وَٱلْفَجْرِ
The sūra opens with an oath of a single word. In Arabic a sentence this short turns into a hammer-blow; and because the four oaths to follow are of the same shortness, the first five verses are heard as a series of strokes.
Root: ف-ج-ر. The original sense of the root is to split, to crack, to open, to make something gush out from within.
This root was taken up in the last verse of Sūrat al-Qadr (ḥattā maṭlaʿi'l-fajr); I do not repeat what was recorded there — a brief reminder and the addition of what belongs here will be enough.
The main point established there was this: the dawn is the splitting of the darkness. The light does not come; the darkness is split and the light comes out of it. The word describes not an illumination but a tearing. And fujūr from the same root — to exceed the limit in sin, to tear the covering and do evil openly — is the counterpart of this image in the moral field: at dawn the covering of the night is torn, in fujūr the covering of shame. A conceptual kinship was also established with ṭughyān (water overflowing its bed), treated in Sūrat al-ʿAlaq.
Fajjara and tafjīr are used in Arabic especially for making a spring gush, splitting the ground and bringing out water. Their occurrences in the Qurʾān show this clearly:
- "There are stones from which rivers gush forth." (al-Baqara 2/74). The verb is from the same root: yatafajjaru. The stone, hard and closed, is split, and water comes out of it.
- "They said: We will not believe you until you make a spring gush for us from the earth." (al-Isrāʾ 17/90). Tafjura lanā mina'l-arḍi yanbūʿā.
- "And We made the earth gush with springs." (al-Qamar 54/12). The part of the water in Noah's flood that came from the ground.
- "A spring from which the servants of God drink, making it gush abundantly." (al-Insān 76/6). Yufajjirūnahā tafjīrā.
That is, the root works in two directions at once: light above, water below. In the sky the darkness of night is split and brightness comes out; on the ground the hardness of the soil or the rock is split and water comes out. The common structure of the two events is the same: a mass that looks closed and impassable is opened at some point and something life-giving comes out of it.
There is a reason I record this, and it has to do with the end of the sūra. In the twenty-first verse the earth will be pounded and levelled (dukkat): this time not a splitting but a crushing. The sūra opens with a place that is split and closes with a place that is pounded. I record this as an observation about the structure, as my own reading; I do not ascribe it to a classical exegete.
In Sūrat al-Falaq the root ف-ل-ق was taken up in detail. The description there was this: falq is not any sort of cutting; it is the opening of something closed, from within or by a force, the whole parting and something coming out from between. And the two verses at al-Anʿām 6/95-96 gave, one after the other, the two scales of the root: fāliqu'l-ḥabbi wa'n-nawā (the splitter of the grain and the date-stone) and fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ (the splitter of the morning).
The two roots are very close to one another, and the lexicographers have noticed this. It would not be right to present the difference between them as a firm lexical boundary; but looking at their usages, a difference of emphasis appears:
| ف-ل-ق (falq) | ف-ج-ر (fajr) | |
|---|---|---|
| The image that stands out | A whole parting in two, cracking | A place splitting and something gushing out of it |
| Its typical objects | The date-stone, the grain, the shell, the sea (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/63 fa'nfalaqa) | Water, a spring, a river; and the dawn |
| For the morning | Fāliqu'l-iṣbāḥ — the splitter of the morning | Al-fajr — the splitting itself, the name of the event |
| Emphasis | The parting | The coming out |
That both words can be used for the morning shows how narrow the distance between them is. The difference is not an opposition but a difference of centre of gravity: one looks at the fissure, the other at what comes out of the fissure.
A conclusion for the sūra follows from this. The name of Sūrat al-Fajr is the name of the event — not the attribute of an agent. Sūrat al-Falaq was looking at the agent of the splitting by saying "the Lord of the falaq"; Sūrat al-Fajr swears by the splitting itself.
Various answers are given to this question in the classical sources; I propose a reading that comes out of the text's own structure, stating that it is my own reading.
The sūra opens with the ending of a night: the dawn is the moment at which the night comes to an end. And the sūra closes with a call to return: irjiʿī ilā rabbik — "Return to your Lord." What passes between the two is the length of the night: peoples rise and fall, man swings between abundance and want, wealth is gathered and eaten.
The dawn is the proof that some point in this order can be split, and it repeats every day. The sūra begins from the moment at which the thing that looks most closed to man — the night — regularly opens.
There is a further aspect. The hour of dawn is the quietest and least crowded moment of the day; that the Qurʾān mentions this hour especially in other places (as a time of prayer, and with the expression qurʾān al-fajr) shows that this hour carries a distinct ruling. The oath is made at the most solitary moment within the day.
The word comes with the definite article: al-fajr. In Arabic this article either covers the whole of the class (istighrāq) or points to a known particular instance (ʿahd). The exegetes have defended both:
| View | What it means | Its ground | Its weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| The class — every dawn | The daybreak of every day; the event itself | The most widespread function of the article; that the subsequent oaths are also natural phenomena (the night) | If the "ten nights" of the next verse points to a particular time, it may not fit with this |
| A particular morning | The morning of the Feast of Sacrifice / the morning at Muzdalifa | The reading of the subsequent verses as the time of pilgrimage; the tying of "the even and the odd" to the days of the pilgrimage | There is nothing in the text that determines this |
| The first morning of Muḥarram | The first dawn of the year | Another proposal within the same frame | It has no ground in the text |
The preference of the majority is the first, and its ground is sound: when a word comes unqualified, a proof from outside the text is needed to qualify it. But I do not write this as a binding ruling; the second and third views become consistent if the subsequent verses are tied to the calendar of the pilgrimage.
The subject of the oath (qasam) was established in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr and extended to long series of oaths in Sūrat al-Shams; I do not repeat it. What belongs here is this: the oath of al-Fajr runs for five verses and in the fifth verse is tied to a condition. This is an unusual structure among the series of oaths in the Qurʾān — most series of oaths are tied directly to the answer (jawāb al-qasam).
And the answer of al-Fajr is not stated openly. This is one of the most disputed grammatical questions of the sūra, and I shall dwell on it separately after the fifth verse.