ʿAbasa 80:25-32

Annā ṣababna'l-māʾa ṣabbā ۝ Thumma shaqaqna'l-arḍa shaqqā ۝ Fa-anbatnā fīhā ḥabbā ۝ Wa ʿinaban wa qaḍbā ۝ Wa zaytūnan wa nakhlā ۝ Wa ḥadāʾiqa ghulbā ۝ Wa fākihatan wa abbā ۝ Matāʿan lakum wa li-anʿāmikum

"We poured down the water in abundance; then We split the earth in clefts; and We made grain grow in it — and grapes and green fodder, olive and date palm, thick-treed gardens, fruit and pasture; for your enjoyment and that of your livestock."

Two readings are transmitted, and they change the word order:

I give no imām's name. The difference of meaning is small but real: on the first reading what is to be looked at is not the plate but the story of the plate. That is, the command "look at your food" turns into "look at where your food came from".

Root: ص-ب-ب. To pour, to make flow; to empty out from above downwards. Ṣabb — pouring. Munṣabb — that which is poured.

The absolute object: صَبًّا. The repetition of the verb's own verbal noun as its object. In Arabic the function of this is reinforcement: "we poured and poured, we poured in abundance".

And in this passage it is done twice: ṣabban and shaqqan. Two verbs, two reinforcements. The verbs that follow (anbatnā and the rest) are not reinforced. So the emphasis lies on the first two steps: the pouring and the splitting.

It does not say "We sent down rain". In other places the Qurʾān uses anzalnā (We sent down). Here it is ṣababnā — We poured. The difference lies in the concreteness of the picture: to pour is to empty out of a vessel. The sky is handled as though it were a vessel.

Root: ش-ق-ق. To split, to divide in two, to crack. Shiqq — a half, a piece. Mashaqqa — hardship; the lexicographers bind this to the idea of "what splits a man in two". Inshiqāq — a splitting (al-Inshiqāq 84/1: "When the sky is split open").

The order is correct: first the water, then the splitting. The verse does not say that the earth splits of itself; it says that it splits after the pouring of the water. And this is what is seen in the field: dry soil is hard and whole; when it takes water it loosens, the seed swells, and it comes out by cracking the surface. The cracking of the soil is the first sign that the shoot is coming.

I do not write this as a "scientific miracle"; the verse describes what the farmer sees every year. Its value lies not in announcing a hidden piece of knowledge but in relating an open thing in the right order.

These three roots were treated in separate places in this commentary, and they can now be set side by side.

The three are separate roots. I establish no relation of derivation among them; the note of caution entered in the section on al-Falaq about the closeness between falaq and falāḥ holds here too. In Arabic it is a pattern that roots close in meaning share their first two letters, and this has been discussed in the linguistic tradition; but the discussion has not been brought to a settled conclusion, and I draw no ruling from it.

What can be recorded is this: in describing the coming forth of life the Qurʾān uses the same picture with three separate roots — the splitting of something closed and dark, and the coming out of something from within it. The seed, the morning, the sea, the sky, the soil. This is a pattern that really does repeat in nature, and that the language gathers it into a single picture is worth noticing.

And in the last verse of the sūra a fourth root of splitting will come: ف-ج-ر. But that will be a use of splitting in the opposite direction — it will be treated at the forty-second verse.

The logic of the list: from the necessary to the pleasurable, with the livestock's share in between.

The ordering begins from necessary food (ḥabb — grain, the thing that keeps a society on its feet) and arrives at the end at fākiha — by the lexicographers' distinction, fākiha is what is eaten not in order to stay alive but in order to taste. Root ف-ك-ه: to take pleasure, to enjoy; from the same root fukāha (pleasant talk, jesting).

So the list begins from need and rises to pleasure. What is given is not in the quantity that suffices for living; there is more than that. This is the evidence for the accusation "how ungrateful he is" in the seventeenth verse: the reckoning is not "enough was given and no thanks were offered" but "more than enough was given".

