al-Qiyāma 75:24-25

Wa wujūhun yawmaʾidhin bāsira · Taẓunnu an yufʿala bihā fāqira "And there are faces that day, drawn tight; they know that something back-breaking is to be done to them."

Root: ب-س-ر. And the concrete sense of the root comes from a fruit: بُسْر (busr) — a date that has not yet ripened. The stage at which the colour has turned but the fruit has not softened, hard and sharp to the taste.

From here the verb is born: basara — he soured his face, he drew his features tight, he wrinkled them. So "a sour face" is named by the hardness of an unripened date.

The Qurʾān uses this word together with another verb:

ثُمَّ عَبَسَ وَبَسَرَ — "Then he frowned and scowled." (al-Muddaththir 74/22)

In the section on ʿAbasa the root ع-ب-س was treated: to wrinkle the face, to knit the brows, the hardening of the features. ʿAbūs — sour-faced. When the two roots come side by side they say the same movement twice.

And one comparison is striking. In Sūrat ʿAbasa the one who frowned was a man. In Sūrat al-Insān what frowns is the day (yawman ʿabūsan qamṭarīrā — al-Insān 76/10). In al-Qiyāma what is soured is a face again, but this time not by its owner's will.

That is, the same movement in three places: what a man does to another, what the day does to man, and what happens to a man's face without his choosing.

The opposition between nāḍira and bāsira is built in the language of plants:

The opposition in al-Ghāshiya (khāshiʿa / nāʿima) was built on the same axis: dried earth / a soft surface. The Qurʾān's description of the face uses not the names of emotions but the names of textures.

Root: ظ-ن-ن. This word was treated in two separate places in the section on al-Baqara, in two opposite senses:

• al-Baqara 2/46 — yaẓunnūna annahum mulāqū Rabbihim: here firm conviction is meant; the verse says it as praise.
• al-Baqara 2/78 — wa in hum illā yaẓunnūn: here groundless guessing is meant.

The finding recorded there was this: the root in Arabic can answer to both a doubtful guess and a firm conviction — in language this is called a contronym — and which sense is intended is always determined by the context.

Then which is it here?

Both readings suit the text and both are in the classical sources. I state no preference.

But an observation can be recorded within the sūra. The fourteenth verse had described man as baṣīra — possessing certain knowledge about himself. Here the same man is taẓunnu — a state of unsteady knowledge. The one who knows himself for certain does not know for certain what will befall him.

This distinction is consistent: a person knows what he did, and does not know what its return will be. The sūra preserves the difference between knowledge and verdict.

I record this as my own reading; the presence of the two verbs in the sūra is a datum of the text.

Root: ف-ق-ر. And the concrete centre of this root is a bone: فَقَار (faqār) — the spine, the backbone; its singular faqāra — a vertebra.

From here comes the verb: faqara — to break the spine, to crack the back. And فَاقِرَة (fāqira) is the active participle: the calamity that breaks the back.

The other branch of the root is far better known: فَقِير (faqīr) — poor. The explanation the lexicographers transmit: the poor man is one who is as though his back had been broken; poverty crushes a man as though he were under a load he cannot carry.

The Turkish word "fıkra" comes from this root too: the separately standing parts of a text, jointed pieces like the segments of a spine. This is the sense used in legal language when one speaks of "the second fıkra" of an article.

English has the same idiom: to break someone's back, a back-breaking load. Two languages have fastened the same picture to the same place.

The verse's indefiniteness is deliberate. The sentence says "something back-breaking"; it does not say what. Fāqira is indefinite — unspecified. And the verb is passive: yufʿala bihā — "will be done to it", and who will do it is not said.

So neither the subject nor the object is stated. Only the result is stated: the back will be broken.

This runs in the same direction as the effect recorded in the section on al-Inshiqāq for the withholding of the answer to idhā: what is not described weighs heavier than what is described.

Verses 20-25 all close on a single sound:

al-ʿājila, al-ākhira, nāḍira, nāẓira, bāsira, fāqira.

Six verses in a row. And the last four are in the same measure (active participle, feminine): nāḍira / nāẓira / bāsira / fāqira. Four words, four roots, one pattern.

This is one of the tightest examples of the Qurʾān's ordering of verse-endings: two opposed tableaux drawn with four words of the same measure, and the ear hears the difference only from the root letters.