al-Infiṭār 82:2

Wa idhā'l-kawākibu'ntatharat "When the stars are scattered."

Singular: كَوْكَب. The word names the bright bodies in the sky. In modern Arabic kawkab has come to mean "planet" and najm "star"; but this distinction did not exist in classical Arabic, and it is not right to load it back onto the verse. In classical usage a kawkab is a bright body visible in the sky — the distinction is not astronomical but visual.

Its uses in the Qurʾān show this:

• "O my father! I saw eleven stars, and the sun and the moon." (Yūsuf 12/4). Joseph's dream.
• "When the night covered him he saw a star." (al-Anʿām 6/76). The story of Abraham (Ibrāhīm).
• "As though it were a star shining like a pearl." (al-Nūr 24/35). The likeness of the lamp in the verse of light.
• "We adorned the nearest sky with an adornment, the stars." (al-Ṣāffāt 37/6).

This last is directly meaningful for our verse. Al-Ṣāffāt 37/6 describes the stars as zīna — an adornment. An adornment is by definition something arranged; objects scattered at random are not called an adornment. What makes a necklace an adornment is not the existence of the beads but the manner of their stringing.

And al-Infiṭār 82/2 recounts exactly the undoing of that stringing.

Root: ن-ث-ر. Its concrete sense: to scatter, to sprinkle, to disperse. And the distinguishing feature of the word lies in the kind of thing scattered: nathr in Arabic is used especially for the scattering of dry things in small grains — pearls, seed, grain, beads.

Its derivatives:

• nithār — the thing scattered; the money or sweets scattered at a wedding.
• manthūr — scattered.
• intathara (the iftiʿāl form) — it was dispersed, it was scattered; the verb in the verse.

The use of this word in Arabic literary terminology explains the verse all by itself.

In Arabic there are two kinds of speech:

• نَظْم (naẓm) — strung speech, that is, verse. The root sense: to string a pearl on a thread. Niẓām (order) is from this root too.
• نَثْر (nathr) — scattered speech, that is, prose. That which is "not strung on a thread", left loose.

Both terms are taken from the same image: the pearl. A pearl strung on a thread is naẓm, a pearl spilled is nathr. In both the pearl is the same pearl; the only thing that changes is the bond between them.

The verse applies this image to the stars. The stars do not cease to be; their order is undone. What was called an "adornment" in al-Ṣāffāt 37/6 was not the material of the adornment but its arrangement; and it is that arrangement that is removed here.

This carries on the same idea as the first verse of the sūra. The sky was split — the closedness went. The stars were scattered — the order went. In both, what ceases to be is not an object but a relation.

The root occurs rarely in the Qurʾān, but the places where it occurs are striking:

• "We shall take in hand every deed they did and make it scattered dust." (al-Furqān 25/23). Habāʾan manthūrā — dust flying in the air, not to be caught, not to be gathered together again. Here what is scattered is deeds.
• "Immortal youths go round among them; seeing them, you would think them scattered pearls." (al-Insān 76/19). Luʾluʾan manthūrā.

These two verses together show that the word carries no verdict. The same word recounts in one place the coming to nothing of deeds and in another the beauty of the garden. To be scattered is not in itself an evil; what is evil is the scattering of something that ought to be in order.

For the stars, being scattered is a corruption, because their function lay in their order: finding direction, reckoning time, knowing the season. The Qurʾān says this expressly: "It is He who made the stars for you, that you might find your way by them through the darknesses of land and sea." (al-Anʿām 6/97).

What the verse says takes concrete shape in this light: the thing man looks at to find his direction no longer shows the direction.

Sūrat al-Takwīr recounts the same scene with a different verb:

"When the stars fall dulled." (al-Takwīr 81/2) — انكدرت (inkadarat).

Root ك-د-ر: to grow turbid, to darken, to lose one's light. Kadir — turbid water. The verb is also explained in the sense of "to pour down from above" (from a verb used of a bird gliding down).

The two sūras say two different things:

Two separate faces of the same event. One recounts what happens in the star itself, the other what happens in the relation between the stars. I record this as an observation; I make no claim that the two sūras have made a deliberate division of labour.