al-Qiyāma 75:37-39

A-lam yaku nuṭfatan min manīyyin yumnā · Thumma kāna ʿalaqatan fa-khalaqa fa-sawwā · Fa-jaʿala minhu'z-zawjayni'dh-dhakara wa'l-unthā "Was he not a drop of sperm poured out? Then he was a clinging thing; then He created and set in order. And from it He made the two mates, the male and the female."

أَلَمْ يَكُنْ would have been expected; the verse drops the final ن: a-lam yaku.

In Arabic this is called taḫfīf (lightening) and is common with the verb kāna in the jussive. Its effect is to speed the flow of sound: the sentence runs on unbroken.

The interrogative particle is again a denying question — as in the third and thirty-sixth verses. But the direction has changed: those questions rejected the addressee's opinion; this question makes the addressee affirm his own past.

Root: ن-ط-ف. Its meaning is to drip, to seep, to flow little by little. Nuṭfa — a drop of water; the word is also used of clear water in small quantity.

The choice of word must be dwelt on. Nuṭfa is the name not of a substance but of a quantity: smallness. The verse does not use a biological term; it says "a drop".

And the weight of the proof lies exactly here: the comparison is built not on the material but on the scale. If a man has come out of a drop, why should it be impossible for a man to come out of decayed bone?

Root: م-ن-ي. And the semantic family of this root is surprisingly wide:

• مَنَىٰ (manā) — he determined, he measured, he apportioned.
• مَنِىّ (manī) — what is poured out.
• مَنِيَّة (maniyya), plural مَنَايَا — death; according to the lexicographers' explanation, "what has been determined".
• أُمْنِيَّة (umniyya), plural أَمَانِىّ — wishing, vain fancy.

This last derivative was treated in the discussion of al-Baqara 2/78: amānī — a conviction resting not on reality but on desire. The finding recorded there was this: the text is read but not known; what fills the gap is what the person wants to be the case.

So the name of life's beginning, the name of vain fancy and the name of death all come from the same root — because all three are tied to the idea of "what is determined, what is measured". I transmit this link as a lexical observation; I issue no definite ruling on the historical development of the root and build no interpretation on it.

يُمْنَىٰ — passive imperfect: "poured out / spilled". A passive again: man is not the agent even at his own beginning.

Two variant readings are transmitted for the word (yumnā / tumnā); no great difference arises in the resulting meaning — one refers the pronoun to manī, the other to nuṭfa. I do not say which reading belongs to which authority, because I am not sure.

Root: ع-ل-ق. This word was analysed in detail in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAlaq. The summary of the finding there: the meaning of the root is to hang, to cling, to stick; ʿalaqa — a thing that hangs, that clings; ʿalaq also means a leech (the animal that hangs on) and is used of a clot as well.

And there, the claim that the word matches modern embryology was treated in detail on five grounds and rejected. I keep the same position here and do not repeat the grounds. In brief: the meaning of the word is given and not diminished; but this cannot be presented as the verse's claim, nor turned into a proof of miracle. The verse's own purpose is not to give information; it is to set up a bringing-low and a proof of power.

What belongs to this place is the word's grammatical position.

In Sūrat al-ʿAlaq the word was a material: man was created from this. In al-Qiyāma it is a stage: man came to this state, then passed to another.

The difference is not trivial. Al-Qiyāma sets up a series: drop → ʿalaqa → creating → setting in order. Four steps, and at each step something different from the one before.

In the middle of the verse the agent changes, and the change is not stated.

• kāna ʿalaqatan — "he became a clinging thing". Subject: man.
• fa-khalaqa fa-sawwā — "He created and set in order". Subject: God.

Within the sentence, with no conjunction and no warning, there is a passage from a passive becoming to an active doing.

In the classical commentaries this is explained as a hidden change of subject, and the indication is clear: the subject of the verb "to create" cannot be man.

Its effect is this: in the first two steps man is inside a becoming — he became a drop, he became a clinging thing, he did nothing himself. At the third step an agent enters. That is, man is not there at the beginning of his story; he is not there even in the middle of it.

The two فَ particles (fāʾ) reinforce this as well: fa-khalaqa fa-sawwā — quick and unbroken succession. There is no gap between the steps.

And now one of the sūra's most marked structural closings.

This verb had occurred in the fourth verse of the sūra as well:

The sūra opens and closes with the same verb. In the fourth verse there was a claim: "We are able to set the fingertips in order." The thirty-eighth verse shows that claim already realised: He has already set in order.

That is, the sūra shows that the work said to be done in the future has already been done in the past. The claim carries its own proof within it.

The finding recorded for this root in the discussion of al-Shams 91/7 — to bring the parts of a thing into correspondence with one another, to get its proportions right — is the same in both verses. The only thing that changes is the size of what is proportioned.

I offer this symmetry as my own reading; the presence of the verb in the two verses is a datum of the text.

Root: ز-و-ج. And the word زَوْج (zawj) has a subtlety in Arabic: it does not mean "a pair" but one member of a pair. One shoe of a pair is a zawj; the two together are zawjān.

This is why the Qurʾān says zawj of both man and woman; the word is "mate", "one of a pair".

ٱلزَّوْجَيْن — the dual: two mates, the two sides of a pair.

To what does the pronoun مِنْهُ refer? There are two readings: to nuṭfa (two sexes from the same drop) or to al-insān (two sexes from the same kind). Both are possible and produce no great difference in meaning.

ٱلذَّكَرَ وَٱلْأُنثَىٰ — the explanation (apposition) of al-zawjayn: "the two mates — the male and the female."

A point of word order: first the unity (al-zawjayn — one pair), then the division (al-dhakar wa'l-unthā). The verse first sets down the twoness as a whole, then breaks it apart.

The relation between the root ذ-ك-ر and dhikr (remembrance) is disputed among the lexicographers; no settled link has been established and I build nothing on it here. As for the root أ-ن-ث, the explanation the lexicographers transmit is that there is an idea of softness in the root; I transmit this explanation and make no claim to certainty.

A question may be asked: the proof of the resurrection had been completed in the thirty-eighth verse (fa-khalaqa fa-sawwā). Why is the thirty-ninth added?

The classical explanation is this: the distinction of sex is a separate proof of power — two different results from the same material. The drop is one, what comes out is two sexes. That is, the matter is not only the bringing of a thing into being but its being differentiated as it is brought into being.

And this is the continuation of the line of proof in the fourth verse. There too the matter was detail: setting the fingertips in order. Here too: drawing two separate orders out of a single drop.

The sūra always proves power from detail, not from magnitude. I record this as my own reading.