And the livestock's share is woven into the list, not appended to its end. Qaḍb comes third, abb comes last. Both are things man does not eat and animals graze. The sūra does not put them in a separate list; it places them inside man's own table.

The thirty-second verse will say this openly: "for your enjoyment and that of your livestock."

حَبّ — root ح-ب-ب: grain, seed. From the same root come ḥabīb (beloved) and ḥubb (love); the lexicographers bind the link to the idea of "the seed, the core, of the heart". This derivation is disputed; I transmit it with caution.

قَضْب — root ق-ض-ب: to cut. Qaḍīb — a branch, a rod; miqḍab — a pruning knife. The word describes the plant that grows again as it is cut: it is sown once and mown many times. Lucerne and fodder plants like it are such.

This is the most technical word in the list, and the one that says the most: the existence of a plant that increases as it is cut is the condition on which the keeping of livestock is possible.

نَخْل — the date palm. A tree that occurs often in the Qurʾān; it is there in the scene of the childbirth of Mary (Maryam) as well (Maryam 19/25). In a desert economy the date palm is at once food, shade and building material.

حَدَآئِق — the plural of ḥadīqa. Root ح-د-ق: to encircle, to surround. Ḥadaqa — the pupil of the eye; because the eyelid encircles it. Ḥadīqa means a garden with a wall around it — that is, a garden that has a boundary, that has an owner, that is protected. Not an ordinary stand of trees.

غُلْب — root غ-ل-ب: to overcome, to be superior. Aghlab — thick-necked, large. Ghulb, said of trees, means "thick-trunked, tangled into one another, dense".

The choice of the word is fine: the root of overcoming is used to relate the denseness of trees. It is as though the trees in the garden were trying to overcome one another; growth itself is pictured as a race.

أَبّ — and here one must be honest.

What the word means is not certain. The widespread explanation: pasture, the greenery on which animals graze; on one view, "every plant that man does not eat and animals do". The word occurs only here in the Qurʾān, and it is rare in Arabic too.

Reports are transmitted that in the early period this word was asked about, and that the one who was asked gave an answer to the effect that "to go chasing after this is affectation / it is more correct to say that we do not know". The transmissions differ as to whom this report belongs, and there is dispute over its chain; for this reason I give no name and do not present it as an established transmission.

But the attitude the report conveys agrees with the method of this commentary: to dress a word whose meaning is not certain in a certain meaning is not exegesis but addition. The verse's function is plain in any case — to count what the animals graze on. Not knowing the exact botanical equivalent of the word does not mean not knowing what the verse says.

مَتَاع — root م-ت-ع. Its meaning: the thing enjoyed, the enjoyment of it; and inside the word there is transience. Tamattuʿ — to enjoy for a time. The Qurʾān's settled expression: matāʿu'l-ḥayāti'd-dunyā — the passing enjoyment of the life of this world (Āl ʿImrān 3/185; al-Raʿd 13/26).

So the picture of the table closes with a word that carries the sense of "passing".

And the next verse: "When the sound that deafens the ears comes…"

The transition has been made inside the word. The sūra does not change the subject; the last word it uses changes the subject of itself. Eight items of food were counted out, all of them were named matāʿ, and matāʿ means that which will come to an end. No separate sentence is needed in order to begin speaking of the resurrection.

أَنْعَام — root ن-ع-م. The collective name used for camels, cattle, sheep and goats. And this root is the same root as the word "favour": niʿma, naʿīm, anʿama (he bestowed a favour), nāʿim (soft).

So the name given to a herd of animals means "favour". The word itself says what a herd meant in that society: capital, food, transport, clothing, standing — all of it in a single word.

And the work the closing sentence does: "for you and for your livestock." The food of man and the food of the animal come out of the same rain, the same splitting, the same soil. The sūra counts them out separately and then joins them in a single sentence.

And this speaks quietly with the sūra's first ten verses. There a man had seen himself as self-sufficient; he had supposed he needed no one. Here what he eats and what his animal eats are bound to the same source. The verse does not say this; I am the one drawing it, and I record this as my own reading. But the tension between the two ends of the sūra is real.