عَلِمَتْ نَفْسٌ مَّا قَدَّمَتْ وَأَخَّرَتْ
ʿAlimat nafsun mā qaddamat wa akhkharat "Every soul knows what it has sent ahead and what it has left behind."
This verse is the answer to the four preceding idhā clauses. In grammar this is called the jawāb al-sharṭ, and its position says this: the four scenes were set up for this sentence.
To see the weight of that, it is enough to take the verse away and look. The sky is split, the stars are scattered, the seas overflow, the graves are overturned — and as the outcome of all this, what happens? No scene of the end is completed. A piece of knowledge comes to light.
The sūra ties the dissolution of the universe to an act of knowing. The "answer" to four verses of cosmic destruction is a person's learning something about himself.
The verb is in the perfect: "it knew". The expected tense would have been the imperfect — "it knows / it will know". Its coming in the perfect is the usage treated in the section on al-Humaza: something certain to occur in the future being recounted in the past tense as though it had happened. Its function is to convey certainty.
But here there is one more detail. In conditional sentences the answer's coming in the perfect is an ordinary structure in Arabic and may carry no emphasis by itself. So the conclusion to be drawn from the perfect tense should not be overstated. What is certain is this: the verb is not "it learns" but "it knows" — that is, what comes to light is a piece of knowledge, not a punishment.
This distinction matters for the tone of the sūra. The verse does not say "every soul sees its punishment"; it says "every soul knows". The punishment will be spoken of separately in verses 14-16. What is said here comes earlier: first it is known, then the recompense is given.
In Arabic this is a recognised usage. If the context conveys generality, an indefinite noun covers the whole of the class. Here the context makes it necessary: since the four cosmic events encompass all of them at once, the expression "a soul" cannot mean a particular person.
The explanation given in the classical sources is this: the indefiniteness sets up the scene one by one. "Every soul knows" states a collective judgement; "a soul knows" takes a single person into view. Not the crowd but the individual. And that individual is the person reading the sentence.
The sūra as a whole supports this choice: in the sixth verse the address will be singular (yā ayyuhā'l-insān, gharraka), and in the nineteenth a single soul will again be spoken of (lā tamliku nafsun li-nafsin). That is, the sūra chooses to disperse the crowd and take one person before it.
The nearest instance of the same pattern is in Sūrat al-Takwīr: "Every soul knows what it has made ready." (al-Takwīr 81/14) — ʿalimat nafsun mā aḥḍarat. The structure of the sentence is identical to the letter; only the last verb changes: instead of aḥḍarat (what it has made ready), here qaddamat wa akhkharat.
Two sūras set up the same sentence at the end of two ten-verse cosmic series. I record this as one of the clearest proofs of the kinship of the two sūras.
قَدَّمَ — root ق-د-م. Qadam — the foot. Qudūm — to come, to arrive. Taqdīm — to bring forward, to present, to send on ahead. Qadīm — that which comes before.
The concrete sense of the root is to put forward, and the usage here rests on an image of trade or of travel: to send a thing on ahead of oneself. A man sends his load before he goes himself; when he arrives he finds it there.
أَخَّرَ — root أ-خ-ر. Ākhir — the last. Ākhira — the abode that comes after. Taʾkhīr — to leave behind, to postpone. Ukhrā — the other.
The two are a perfect pair of opposites in Arabic: muqaddam / muʾakhkhar, that which is brought forward / that which is left behind.
| View | Qaddamat | Akhkharat | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Done / not done | The deeds it performed | What it should have done and did not, what it abandoned | The most widespread view. That the reckoning looks at both act and omission agrees with the general line of the Qurʾān (in al-Māʿūn 107/3 "not urging" was counted as a charge) |
| Done earlier / later | What it did at the beginning of its life | What it did at the end | In sense this amounts to "all of it"; the expression is counted a formula of inclusion |
| Its own deed / the trace it left | What it performed itself | The effect that goes on after it: the custom it set up, the path it opened, the word it wrote | The view with the strongest support from within the Qurʾān — see below |
| In the context of property | What it gave in its lifetime | The property it left for after its death | A narrow reading; it restricts the wording |
"It is We who bring the dead to life; and We write down what they have sent ahead and the traces they have left." (Yāsīn 36/12)
In the verse mā qaddamū and āthārahum (their traces, their works) are set side by side. That is, what enters a man's reckoning is not limited to the works he did; what goes on walking behind the work he did is written down as well.
"On that day man is informed of what he has sent ahead and what he has left behind." (al-Qiyāma 75/13)
This verse uses the identical expression. So the formula is the Qurʾān's own, and in both places it is in the context of the reckoning.
The preference and its ground. The views do not exclude one another; the expression appears to have been left deliberately wide. In my judgement the wording of the text supports the first and third views most: the reckoning looks at both what was done and what was not done, at both the act and the continuation of the act. Both fall within the scope of "what is left behind", because taʾkhīr is open to both "I did not do it, I put it off" and "I left it behind me". This preference is not binding.
In the sentence the one who knows is the soul itself. It does not say "it is made known to him"; it says "he knows". The subject of the verb is the person.
"We have fastened every man's deed about his neck. On the Day of Rising We shall bring out for him a book he will find laid open. Read your book! Today your own soul suffices as a reckoner against you." (al-Isrāʾ 17/13-14)
In the verse the one who reads the reckoning and the one who sees it are both the person himself. The same idea was in al-Zilzāl 99/6-8 too: "that their deeds may be shown to them" and "whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it." This was treated in detail in the section on al-Zilzāl.
The conclusion that follows is this: the reckoning is not a verdict announced from outside; it is the completion of a person's knowledge about himself.
It is not hard to see why this is a heavy thing. There are things a man does not know about himself, and most of them are bearable precisely because they are not known. It is not possible for a man to see all the consequences of the work he did, all the ears his word reached, all the lives his decision altered. The verse recounts the opening of that view.
What the verse calls akhkharat — the part of your work that goes on walking after you have stopped — was limited in traditional life. What a man left behind him were his children, the order he set up, the path he opened, the words he said and that were passed on. All of these were things that spread slowly and generally died out within a generation or two.
Today a sentence does not stay where it was written; it is copied, quoted, taken out of its context, and goes on circulating long after the one who wrote it has forgotten it. A piece of software goes on producing decisions years after its author has left the job. A structure that has been set up goes on working after the one who set it up has died.
The distinction the verse records is useful here: what you did and the walking of what you did are two separate columns, and the second is usually larger than the first. A person knows the first; the second he does not.
It is more correct to read this not as a threat but as a measure. When Yāsīn 36/12 says "the traces", it covers the good trace as well as the bad. The question the measure asks is this: what am I leaving that will go on working after I have stopped?