وَٱلَّيْلِ إِذَا يَسْرِ
Root: س-ر-ي. Its meaning is not merely "to travel": to make one's way by night. Arabic has other verbs for travelling by day; sarā is specifically a journey made at night.
From the same root comes إسراء (isrāʾ), and it occurs in the Qurʾān: "It is He who made His servant travel by night" (al-Isrāʾ 17/1). The verb is asrā: He made him travel by night.
This feature of the word makes the choice in the verse meaningful: the night is not "coming" or "falling", it is travelling. And a thing that travels goes from somewhere to somewhere; it has a road, it has an end.
This is not a figure of personification — this is the word's own usage; in Arabic it is an ordinary expression for the night to sarā. But the effect is this: the night here is not a condition but a traveller. And a traveller will arrive.
Where it will arrive has also been stated: at the first verse. The place the night arrives at is the dawn. The first and the fourth verses of the sūra hold the two ends of the same event — one the moment at which the night ends, the other the journey that ends the night.
The Qurʾān does not use a single verb when it mentions the night. Four separate oaths in the short Meccan sūras give four separate images:
| Verse | Verb | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| al-Shams 91/4 | yaghshā-hā — it covers | The night is a covering; it comes over and closes |
| al-Layl 92/1 | yaghshā — it covers (without an object) | The same verb, its object not stated |
| al-Ḍuḥā 93/2 | sajā — it grew still, it subsided | The night is a stillness; movement stops |
| al-Takwīr 81/17 | ʿasʿasa — it came / it turned its back | The word conveys both coming and going (of the aḍdād) |
| al-Fajr 89/4 | yasri — it travels | The night is a traveller; it makes its way and arrives |
As was treated in the sections on al-Shams and al-Layl, the root gh-sh-y conveyed covering, enveloping, coming over and mantling; there the night was something that actively settles over you. Here the same night is something that goes its own way.
The difference matters. A covering night looks permanent — when has something settled over you is going to lift is not known. A travelling night is temporary; a thing that travels stops somewhere.
Considering the content of the sūra, this choice takes on meaning: al-Fajr will speak of peoples that were destroyed and of a man who sways. What is said of both is the same — it is temporary. That the night is travelling is the first record of this idea. I present this as my own reading.
The original of the verb is يَسْرِي (yasrī) — imperfect, with a yāʾ at the end. In the verse it comes in the form يَسْرِ, without the yāʾ.
This is a known phenomenon in the Qurʾān and is done for agreement of verse-ending: the end of the verse is fitted to the sound of the preceding and following verses. The same elision is seen elsewhere too — al-kabīru'l-mutaʿāl (al-Raʿd 13/9), yawma yadʿu'd-dāʿ (al-Qamar 54/6).
It is transmitted that in the variant readings the word is read with the yāʾ as well (yasrī). There is no difference of meaning between the two readings. Since I cannot say with certainty which reading belongs to which authority, I write no name.
I should like to add an observation from the point of view of rhetoric, stating that it is my own reading: the cutting-off of the end of the word agrees with what it describes. The night travels and ends; and the word too is cut off before it is complete. That the sound should move together with the content is something often seen in the short Meccan sūras; but I record this not as a claim of miracle, but as the consistency of the text's formal choices.
The oath is made not upon the night absolutely but upon one of its states: idhā yasri — "when it travels on."
This is an attitude seen in all the oaths of the sūra, and it is the same in al-Shams and al-Layl. The oath is made not upon the object but upon a particular moment of the object. Not the night itself but the night's travelling; not the morning itself but its splitting.
The result is this: what is sworn by is not an object but an event. And the common property of events is that they take place and pass.