ʿAbasa 80:38-42

Wujūhun yawmaʾidhin musfira ۝ Ḍāḥikatun mustabshira ۝ Wa wujūhun yawmaʾidhin ʿalayhā ghabara ۝ Tarhaquhā qatara ۝ Ulāʾika humu'l-kafaratu'l-fajara

"On that day some faces are shining; laughing, filled with good news. And on that day dust covers other faces; a darkness overspreads them. Those are the deniers, the transgressors."

To see this is to see the whole of the sūra.

The first word: عَبَسَ — an expression on a face. The last five verses: وُجُوهٌ ... وَوُجُوهٌ — faces.

Forty-two verses open with one face and close on faces. Everything related in between — the text, creation, the table, the flight — stands between two faces.

And the sūra's claim is built by this frame: what a face does today has to do with what will become of it on that day. The sūra nowhere says this openly; it says it by structure.

Root: س-ف-ر. It occurred in the fifteenth verse as safara; the whole network of the root was opened out there, I do not repeat it here.

أَسْفَرَ — Form IV: it came to light, it shone, it grew bright. Asfara'ṣ-ṣubḥu — the morning broke. مُسْفِرَة is an active participle: shining, uncovered, lit up.

That is, the face is likened to the morning. The moment when the darkness withdraws, the covering lifts, the light appears. This is the concrete sense of the word.

And the two ends of the sūra join:

The text comes to light in the hand of the safara; the face of the one who receives it becomes musfira. The same root, the same work, on two storeys.

And this is why one of the sūra's names being al-Safara is apt: the root is the sūra's real backbone.

Parallel descriptions in the Qurʾān:

• "On that day some faces are radiant (nāḍira), looking towards their Lord" (al-Qiyāma 75/22-23).
• "You will know in their faces the brightness of bliss" (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/24).

In all three the same thing is done: the inner state is read in the face.

ضَاحِكَة — root ض-ح-ك. To laugh. One of the places where the Qurʾān uses laughter for those who are delivered.

And note: this is not a smile. Ḍaḥk is laughter with sound. In another place the Qurʾān gives this within an opposition: "On that day the believers laugh at the deniers" (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/34), and earlier the same sūra had related that in this world the deniers laughed at the believers (83/29).

مُّسْتَبْشِرَة — root ب-ش-ر. And the real sense of this root was treated in the section on al-Baqara 2/25: the centre of the root is bashara, that is, the outer skin of the face. Good news was given this name because good news shows on the skin of the face; from the same root comes bashar (man) — the being whose skin is visible.

Now put this piece of knowledge here.

The verse is speaking of faces. And the word chosen for those faces is the word whose root is "the skin of the face". That is, mustabshira here is not a metaphor; the concrete sense of the word is realised to the letter: the good news is named at exactly the place where it shows — on the skin.

This is one of the sūra's cleanest correspondences of wording and sense, and it does not become visible without the analysis of the root established in al-Baqara.

The pattern: Form X (istifʿāl). Istibshār — to receive good news, to rejoice at good news; and with the "seeking" function of Form X: to await good news, to be in hope.

The order of the three adjectives. Musfira (shining) → ḍāḥika (laughing) → mustabshira (filled with good news). It runs from the appearance towards the cause: first the light, then the movement, then the reason for it.

If the order is reversed the logical order comes out: the good news was received → there was laughter → the face lit up. The verse gives not the logical order but the order of appearance.

This is the same work the sūra has been doing from the beginning: saying first what is visible from outside. The sūra had begun with an expression on a face — that too was the outward sign of an inner state. Sūrat al-Māʿūn used the same method: the hand was shown as the evidence of belief. The inner state is read from its trace on the outside.

And there is a grammatical asymmetry here; it must not be missed.

The brightness of the first group belongs to them: the face is shining, it laughs, it is filled with good news. The darkness of the second group has been laid upon them: the dust is upon them, the darkness overspreads them.

It is worth comparing this asymmetry with the sequence of passive adjectives treated in the section on al-Bayyina 98/2; but the difference here works in the opposite direction. The good is their attribute, the evil is a load upon them.

