned) in the section on ʿAbasa as well: an inward state is named from the place where it shows, in the face or on the tongue.

To what does the pronoun بِهِ refer? There is no explicit antecedent in the text — the Qurʾān has not yet been mentioned. The classical explanation: because the indication is clear the pronoun refers to the revelation; the one addressed already knows what it is. This is the same structure as the use of "We sent it down" in Sūrat al-Qadr: an object known without being named.

The fronting of عَلَيْنَا. The normal order of the sentence would be inna jamʿahū wa qurʾānahū ʿalaynā. The verse draws the element "upon Us" to the front — it conveys restriction: this work belongs to Us, not to you.

And this fronting comes once more in the nineteenth verse: thumma inna ʿalaynā bayānah.

Four tasks are counted in four verses, and three are given to one side, one to the other:

The only task that falls to man is to follow. And that task too comes after the second place — that is, it is given first and followed afterwards.

This table is consistent with the sūra's whole account of man. In the third verse man supposed we could not do a certain thing; here the list of what will be done is drawn up and man's share is reduced to one.

Root: ق-ر-أ. This root was analysed in detail in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAlaq and summarised at al-Aʿlā 87/6. The finding there was this:

There are two basic senses in the root: to gather, to bring together (the original sense), and to read, to give voice. The second is counted a special case of the first — to read is to bring letters and words together in the mouth. The name "Qurʾān" is from this root too.

I do not repeat it here. But something remarkable happens here and it must be pointed out.

The verse sets the two senses of the root side by side in the same sentence:

إِنَّ عَلَيْنَا جَمْعَهُۥ وَقُرْءَانَهُۥ "Its gathering and its recitation are Ours."

If qurʾān already means "gathering", this would be a repetition — "to gather and to gather". Since the verse distinguishes the two, qurʾān here belongs to the reading side of the root: first it is gathered, then it is read.

But this very distinction confirms the analysis in al-ʿAlaq. Because in distinguishing the two tasks the verse at the same time sets them side by side. Gathering and reading are given, in one sentence, as two phases of one work. The two senses inside the root appear one after the other in the text's own word order.

That is, a root analysis drawn from the lexicon in the section on al-ʿAlaq is met here by the text's own sentence structure: gathering first, qurʾān after. The order of the senses in the dictionary and the order of the words in the verse are the same.

I offer this as my own reading; the two senses of the root are lexical data, the order of the two words in the verse is a datum of the text, and it is I who set up the correspondence between them.

The verb is in the first person plural: "when We recite". The classical explanation is this: the act of reciting belongs directly to the angel, but is ascribed to God with the plural of majesty — because the angel does not recite of himself but by command.

This explanation is widespread in the sources and follows from the Qurʾān's general language of ascription. I do not present it as a settled ruling.

فَٱتَّبِعْ — follow. The root ت-ب-ع: to go after someone, to follow his track. Tābiʿ — the one who goes after. Form VIII (ittabaʿa) intensifies the verb: to follow closely, insistently.

And the picture in the word suits the verse: the one who follows is behind the one who goes in front. The sixteenth verse forbade trying to go in front; the eighteenth shows the right position.

In the section on al-Aʿlā this verse was treated:

سَنُقْرِئُكَ فَلَا تَنسَىٰ — "We shall make you recite, and you will not forget." (al-Aʿlā 87/6)

The finding recorded there was this: in al-ʿAlaq there was a command (iqraʾ — recite); in al-Aʿlā the same root comes in a causative pattern and in the indicative mood (sanuqriʾuka — We shall make you recite). That is, the command turns into a promise, and the owner of the act of reciting changes: "the act of reciting is not yours; it is recited to you."

Al-Qiyāma 75/17 repeats the same promise in other words. Let us set the three side by side:

Three texts draw a single line. In al-ʿAlaq the work is asked for; in al-Aʿlā it is promised that the work will be done; in al-Qiyāma it is said openly to whom the work belongs.

And the difference between the anxieties removed is fine: in al-Aʿlā the fear was that what had been received would be lost; in al-Qiyāma the fear is that the moment of receiving will slip away. One has to do with memory, the other with speed.

In making this link I make no claim about the order of revelation — the same record was made in the section on al-Aʿlā too. The shared root of the texts is in the text; the line between them is drawn by me.

The root ب-ي-ن was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Bayyina. The summary of the finding there: at the centre of the root there is separation and interval — bayn is the space between two things. To bayān a thing is to make it clear by separating it out from where it was mixed. Bayyina — the proof that distinguishes. Tabyīn — explanation.

I do not repeat it here. Two things belong to this place.

First: ثُمَّ (then). There are two readings of this particle:

Both readings are in the classical sources. I state no preference, but the first reading has a practical consequence worth recording: taking in a text and understanding it do not have to be completed at the same moment.

Second: to whom the bayān belongs. The verse gives the explaining to "Us" as well. This has two sides:

• The explanation of the text comes from the text's source. That is, the Qurʾān is positioned as a text that explains itself; and this is one of the verses on which the method called "the exegesis of the Qurʾān by the Qurʾān" rests.
• And the same sentence draws a limit. If the explanation does not belong to man, then the explanation man makes is not final. Every explanation, this commentary included, is an attempt.

I record this second inference as my own reading.

Three of the four verses end on the same sound: qurʾānah, qurʾānah, bayānah. And the sixteenth verse ends with bih — short, cut off.

The block builds a closed island of sound within itself. Before it -ar and -īrah, after it -ila/-ira. The ear hears the parenthesis as a parenthesis.