al-Takwīr 81:8-9

Wa idhā'l-mawʾūdatu suʾilat ۝ Bi-ayyi dhanbin qutilat "When the girl buried alive is questioned: for what sin were you killed?"

The centre of the sūra is here.

Root: و-أ-د. And the concrete sense of the root shows the scene the word carries: weight, bearing down, a load coming down on top of something.

• الوَئِيد — a heavy, rumbling sound; the noise a thing makes by its own weight.
• التُّؤَدَة (tuʾada) — acting deliberately, not hurrying, circumspection. From the same root. ʿAla't-tuʾada — slowly, in a measured way.
• وَأَدَ الجَارِيَة — he buried the girl alive; that is, he brought the weight of the earth down upon her.

The word, then, names the killing as a verb of "weight". Not strangling, not striking, not cutting — pressing down upon.

المَوْءُودَة is a passive participle: the one upon whom a weight has been brought down. The word, in the passive pattern, speaks from the position of the victim.

And its being of the same root as tuʾada (acting with circumspection) is an unnerving coincidence: the root's idea of weight opens in one place onto a virtue (gravity of bearing), and in another onto this act.

This practice was treated in the section on al-Shams 91/10, and this verse was pointed to there. I complete the connection here.

In Sūrat al-Shams the verb دَسَّى (dassā) was used of the man who buries his own soul; the root is د-س-س, "to slip something secretly inside a thing, to hide it". And the only other use of that root in the Qurʾān was this:

"When one of them is given the news of a girl, his face turns dark and he is filled with rage. He hides himself from the people because of the bad news he has been given: is he to keep her in humiliation, or bury her in the earth (yadussuhū fi't-turāb)? Look — how evil is the judgement they make!" (al-Naḥl 16/58-59)

Now set the two words side by side:

The same event, recounted from two different places.

al-Naḥl's verb recounts the father's motive: to hide. The verse already says that the father hides himself from the people — yatawārā mina'l-qawmi min sūʾi mā bushshira bih. Verb and motive are the same: concealment. The father is burying his shame.

al-Takwīr's word says nothing at all about the father. It looks at the body of the victim: the one upon whom a weight has come down.

This distinction shows what each of the two sūras is doing. al-Naḥl makes a diagnosis: this thing is done out of shame. al-Takwīr opens an account: and this has an owner.

Care is needed here, because the subject lends itself to exaggeration in either direction.

The Qurʾān's own data. The Qurʾān comes at this subject from several places, and names two distinct motives:

The point to note: al-Isrāʾ 17/31 and al-Anʿām 6/151 say "your children" — they do not specify sex. The Qurʾān thus appears to be separating two distinct things: the killing of a child out of poverty, and the killing of a girl out of shame. The mawʾūda of al-Takwīr is feminine, and names the second.

On how widespread it was. Two exaggerations must be avoided here:

• The exaggeration that "everyone did it". This is not supported in the sources, and it is demographically incoherent as well. A society that killed its girls on a wide scale would stop reproducing within a generation or two. The reports name particular tribes (Tamīm, for instance) and particular individuals; this gives one to think that the practice was not widespread, but known and able to be accepted.
• The exaggeration that "it never happened". This is not defensible either. The Qurʾān is addressing the very society in which the thing took place, and it refers to a practice its hearers knew. A text does not invent, to its own disadvantage, a practice about which its hearers would say "there is no such thing". The hearers brought a great many objections against these verses; that no objection of the form "we do not do such a thing" was recorded is meaningful.

The wider frame. Infanticide and exposure are not a practice peculiar to pre-Islamic Arabia. In the Roman world the exposure of the newborn (expositio) was for a long time a practice tolerated in law; comparable instances are documented in other societies as well. This information is recorded not in order to make the pre-Islamic practice lighter but in order to take the subject out of being the characteristic of one people and make it a human matter — and indeed, per the method (Method), no wholesale ruling is issued about any community in this commentary.

And today. Sex-selective practices have produced measurable imbalances of population in some countries where the means of determination before birth became widespread, and legal measures have been taken on the matter. I write this not as a "scientific miracle of the verse" but as a record that the motive the verse describes — a girl being counted a burden and a disgrace — has not been buried in the past.

The sūra's most important choice is here, and it needs to be dwelt on.

