al-Infiṭār 82:4

Wa idhā'l-qubūru buʿthirat "When the graves are overturned."

Root: ق-ب-ر. To bury, to inter. Qabr — the place in which one is buried. Maqbara/maqbura — a burial ground.

In the Qurʾān the word also occurs in a verse that says the burial of the dead is an honour: "Then He caused him to die and put him in the grave." (ʿAbasa 80/21). The context of the verse is a sequence in which the favours given to man are enumerated; and the grave is inside that sequence. So to be buried is a respect shown to the body of man — it is not to be left in the open.

This increases the weight of the fourth verse: what was closed is being opened. The first verse of the sūra had opened the closedness of the sky; the fourth verse opens the closedness of the earth. The uppermost covering and the lowest are lifted two verses apart.

This word was treated in the section on al-ʿĀdiyāt. I do not repeat what was recorded there; in brief: a quadriliteral root (ب-ع-ث-ر), its sense "to turn a thing upside down, to spill out what is inside it"; some of the lexicographers count it a compound of baʿatha (to raise up) and athāra (to stir up), but this is a disputed etymology; and the verb comes in the passive.

The word occurs in only two places in the Qurʾān: al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/9 and here.

But between the two occurrences there is a difference that deserves attention — and this difference had not been noted in the section on al-ʿĀdiyāt.

Let us set the two verses side by side:

In al-ʿĀdiyāt what is overturned is what is inside the graves; in al-Infiṭār what is overturned is the graves themselves.

This difference is not trivial. When Sūrat al-ʿĀdiyāt sets up the scene of the reckoning it was looking at the content — for that sūra goes on to say "and what is in the breasts is sifted out"; the subject there is what is brought out. Al-Infiṭār, by contrast, behaves consistently with its other three verses: the sky is split, the arrangement of the stars is undone, the dyke of the seas is broken, the graves are overturned. In all four, what is overturned is structure, not content.

So the first four verses of al-Infiṭār make a consistent choice: in every verse what holds a thing together is removed.

Now let us look at the four verses together.

Four different patterns, four different roots, and all four ending on the same sound: -rat. Infaṭarat, intatharat, fujjirat, buʿthirat. In all four the letter ر stands immediately before the close. The fifth verse will end on the same sound too: akhkharat. Five verses, a single sound.

And in all four the doer is not named. Two verbs are in the muṭāwaʿa form (that is, not "it was done" but "it happened"), two are passive (that is, "it was done", but without the doer being mentioned). The sūra sets up four scenes without using a subject.

This gap will be filled in the seventh verse: ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَكَ — "He who created you." The name of the one who scatters will be given as the one who made you.

The architecture of the sūra becomes visible here, and this must be recorded separately, because it explains the whole of the text.

In verses 1-4 there are four verbs, and all four recount the dissolution of a whole. In verses 7-8 there are four verbs, and all four recount the building of a whole: khalaqa (He created), sawwā (He proportioned), ʿadala (He balanced), rakkaba (He assembled).

The opposition is exact and arithmetical: four to four.

And between the two series there is not only a contrast but a difference of direction:

• The objects of the first four are the universe and the verbs have no subject.
• The object of the second four is you, and all the verbs end with the suffix كَ ("you"); their subject is stated openly.

So this is what the sūra does: it recounts the coming apart of the universe without a doer, and then recounts your being built with a doer. On the cosmic stage it is as though there were no one; on the personal stage the subject appears.

I shall cast this structure into a table in the section that treats the sūra as a whole. Here it is enough to state this much: the enumeration of the things that come apart is there not to present a scene but to prepare the second four.