يَسْـَٔلُ أَيَّانَ يَوْمُ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ
Arabic has several particles for asking about time, and مَتَىٰ (matā) is the most common. The verse does not use it; it uses the word أَيَّانَ (ayyāna).
The distinction some of the lexicographers transmit is this: ayyāna is used for asking about a time that is far off and great; it carries a weight in it. I transmit this distinction and build no ruling on it, because it cannot be presented as a distinction settled among the lexicographers.
Looking at the places where the Qurʾān uses this word, a pattern appears: the word occurs almost always in mocking questions about the resurrection — "ayyāna yawmu'd-dīn" (al-Dhāriyāt 51/12), "ayyāna mursāhā" (al-Aʿrāf 7/187; al-Nāziʿāt 79/42). That is, in the Qurʾān's own usage the word has become the sign of a type of question.
The first thing to notice in the sentence is this: the question is not "will it happen?" but "when?"
On the face of it this is an acceptance. Someone who asks the time of a thing is taken to have accepted that it will happen. But there is no acceptance here; the question comes in the guise of acceptance.
The finding recorded for the particle idhā in the section on al-Inshiqāq looks straight at this: the Qurʾān opens its scenes of the resurrection with idhā almost without exception, because what is in dispute is not "will it happen" but "when". Now note: the one addressed is also asking "when".
| The Qurʾān's mood (idhā) | The addressee's question (ayyāna) | |
|---|---|---|
| What is accepted | That it will happen, for certain | That it will happen, apparently |
| What is unknown | Its time | Its time |
| Its tone | Statement | Challenge |
| What its answer does | Changes nothing | Changes nothing at all |
The difference is in tone; and the difference in tone determines whether the answer will be taken or not.
In the discussion of al-Baqara 2/67-71 — the story of the cow — this matter was treated in detail. The summary of the finding there was this:
Asking questions is not itself condemned. In the same sūra the angels asked a question and their questions were answered. What is condemned is not curiosity but deferral: here the question is not an instrument of knowledge but an instrument of delay — and the production of a new question each time an answer comes shows this as well. And in that story what made the command heavier was not the one who gave it but the one who received it.
I do not repeat it here. What belongs to this place is this: in Sūrat al-Qiyāma the link between question and deferral is not drawn out of a story; it is set up by placing two verses side by side.
The fifth verse gives the intention, the sixth the instrument. There is not even a conjunction between them — the sentences have been set side by side and the reader makes the relation.
And it is not hard to see how the question serves deferral: if the date of a thing is uncertain, that thing does not bind today. As long as the answer to "when?" is not given, the one who asks may not count himself under any judgement. The question suspends the judgement.
The sixth verse asks a "when" question. The seventh verse gives no date. It gives no year, no sign, no token. It opens the scene directly:
This is not an evasion but a diagnosis. The text gives no information because it sees that the question is not a request for information. Instead it shows that the answer to the question is not a date: what is being asked about is not an entry in a calendar but a state.
The Qurʾān explicitly reserves knowledge of the time of the resurrection to itself elsewhere: "Its knowledge is only with my Lord" (al-Aʿrāf 7/187). So the withholding of an answer is not a stylistic choice peculiar to this sūra; it is the text's consistent position.
And an observation, as my own reading: the sūra does not answer this man's question — but in the tenth verse it makes the same man ask a question. This time the question is not "when" but "where":
"On that day man says: 'Where is the place of escape?'" (75/10)
The first question was a challenge; the second is helplessness. And the one who asks them both is, in the sūra's own wording, the same person named with the same word: ٱلْإِنسَٰن. The sūra places the scene of the resurrection between one man's two questions.