al-Infiṭār 82:1

Idhā'l-samāʾu'nfaṭarat "When the sky is split open."

This use of the particle idhā was treated in the section on al-Zilzāl: in Arabic idhā is used for events counted as certain to occur, in for those in doubt. The sentence therefore does not say "if the sky splits", it says "when the sky splits". Whether the event will happen is outside the discussion; what is spoken of is what will happen when it does.

There is a further point here. The sūra opens with four idhā clauses (1, 2, 3, 4) and the answer to all four stands in the fifth verse: ʿalimat nafsun. That is, four conditional clauses are attached to a single main clause. In Arabic this structure produces waiting by delaying the answer: the listener takes in four scenes one upon another, the sentence is still not complete, and at last it closes in the fifth verse.

One consequence of this delay is the following: the four scenes are not a scene recounted for its own sake; they are the condition of a sentence. The description of the end is not a subject here but a note of time. The sūra does not say "the end will be like this"; it says "when this happens, this will be known".

Root: س-م-و. Height. Samāʾ means "that which is above"; from the same root come ism (which raises a thing above the others and marks it out), sumuww (loftiness), asmāʾ.

The most concrete use of the word in Arabic is striking: everything above a thing is that thing's samāʾ. The samāʾ of a room is its ceiling, the samāʾ of man is the sky. The word therefore names not a body but a position: what stands above.

This determines the picture the verse gives. What is split is not an object; it is the covering over us. In most places the Qurʾān speaks of the sky as a roof or a ceiling:

• "And We made the sky a protected ceiling." (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/32)
• "Who made the sky a building and the earth a bed." (al-Baqara 2/22 — this verse was treated in the section on al-Shams.)

The splitting of a ceiling is something other than the breaking of an object: it is the end of a closed space's being closed. The first sentence of the sūra recounts the opening of the enclosed volume man lives inside.

The word that gives the sūra its name, and the product of one of the densest roots in the Qurʾān.

Root: ف-ط-ر.

The root's basic sense in the lexicon is to split, to crack lengthwise, to open. But the Arabic dictionaries give two clusters of meaning under this root that look different from one another, and this doubleness carries the whole force of the verse:

The first cluster — to split, to be split:

• faṭara — he split, he cracked.
• infaṭara — it was split (reflexive/passive).
• fuṭūr — cracks, fissures.
• tafaṭṭara — it cracked and broke apart.

The second cluster — to make for the first time, to begin out of nothing:

• faṭara'l-khalqa — He began the creation, He brought it into being for the first time.
• fāṭir — the one who brings into being out of nothing, who creates first.
• fiṭra — the state of a thing at its first creation, its condition before any intervention.

That these two clusters are found in one root is no coincidence, and there is a settled explanation of it among the lexicographers: faṭr is the first opening of something closed and whole. To "create out of nothing" is to split the closedness of non-being and bring something out. That is, creation too is a splitting.

This is the common logic of several "splitting" roots the Qurʾān uses, and two of them were treated in earlier sections:

• ف-ل-ق (the section on al-Falaq): the splitting of the seed and the stone, the splitting of the morning. Fāliqu'l-ḥabbi wa'l-nawā, fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ.
• ف-ج-ر (the section on al-Shams): the bursting forth of water, the splitting of the dawn, and in the moral sense the tearing of the bound (fujūr).

ف-ط-ر is added to these two as a third and has a place of its own. Its difference is this:

Falaq and fajr recount something coming out of something. Faṭr recounts a thing beginning to exist or ceasing to exist. This is why fāṭir is an attribute of creating while infiṭār is a verb of dissolution — and both stand in one root.

This observation must not be confused with the claim of "the greater derivation". As was stated in the section on al-Falaq, the search for nearness of meaning among roots sharing their first two letters is a recognised topic in Arabic, but it is not a claim of unity of root. What is said here is simpler and beyond dispute: ف-ط-ر is a single root, and the dictionaries give under this root both "to split" and "to bring into being for the first time".

فِطْرَة (fiṭra). The structure of the word is worth dwelling on. The fiʿla pattern in Arabic conveys the manner of doing a thing, its state: jilsa (the manner of sitting), rikba (the manner of riding). So fiṭra is not "creation" but "the manner of creation, the state acquired in the act of being created".

Its occurrence in the Qurʾān: "So set your face to the religion as a ḥanīf. The fiṭra of God upon which He created people." (al-Rūm 30/30). In the verse the noun (fiṭra) and the verb (faṭara) stand side by side.

The idea of "the first splitting" in the root of the word is reflected in the concept of fiṭra as well: the fiṭra is the first state, to which nothing has yet been added, which has undergone no intervention. This is a subject to be treated at length in later sections; here I record only the kinship of the root.

إِفْطَار (ifṭār). The breaking of the fast. The word familiar in English as iftar comes from this root, and the choice is meaningful: a fast is a closing, and ifṭār is the opening of that closedness. From the same root faṭūr — breakfast, the meal that opens the night's hunger. And faṭīr — unleavened bread, bread not left to stand, made at once; that is, bread that has stayed in its first state.

