al-Qiyāma 75:20-21

Kallā bal tuḥibbūna'l-ʿājila · Wa tadharūna'l-ākhira "No! In truth you love what is at hand in haste, and you leave the hereafter."

Here the sūra does something it had not done for nineteen verses: it turns directly to the one addressed.

Until that moment the subject had always been in the third person — al-insān, "man". Now the verbs move to the second person plural: tuḥibbūna, tadharūna — "you love", "you leave".

The books of rhetoric call this iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address). Its effect is this: the diagnosis stops being talk about a type observed from a distance and becomes a word said to the person in the room.

And its timing is striking. The sūra first set up the diagnosis in the third person — the reader could follow it comfortably. In the twentieth verse the curtain lifts: the one being described is you.

The sūra will do this once more: in verses 34-35 the address will turn to the second person singular (awlā laka), and then in verse 36 it will go back to the third person. That is, the sūra moves back and forth between three layers of address.

Root: ع-ج-ل. Its meaning is to hurry, to want a thing before its time, to bring it forward. Its derivatives:

• عَجَلَة (ʿajala) — haste. (Turkish took it over directly as acele.)
• عَاجِل (ʿājil) — what is immediate, what is at hand. (It lives on in Turkish as acil, but with a narrowed sense.)
• تَعْجِيل (taʿjīl) — speeding up, bringing forward.
• ٱسْتِعْجَال (istiʿjāl) — hurrying, growing impatient.
• عِجْل (ʿijl) — a calf. The explanation the lexicographers transmit: because the animal begins to move early, or because it is "unripe, early". I transmit this derivation; I do not present it as a settled link.

The form of the word: al-ʿājila is the feminine of the active participle — "the thing that is in haste". The noun it qualifies is not stated; in the classical explanation what is understood is al-dāru'l-ʿājila or al-ḥayātu'l-ʿājila: the dwelling, or the life, that is at hand.

The word set against it has the same structure: ٱلْـَٔاخِرَة — "the thing that comes after", its qualified noun likewise unstated.

Both words are adjectives and both have hidden the noun they qualify. That is, the sentence names the two lives not by their names but by their positions in time.

And now the contribution of this sūra.

In the discussion of al-Baqara 2/4 this was recorded: the counterpart of al-ākhira is al-dunyā, and dunyā comes from the root د-ن-و: what is near, what is low. The conclusion reached there was this: the names the Qurʾān uses for the two lives state not a value judgement but a position — this world is not called "this world" because it is bad, but because it is near.

And in the discussion of al-Baqara 2/61 the same root came up once more: adnā — "lower" or "nearer"? The finding there: what is near and what is low are named by the same word; what is tangible and immediately reachable is for that very reason counted low in value.

Al-Qiyāma 75/20 gives this same life a third name. And this name stands on a different axis from the others:

Three names, the same life. And all three are words of comparison: near (relative to the far), first (relative to what follows), immediate (relative to the deferred). The Qurʾān never names this life on its own; always in its relation to the other.

And what al-ʿājila adds is this: this world is not only near, it is also fast. It comes early, it ends early, it does not wait.

From here comes the sūra's diagnosis, and the diagnosis differs from the usual: the verse does not say that man chooses the wrong thing; it says he chooses the fast thing.

The choice is not made as the outcome of a comparison of values. Nobody sits down and reckons "the hereafter is worth less". The choice follows the reach of the hand: whichever comes first is the one taken.

And the Qurʾān records this feature of man in another place as an attribute:

وَكَانَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولًا — "Man was created hasty." (al-Isrāʾ 17/11)

The same root: ع-ج-ل, in the intensive pattern (ʿajūl). That is, haste is by Sūrat al-Qiyāma a fault of conduct; by Sūrat al-Isrāʾ an attribute of man. Read together, the two verses say: the attribute is acknowledged, but the verdict the attribute gives is not accepted.

I offer this comparison as my own reading; the root meanings of the three names and the usage at al-Isrāʾ 17/11 are transmitted.

Root: ح-ب-ب. And at the concrete centre of the root stands something: حَبّ (ḥabb) — a grain, a seed, a kernel. Ḥabba — a single grain. In the Qurʾān: "the weight of a mustard seed" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/47).

The explanation the lexicographers transmit: ḥubb (love) is what settles in the heart like a seed and puts down roots there. The name of love comes from the name of what is sown.

I transmit this explanation; I issue no definite ruling on the historical development of the root. But the picture the word gives suits the verse: love of al-ʿājila is not a decision but something settled — a root that has to be pulled up.

The same root will come once more in Sūrat al-Insān, but turned around: wa yuṭʿimūna'ṭ-ṭaʿāma ʿalā ḥubbihī — "they give food though they love it" (al-Insān 76/8). There love is what measures the worth of what is given; here, of what is held back.

Root: و-ذ-ر. Its meaning is to leave, to abandon, to take no interest in.

This verb has a striking feature of language, treated in the discussion of al-Insān 76/27; I do not repeat it here.

What belongs to this place is the verb's weight of meaning. The verse does not say tukadhdhibūna (you call it a lie), nor tunkirūna (you deny it). It says you leave it.

The difference matters. To call something a lie is to take a position; to leave it is to take none. The one who calls it a lie has engaged with the matter, has set himself against it, has fixed a position. The one who leaves it has not engaged.

The verse names the real fault committed against the hereafter not as denial but as indifference.

And this joins with the fifth verse. There man wanted to "break open his front"; here he "leaves" the hereafter. The two are two descriptions of the same movement: pushing it forward and leaving it behind.

The two verbs are built in parallel and their objects answer each other:

To love and to leave are not exact opposites — the opposite would be "to hate". The verse deliberately sets up a weak opposition: on one side a strong bond (love), on the other the bond's never being formed at all (leaving).

That is, man does not hate the hereafter. He takes no interest in it. And the verse's diagnosis lies precisely in that asymmetry.