al-Inshiqāq 84:16-18

Fa-lā uqsimu bi'sh-shafaq · Wa'l-layli wa mā wasaq · Wa'l-qamari idha'ttasaq "By the afterglow; and by the night and what it gathers; and by the moon when it comes full."

This construction occurs in several places in the Qurʾān (al-Wāqiʿa 56/75, al-Ḥāqqa 69/38, al-Maʿārij 70/40, al-Qiyāma 75/1), and there is a classical debate about the lā at its head. In the section on Sūrat al-Balad this debate was set out in a table of four views and a preference was stated with its ground; I do not repeat it.

What belongs to this place is the فَ (fāʾ) at the head. In al-Balad the construction began as lā uqsimu; here there is a connective before it.

The fāʾ conveys attachment to the preceding sentence. That is, the oath comes as the continuation and the consequence of what went before. The fifteenth verse said "his Lord was seeing him"; the sixteenth continues, "so then, by this…".

This connective stitches the two halves of the sūra to one another.

Root: ش-ف-ق. And this root has two senses; both occur in the Qurʾān:

1. The afterglow — the redness remaining on the horizon after the sun has set (or the whiteness that follows it).

2. Tender concern, anxious care — ishfāq is to be anxious lest something befall someone; mushfiq is one who both fears and spares.

• "They tremble in awe (mushfiqūn) of Him" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/28).
• "Those who believe are anxious about it" (al-Shūrā 42/18).
• "…and they shrank from bearing it" (al-Aḥzāb 33/72).

How do the two senses join? The explanation the lexicographers give is to put رِقَّة (riqqa) — thinness, weakness, fineness — at the centre of the root:

• The afterglow is the thinned, weakened residue of the daylight. Not thick light, but remaining light.
• Tenderness too is the thinned state of a feeling: not a hard affection but a care that notices fragility. And ishfāq is the state in which love is mixed into fear — which is why in Arabic "fear" and "sparing" can stand in the same word.

I transmit this explanation from the classical lexicons; I pass no judgement on the historical development of the root. But this is worth recording: the stretch of time sworn by is the last thin residue of the day.

This is a debate tied directly to a legal consequence, because the time of the ʿishāʾ prayer begins with the disappearance of the shafaq.

Both views have been defended in the literature of law and are a matter of disagreement among the schools. Because I cannot give with certainty which imam held which view, I give no names. In this commentary no legal ruling is issued; I content myself with recording that the disagreement exists.

As regards the sense of the verse the difference is small: in either case what is sworn by is the moment of transition between day and night.

The choice of the oaths is tied to the sūra's matter. The afterglow is the moment of the day's transition: neither day nor night; between the two, a continually changing state.

And what will be said three verses later? "You shall surely mount stage upon stage." The oath is the instance of the ruling.

Root: و-س-ق. And this root carries the subtlest play on words in the sūra.

The primary sense of the root: to gather, to bring together, to drive and collect, to load.

• وَسْق (wasq) — a camel-load; also a measure of volume. In the literature of hadith the threshold for the alms-due is named by this measure: in a report found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim it is said, "there is no alms-due on less than five wasq". The plural of the word is awsuq/awsāq.
• وَسَقَ — the shepherd's gathering of the scattered flock; to collect a thing together and load it.
• اِتَّسَقَ (ittasaqa, Form VIII) — it gathered itself, it became orderly, it came to be complete and regular.

مَا وَسَقَ — "what it gathers". The verse does not say what it gathers.

The ways the exegetes fill this indefiniteness:

The first view is the closest to the concrete sense of the root and has support from within the Qurʾān:

"Have We not made the night a covering, and the day a time of livelihood?" (al-Nabaʾ 78/10-11) "And He made the night a time of rest." (al-Anʿām 6/96)

The function of the night in the Qurʾān is gathering: it draws back what has scattered.

And here is the root's second occurrence. The same root, in two consecutive verses, in two different forms:

The night gathers others; the moon gathers itself.

What does اِتَّسَقَ mean? The moon's gathering is its state of fullness. Beginning as a crescent and growing by one part more each night, the moon becomes a complete circle on the fourteenth night — its parts "gathered", its deficiency completed.

Turkish's borrowed ittisâk and müttesik, which answer to "consistency", are from this root too: the parts of a statement holding to one another, not falling apart.

Now read the three oaths together:

1. The afterglow — the last part of the day; the moment of transition. 2. The night and what it gathers — the gathering of what has scattered. 3. The full moon — a thing that grows part by part and is completed.

All three are stages within a process. Not one of them is a fixed thing.

And note: the moon is the plainest instance among the three, because its completion can be followed with the eye. Each night one part more. A process lasting fourteen nights, and at the end a complete circle.

The nineteenth verse will come upon this: "You too shall mount stage upon stage." That is, what is seen with the eye in the case of the moon holds for man as well.

The sūra does not set up this link itself; it lets it be felt through the choice of the oaths. I record it as my own reading; but that all three oaths meet in the common ground of "change by stages" is a datum of the text itself.

There is a matter of sound too. The verse-endings of the seventeenth and eighteenth verses: وَسَقَ / ٱتَّسَقَ — almost the same sound. And the nineteenth verse ends with طَبَقٍ. Three verses one after another with the same hard close: saqa / tasaqa / ṭabaq. Here the Qurʾān binds three verses to one another by sound as well.