Read together, these derivatives make the idea beneath the root clear: the opening of what is closed. Creation is the opening of the closedness of non-being. The fiṭra is the state at the moment of opening. Ifṭār is the opening of the fast's closedness. And infiṭār is the opening of the sky's closedness.

The Qurʾān names God with this root in six places. The occurrences I can give with certainty:

• "Say: shall I take as a protector any other than God, the one who splits the heavens and the earth into being?" (al-Anʿām 6/14)
• "I have turned my face, as a ḥanīf, towards the one who split the heavens and the earth into being." (al-Anʿām 6/79)
• "Splitter of the heavens and the earth into being! You are my protector in this world and in the next." (Yūsuf 12/101)
• "Praise belongs to God, who split the heavens and the earth into being, who made the angels messengers." (Fāṭir 35/1)

About this name there is a report very widely transmitted in the tradition of exegesis. It is told that Ibn ʿAbbās did not know what the expression fāṭiru'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ meant, and then, hearing one of two bedouin quarrelling over a well say "anā faṭartuhā" — "I opened it, I am the one who first dug it" — he grasped the sense of the word. I cannot give the chain of this report with certainty; but it is repeated widely in the books of exegesis and its linguistic content is sound: faṭr is to begin a thing for the first time — the one who first digs the well is the one who opens a place no one had opened.

Setting three verses side by side explains the first sentence of the sūra all by itself.

One — the present state: there is no crack in the sky.

"You will see no disharmony in the creation of the Most Merciful. Turn your gaze and look: do you see any fissure?" (al-Mulk 67/3)

The word in the verse is فُطُور — the same root as the verb of Sūrat al-Infiṭār, the same field of meaning: cracks, fissures. Sūrat al-Mulk says that the eye that looks will find no fissure in the sky.

Two — the source: it is He who first split the sky into being.

Fāṭiru'l-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ — the one who splits the heavens and the earth into being.

Three — the outcome: the sky will be split.

"When the sky is split open." (al-Infiṭār 82/1). And: "On that day the sky is split by it; His promise is carried out." (al-Muzzammil 73/18).

The three are three sentences said with the same root, and they set up a line:

The sky was brought into being by a splitting (faṭara) → at present there is no fissure in it (fuṭūr) → in the end it will be split (infaṭarat).

That is, the beginning and the end of the sky are the same verb. It came to be by one splitting, and it ends by another. And throughout the span between, the eye that looks can find no crack in it.

I present this link not as an interpretation but as the data of the words themselves: the same root occurs in all three verses and all three take the sky as their subject. The line drawn from that, however, is my own reading.

The root has one further usage, and it opens another door onto the sūra:

"At this the heavens are near to cracking apart, the earth to splitting, the mountains to falling down in ruin." (Maryam 19/90). The verse speaks of a child being ascribed to God and renders the response as a cosmic cracking. The verb here too is from the same root (yatafaṭṭarna).

This verse is important because it carries the root into a moral context. In al-Infiṭār the sky is split because its time has come; in Maryam it is on the point of splitting from the weight of a thing said. Read together, the two verses set up a link between cosmic dissolution and the word and act of man. That link is in the structure of Sūrat al-Infiṭār as well: after the graves are opened in the fourth verse, the reckoning comes in the fifth.

انفطر — the infaʿala form. In Arabic this form conveys muṭāwaʿa: the object of a verb accepting that verb, undergoing it.

Kasartuhu fa'nkasara — "I broke it, and it broke." Faṭartuhu fa'nfaṭara — "I split it, and it split."

So infaṭarat means "it was split", but inside it lies this information: there is one who splits, and the sky has accepted his act. The verb is not passive (had it been passive it would be fuṭirat); it is reflexive. The difference is fine but real: the passive form conceals the doer, the muṭāwaʿa form does not conceal the doer — it merely turns the focus of the account onto the object.

Its counterpart within the sūra is this: in all four of the first four verses the doer is not named — two are in the muṭāwaʿa form (infaṭarat, intatharat), two are passive (fujjirat, buʿthirat). In all four the name of the one who does it is withheld. The name of the doer comes in the seventh verse: الذي خلقك — "He who created you." The sūra sets up four scenes without saying who scatters, and then says that the same subject is the one who made you.

What is hardest for the reader of today in this verse is not the magnitude of the event it describes; it is its certainty.

The sky is the most unchanging thing in human experience. Cities fall, states end, people die — the sky stays where it is. If one were asked where man learned the notion of "constant", the first answer to be given is that: the stars standing in the same place every night, the sun rising from the same place every morning.

What the verse does is to remove the last fortress of constancy. And it does this not with a threat but with a note of time: idhā — "when that time comes".

A boundary must be drawn: to build a bridge from here to modern cosmology is a forcing of the kind forbidden in Method, and it will not be done. The verse does not state a proposition of physics; by using one word — faṭr — for both the beginning and the end, it says that the two ends of existing are the same verb. This is not a measurable claim; it is a way of looking.

The practical consequence of that way of looking is this: that a thing has remained the same for a long time is not proof that it is permanent. The human mind infers permanence from continuity; this is an inference that works but is invalid. In the sixth verse the sūra will ask man "what deceived you?"; this is exactly one of the sources of the deception.