As a possible reading — my own reading: light is a state, whereas darkness is an accumulation. A face does not darken of itself; things settle on top of it. And the sūra describes what settles in two layers.

غَبَرَة — root غ-ب-ر. Dust, the dust of the earth. Ghubār — dust. From the same root comes ghābir, and it is curiously one of the aḍdād: it means both "the one who passes away" and "the one who stays behind" ("except an old woman among those who stayed behind", al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/171).

قَتَرَة — root ق-ت-ر. Darkening smoke, soot, blackness. Qatar — the smoke and smell of roasting meat. And from the same root comes iqtār: miserliness, stinting, narrowing. In the Qurʾān: "When they spend they neither waste nor stint" (al-Furqān 25/67: wa lam yaqturū).

This standing-together is worth recording: soot and darkness on the one side, miserliness and narrowing on the other, in the same root. The idea common to the root may be "narrowing, stinting, darkening". I record this as an observation about the language; I bind no ruling to the verse from it.

Two layers: dust, then darkness. First ghabara (dust) — coming from outside, settling. Then qatara (soot, darkness) — overspreading, covering. The lower layer is dust, the upper layer is the darkening.

تَرْهَقُ — root ر-ه-ق. To overspread, to cover, to catch up with and settle upon; and from there rahaq — distress, pressure, compulsion. Murāhiq — one approaching puberty (one who is catching up).

The verb carries a movement of catching up and settling: something comes from behind and mounts upon it.

The Qurʾān builds the exact opposite in another place and uses the two words together:

"For those who do good there is the finest reward, and more. Neither a darkness (قَتَر) nor a humiliation covers their faces." (Yūnus 10/26)

The same word (qatar), the same family of verbs (yarhaqu), with the verdict reversed. The last two verses of ʿAbasa are the negative of Yūnus 10/26.

Grammar. Ulāʾika humu — a demonstrative pronoun + the pronoun of separation + a definite predicate. In Arabic this trio denotes restriction (ḥaṣr): "those, precisely, are they". The same structure was used at al-Bayyina 98/6-7 (ulāʾika hum sharru'l-bariyya / khayru'l-bariyya).

ٱلْكَفَرَة — root ك-ف-ر: those who cover. Treated in the section on al-Kāfirūn.

And now the finest close in the weave of the sūra:

These people are called those who cover. And two verses earlier it was said that their faces were covered in two layers: dust and darkness.

The face of the one who covers is covered. The act's returning upon its doer is a symmetry established in the weave of the sūra — and it is another instance of the idea, treated in the section on al-Shams, that "the moral act returns upon its doer".

ٱلْفَجَرَة — root ف-ج-ر. And the sūra's fourth root of "splitting".

The concrete sense of the root is to split, to make gush, to open:

• "And We made the earth gush forth with springs" (al-Qamar 54/12: wa fajjarna'l-arḍa ʿuyūnā).
• "Until you make a spring gush forth for us from the earth" (al-Isrāʾ 17/90).
• الْفَجْر — the dawn. The splitting of the night.
• الفُجُور — sin; but what kind of sin? To breach the boundary and pass beyond it, to burst outside the limit, to commit openly.

At al-Shams 91/8 fujūr and taqwā were set face to face; that discussion was treated there.

And now set the sūra's two uses of splitting side by side:

The same movement, two directions. Splitting the soil produces life; splitting the boundary produces ruin. Splitting is neither good nor bad; what is split is what decides.

In the picture of the table the sūra related one splitting, and in its last word it names another. This is a link standing in the text's own weave — and it explains why the sūra's last word is this word.

And the forty-second verse is the counterpart of the sixteenth:

كِرَامٍ بَرَرَةٍ (noble, given to goodness) ↔ ٱلْكَفَرَةُ ٱلْفَجَرَةُ (those who cover, those who overstep the boundary).

The same pattern, the same rhyme, exactly opposite content. Those who bear the text above, and those who cover it below. The sūra binds its own two ends with the same pattern of sound.