al-Nabaʾ 78:6-16 — The tableau of the earth

These eleven verses are a single sentence and hang on a single question: أَلَمْ نَجْعَلِ — "Did We not make?"

Before treating the verses one by one it is necessary to look at the tableau as a whole, because there is something that escapes a verse-by-verse reading.

أَ (the interrogative hamza) + لَمْ (the particle of negation) = the asking of a negative.

In Arabic this pattern is called istifhām taqrīrī: a question asked in order to make the addressee admit from his own mouth something he already knows and cannot deny.

The logic of the pattern is this: when a negative sentence is turned into a question, the answer must be affirmative. The only honest answer that can be given to "Did We not make?" is "You did."

English has the same structure and it does the same work: "Didn't I tell you?" does not ask for information; it extracts an admission.

Why has this pattern been chosen? Because the sūra's addressee is a denier and what he denies lies in the future. It is hard to bring proof about the future; it is easy about the past. The sūra pulls the argument from the future into the past.

And note: not one of the things asked about is in dispute. That the earth can be stood upon, that the mountains are there, that sleep rests, that the night covers, that the sun warms, that the rain falls — none of this was being argued in Mecca.

The sūra builds a bridge from the undisputed to the disputed.

Eleven verses count eleven items. Let us see them together:

Now look at the list a second time.

Cradle. Peg. Covering. Firm structure. Lamp. Water. Garden.

These are the inventory of a house.

To put it more narrowly still: of a tent. The peg is what fastens the tent to the ground; the covering is the tent's cloth; the lamp is what lights the inside; the bed is what one sleeps in; the water and the garden are the livelihood of the place where the tent is pitched. And the verb in the twelfth verse is بَنَيْنَا — we built.

The sūra, that is, describes the earth as a dwelling that has been set up. Not as nature but as housing.

I record this as my own reading. The individual senses of the words are not in dispute and will be treated separately below; that together they form a tableau of a dwelling is a conclusion I have drawn. Some of the classical exegetes gather these verses under the heading "the enumeration of favours"; the connection with a dwelling is a reading I have added.

But this reading has a confirmation within the text and it will come in the nineteenth and twentieth verses. There:

• The sky will become doors (19) — the building is opened up.
• The mountains will become a mirage (20) — the pegs are pulled out.

The tent that was pitched is struck. And in the striking, exactly the two items used in the pitching are named: the sky and the mountains.

This symmetry is in the text; my reading rests on it.

One more observation. Look at the verbs in the eleven verses:

The dominant verb is جَعَلَ and this verb's property in Arabic matters: khalaqa (to create) conveys bringing into being out of nothing; jaʿala conveys putting what exists into a state, assigning it to a task.

The tableau, then, relates not the bringing into being of things but their arrangement. It does not say the earth was created; it says we made the earth a cradle. The difference is this: the first is a question of existence, the second a question of design.

And this is precisely what the sūra's argument requires. The resurrection is not a repetition of creation out of nothing; it is an arrangement carried out a second time.

A-lam najʿali'l-arḍa mihādā "Did We not make the earth a cradle?"

Root: م-ه-د. The concrete sense of the root is to smooth, to spread, to prepare — especially to spread out a bed, to level and ready what lies beneath.

Its derivatives:

• مَهْد (mahd) — a cradle. In the Qurʾān it is used of Jesus (ʿĪsā): "He will speak to people in the cradle and in maturity" (Āl ʿImrān 3/46); "How shall we speak to a child in the cradle?" (Maryam 19/29).
• مِهَاد (mihād) — a spread-out bed, a mattress. It is also transmitted that it may be counted a plural of mahd.
• مَهَّدَ (mahhada) — he levelled, he prepared, he made the ground ready. "And I prepared for him ample means" (al-Muddaththir 74/14).
• تَمْهِيد — the preparing of the ground; the word is current in Turkish as well.

The word's two directions. Mihād occurs in the Qurʾān in both a favourable and an unfavourable context. It is used of the Fire as well: "For them there is a bed of Hellfire" (al-Aʿrāf 7/41); "What an evil bed!" (al-Baqara 2/206; Āl ʿImrān 3/12). The word, that is, is neither good nor bad in itself; it names what is spread beneath.

This is the same as the principle recorded for mabthūth in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the word names not a quality but a position.

At al-Baqara 2/22 the same thing was named with another word:

"He who made the earth a bed (فِرَاش) for you."

What was recorded there will not be repeated here; the finding there was this: firāsh is what is spread out, what the word says is not the shape of the earth but its function, and to draw from it a conclusion such as "the earth is flat" is to make the word say what it does not say.

The same note holds here. A cradle is not flat either — a cradle is a vessel whose sides are raised in order to hold what lies in it.

Now to the difference between the two words:

The two words say the same thing but take hold of it from different places. Firāsh looks at the ground: this has been spread out. Mihād looks at the one in it: this has been prepared for someone.

And the sense of mahd as cradle adds one thing more.

A cradle carries three properties at once:

1. Protection. A cradle has sides; what is in it does not fall out. 2. Movement. A cradle is not fixed; it rocks. And the rocking is not a discomfort but what puts one to sleep. 3. Impermanence. No one stays in a cradle. A cradle is where one stays until one grows.

The third item is meaningful for the sūra as a whole, and I record it as my own reading.

The subject of the sūra is the resurrection — that is, a passage from here to somewhere else. And the word chosen for the earth is precisely the name of a place one does not stay in. A cradle is not a final stop but a starting place.

Joined with the sūra's last verse this reading becomes plainer still. In the fortieth verse the denier will say "would that I were dust" — that is, he will want to return to the material of the cradle. This is the attitude of a child who does not want to leave the cradle.

I offer this as a reading; I do not claim it is what the verse intends. But both words are in the text: mihād in the sixth verse, turāb in the fortieth.

A literature has grown up in the modern period around this verse — and around the next: the earth's "rocking" like a cradle, plate movements, and connections of that kind.

This commentary does not go down that road and the ground for that is recorded in Method. The reason is this: the verse is not giving a piece of geology; it is reminding its addressee of something he already knows. For the argument to work, the addressee must be able to verify it. What a seventh-century Meccan could verify is that the ground he lives on is liveable — not plate movements.

Dressing a verse in modern knowledge does not strengthen the argument; it changes its addressee.