al-Nāziʿāt 79:8-9

Qulūbun yawmaʾidhin wājifa · Abṣāruhā khāshiʿa "On that day hearts will be throbbing; their eyes downcast."

The word is indefinite: not "al-qulūb" (the hearts) but "qulūbun" (certain hearts).

This is a choice that has to be attended to. The verse does not speak of all hearts; it speaks of some hearts.

That is, as early as the eighth verse the sūra makes a distinction — but it does not say between whom the distinction falls. Whose heart is pounding and whose is not: it is not specified.

This is another instance of the principle recorded in the section on al-Qāriʿa: the sūra gives the criterion, it does not give the list.

The heart — a short note. قَلْب in the Qurʾān is not an organ of emotion; it is the centre of understanding, deciding and turning towards. Its root is ق-ل-ب, meaning "to turn, to overturn" — the heart's bearing this name is explained by its turning from state to state. In this commentary it was treated in the section on al-Baqara in connection with the sealing of the heart.

Root: و-ج-ف. And the concrete sense of the root carries the verse somewhere quite different.

وَجَفَ — to move quickly and irregularly. It is used especially of the running of a horse.

Its only other use in the Qurʾān is decisive:

"As for what God gave His Messenger as spoils from them: you spurred neither horse nor camel for it." (al-Ḥashr 59/6)

The verb there is أَوْجَفْتُمْ and it plainly means to spur a horse.

That is, the picture the verse sets up is this: hearts running like horses.

The English "the heart pounding", "the heart in one's mouth" answer to this. But the picture in the Arabic is more concrete: an animal running inside the ribcage.

The word is an active participle and it is feminine — the third feminine active participle in the first nine verses of this sūra (rājifa, rādifa, wājifa, khāshiʿa).

Root: خ-ش-ع. This root was treated at al-Baqara 2/45 and the finding there will be relied on.

What was recorded there was this: the sense of the root is to soften, to be lowered, to bend; the Qurʾān uses this root of the earth as well ("You see the earth dried up — khāshiʿa — and when We send down water upon it, it stirs and swells" — Fuṣṣilat 41/39); khushūʿ is the breaking of hardness, the softening of the shell, becoming able to take in what comes.

What is to be added here is this: in this verse the word is used of the eye.

The Qurʾān mentions the khushūʿ of eyes in several places, and all of them are in the same scene:

"Their eyes downcast, abasement covering them, they come out of the graves." (al-Maʿārij 70/44)

"Their eyes downcast, an abasement covering them…" (al-Qalam 68/43)

"With eyes downcast, they come out of the graves as though they were scattered locusts." (al-Qamar 54/7 — this verse was also mentioned in the section on al-Qāriʿa)

What does the khushūʿ of the eye mean? The bending of the eye is the falling of the gaze: not being able to look across, not being able to lift one's eyes.

And this agrees with the finding in al-Baqara: khushūʿ is the breaking of hardness. An upright gaze is a hardness; a fallen gaze shows that the hardness has broken.

In al-Baqara khushūʿ was a praised state; here it is a sign of fear. The two uses do not conflict: the word names not an attitude but a state — bentness. Whether the bending is good or bad depends on before whom and why one bends.

This is the same as the principle recorded for mabthūth in the section on al-Qāriʿa and for mihād in the section on al-Nabaʾ: a word is not in itself positive or negative.

Now read the two verses together:

Astir within, frozen without.

This is the most recognisable description of fear: the storm breaking inside appears outside only as a gaze that cannot be lifted.

And the two verses are bound to one another: the ninth verse comes to the eighth without a connective, and the pronoun أَبْصَٰرُهَا refers back to قُلُوبٌ.

A grammatical point. The expression "the eyes of the hearts" is odd in Arabic — eyes belong not to hearts but to persons.

The grammarians' explanation is this: there is here a synecdoche; by saying qulūb their owners are meant. That is, "on that day certain hearts [their owners] will throb; their eyes are downcast."

Some grammarians count this a figurative attribution. It was a similar case to the one recorded for ʿīshatin rāḍiya in the section on al-Qāriʿa.

And one further reading is possible, and I record it as my own reading: the expression reduces the person to his heart. On that day a human being is named neither by his name nor by his body but by his heart. In this scene the sūra, in describing the human being, counts first an inner organ, then an outer organ belonging to it.