The verse could have run: "And when the one who buried her is questioned: by what right did you kill this girl?" That is the expected sentence. Whoever calls to account, questions the doer.

It is not framed. The question is put to the victim, and its content too is about her: "for what sin were you killed?"

What this carries must be unfolded in order.

One. The question is the heaviest question that can be put to the killer — only its addressee has changed.

This point is treated in the classical commentaries, and it is correct: to question the victim in his presence is the harshest form of questioning the doer. For the doer cannot answer. And the answer the victim will give is testimony against him, and cannot be refused.

There is a counterpart in a court of law: giving the floor to the victim's kin in front of the accused is a heavier procedure than putting a question to the accused directly. The one who is questioned answers; the one who is not questioned has not been questioned because he has no answer.

Two. The question has no answer, and the question itself announces this.

"For what sin?" — this question contains a presupposition: to kill, a sin is required. The moment the question is asked, that presupposition is established. And the one thing the girl can do — be silent — shows that the presupposition has nothing to answer to it.

The verse, then, frames no sentence of judgement ("she was innocent"); it lodges the judgement in the structure of the question. A question that has no answer is more decisive than a sentence that says there is no answer.

ذَنْب — root ذ-ن-ب. The concrete sense of the word is tail: dhanab — a tail; dhunāba — the hinder part of a thing, its tip. Some of the lexicographers make a connection between dhanb (sin) and dhanab (tail): a sin is the consequence it drags behind it. This derivation is not undisputed; I transmit it with a note of caution.

If the connection holds, the irony of the question is doubled: the girl had nothing at all that she "dragged behind her" — because she had not yet had a life.

Three. And the most important: the girl is given a legal personality.

To see this one has to know her position in that society. The murdered girl had:

• no name,
• no inheritance,
• no one who held the claim to her blood (the mechanism of the blood-feud protects only a person who has someone behind him to call for an account — the same mechanism treated for the orphan in the section on al-Māʿūn),
• and the one who killed her was already her guardian. That is: the killer and the holder of the claim were one and the same person. In this case the system, by its own definition, cannot work.

And the sūra gives her the first word in the greatest scene of the Resurrection.

Look at the list of twelve items: the sun, the stars, the mountains, the camels, the animals, the seas, the souls — all of them named collectively. The eighth item is the only item that names a single person. Beside the sun and the mountains, a girl.

This is a declaration of standing. The sūra writes a death of which no one kept a record into the same list as the dismantling of the universe.

Four. Here too the doer is not named — and here that means something different.

None of the sūra's twelve verbs had a subject. Nor has this verse one: qutilat — "was killed". Who killed her is not said.

But the silence here does a different work from the others. In the others the subject was God, held back to the end. Here the subject is among the listeners. His name is not given because it does not need to be: the one who did it knows who is being spoken of.

This is another instance of the principle al-ʿibratu bi-ʿumūmi'l-lafẓ treated in the section on al-Māʿūn. The verse gives no name; it gives a position.

Two readings are transmitted, and they genuinely change the sense:

I do not give the name of an imam. The common reading is the first.

Note what the second reading does: the girl is no longer the one questioned but the one who asks. Not a silent witness but a plaintiff demanding an account.

The two readings arrive at the same place, but with different force: in the first she is given the floor, in the second she takes it. In the classical tradition it is counted not a defect but a richness that two sound readings should both yield a correct sense; that rule works here exactly.

The Qurʾān handles this matter not with a ruling but with a scene.

Laying down a prohibition is easy, and the Qurʾān does lay one down elsewhere (al-Isrāʾ 17/31; al-Anʿām 6/151). But al-Takwīr does something else: it makes the victim speak.

Why this matters has to do with the way moral change works. Prohibiting a practice mostly remains ineffective if the victim of that practice is not counted as a person. Until who counts changes, what may be done does not change either.

The verse intervenes at exactly this point: it gives the floor, in the most crowded assembly in the universe, to someone with no legal personality.

And what this says to the present is not confined to the historical practice itself. In every society there are losses that go unseen because there is no one to call for an account of them. The verse's measure is this: the recording of a wrong does not depend on the victim's being able to claim it.

The exact counterpart of this was recorded in the section on ʿAbasa: the blind man had not seen the face darken — and that movement was recorded all the same. The two sūras state the same principle on two scales: what goes unnoticed is entered in the record too.