al-Fajr 89:11-12

Alladhīna ṭaghaw fi'l-bilād • Fa-aktharū fīha'l-fasād "Those who exceeded the limit among the lands, and multiplied corruption in them."

Three separate peoples are gathered into a single sentence. And what gathers them is neither geography nor period nor belief — the act.

The root ط-غ-ي / ط-غ-و was taken up in detail at al-ʿAlaq 96/6-7 and in the section on al-Layl; I do not repeat the findings there, I bring what is needed.

The main point recorded there was this: the original, concrete sense of the root is water's exceeding its limit, overflowing. There was a clean proof of this from within the Qurʾān: "When the water overflowed, We carried you in the running ship" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/11) — here the word carries no moral sense at all, it is only the water's crossing its boundary.

And the definition there: ṭughyān is a thing's exceeding its own boundary. When water passes its bed it becomes a flood; flood water is no longer water that nourishes but water that destroys. The same water, in the same quantity, is life when it stays within its bed.

This image explained the whole weight of the word: transgression is not the possession of a bad thing; it is the carrying of a good thing outside its own boundary. Power is not evil; boundless power is transgression.

What is to be added here is this:

One. The verb is plural and perfect. Ṭaghaw — "they exceeded the limit." A completed and shared act. In al-ʿAlaq the verb was imperfect (yaṭghā — continuity, a tendency); here it is perfect, because what is spoken of is no longer a tendency but a closed file.

Two. The note fi'l-bilād. The transgression is mentioned here not as a personal moral fault but as something committed in the land. The word indicates the public sphere: cities, settlements, the place where people live together.

This distinction must be held. A person's exceeding the limit within himself and a community's exceeding the limit in the place where it lives are not the same thing. The sūra speaks of the second: transgression is described here as a way of establishing an order.

Three. And the repetition I recorded earlier is completed here: in the eighth verse the uniqueness was fi'l-bilād, in the eleventh the transgression is fi'l-bilād. The same ground. What is mentioned with praise and what is charged as an offence take place in the same place.

And the word in the fifth verse must be remembered: dhī ḥijr — possessor of a boundary. The sūra made its oath to "the person who has a boundary"; now it mentions "those who exceed the boundary". The two words are two faces of the same concept. I record this as my own reading.

The structure of the sentence is striking. The expected phrasing would have been fa-afsadū fīhā — "they worked corruption there." The verse does not say this.

What it says is: fa-aktharū fīha'l-fasād — "they multiplied the corruption there."

There are two differences:

One. The verb is not "to do" but "to multiply." Kathura → akthara: to increase, to multiply.

Two. The object is definite: al-fasād, not "corruption" but "the corruption."

These two details together open a grammatical possibility: the sentence permits the reading that the corruption already existed and that they increased it. That is, the peoples did not invent a disorder from nothing; they enlarged what was there.

I present this as a grammatical possibility, not as a firm ruling. The definite article is also used in Arabic to convey the class (al-fasād = "the class of corruption"), and on that reading the subtlety above disappears. Both readings are possible.

But if the first reading is right, the meaning it produces agrees with the attitude of the sūra: great destructions generally do not begin from nothing; they come about by the enlarging of the scale of an existing disorder. What distinguishes the peoples is not that they invented evil but that they turned it into an order.

The root ف-س-د was taken up in the section on al-Baqara 2/11-12. What was recorded there was this:

The root فسد: to be spoilt, to rot, to lose balance — a thing's going out of its own order. صلح, on the other hand: to be fitting, to be in its proper place, to be repaired. From the same root come ṣulḥ (peace) and ṣāliḥ. The two concepts presuppose the existence of an order: corruption is to spoil the order, reform is to set it back in place.

And the essential finding there was this:

The corrupter does not define himself as a corrupter. He defines himself as a reformer. The great majority of evil is done not with the intention of doing evil but with the claim of putting right. Almost every one of the great destructions in history had a programme of reform.

And: "the matter is not lying but the inability to see one's own condition. This is a heavier diagnosis: the liar knows, this one does not."

When this finding is carried over to al-Fajr, one of the strongest links of the sūra emerges.

Because the three peoples of al-Fajr did not count themselves corrupters. Let us look at what they did:

• ʿĀd: set up a sign on every height, took strongholds for themselves (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/128-129).
• Thamūd: carved the rock, founded a settlement in the valley.
• Pharaoh: drove stakes, fixed his kingdom.

All three were building. A community that raises columns, carves rock and drives stakes counts itself not a corrupter but a founder. The work it does is visible to the eye, tangible, measurable; it leaves a monument behind it.

Why then does the verse say "they multiplied corruption"?

The answer is in the continuation of the finding in al-Baqara: the difference between building and corrupting lies not in the structure itself but in what it is built upon. A structure can rise by crushing what is beneath it as well. To raise a column is an act of construction; to stand on someone's back in order to raise the column is corruption. The two works are done at the same moment, with the same hand, and the onlooker sees only the column.

And this is why the expression at al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/128-129 is important. What is asked of ʿĀd there is why the structures were built: "hoping to abide forever." The structure itself is not charged; the meaning loaded onto the structure is charged.

This is exactly the same structure as the sūra's later diagnosis. In the fifteenth verse man will not be charged with acquiring wealth; he will be charged with the inference he makes from wealth.

The word occurs in the Qurʾān within a settled construct: al-fasād fi'l-arḍ. A few examples:

• "When he turns away, he strives to work corruption on the earth…" (al-Baqara 2/205).
• "Do not work corruption on the earth after it has been set right" (al-Aʿrāf 7/56). This verse is important: corruption is forbidden after the setting right. That is, an order that can be spoilt is presupposed.
• "Do not seek corruption on the earth; God does not love the corrupters" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/77).
• "That abode of the hereafter We give to those who desire neither exaltation on the earth nor corruption" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/83).

The last two verses are within the story of Qārūn — that is, in the context of wealth and self-exaltation. Al-Fajr's transition from peoples to man is a transition the Qurʾān establishes elsewhere as well.