91. Sūrat al-Shams

Revealed in Mecca. Fifteen verses. It takes its name from its first word.

The sūra falls into two parts, and the transition between them is one of the hardest turns in the Qurʾān:

1. Verses 1-10. A long series of oaths, then a ruling in two sentences: he who purified his soul was delivered, he who buried it was lost. 2. Verses 11-15. The destruction of the people of Thamūd. No connective, no transitional sentence. The general ruling is laid down, and at once a case file is opened out of history.

This second half is there not to tell a story but to show that the ruling of the first half really operates. The logic of the sūra is this: burying one's soul is not an abstract danger; it is concrete enough to wipe out an entire people.

One point has to be recorded at the very start, because it affects the whole reading of the sūra: all fifteen of the fifteen verses end with the same sound. Ḍuḥāhā, talāhā, jallāhā, yaghshāhā, banāhā, ṭaḥāhā, sawwāhā, taqwāhā, zakkāhā, dassāhā, ṭaghwāhā, ashqāhā, suqyāhā, sawwāhā, ʿuqbāhā.

Every one of them closes with -āhā. Agreement of verse-ending (fāṣila) is common in the Qurʾān, but a single rhyme sustained this far without a break is rare. And note: this sound comes from the pronoun هَا at the end — that is, from a pronoun saying "its, to it, it". What is repeated through the sūra is not merely a sound but a pointing finger: something is being turned to again and again.

That "something" changes: first the sun, then the night, then the sky, then the earth, then the soul, then Thamūd, then the she-camel, then destruction itself. But because the sound stays the same, the changing objects are strung onto a single chain. This is something that is lost in translation, and its loss carries away half the sūra.

The function of the oath (qasam) in language, how God's swearing by a created thing is explained, and the evidential relation between what is sworn by and what is said by swearing were taken up in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr; they will not be repeated here. Al-Shams makes it possible to go one step beyond where that discussion stopped, because here there is not a single oath but a series.

The answer to this question depends on the method of counting, and two different numbers circulate in the sources:

• If you count the wāw of the oath, eleven. In verses 1-7 the particle وَ is repeated eleven times: wa'sh-shamsi, wa ḍuḥāhā, wa'l-qamari, wa'n-nahāri, wa'l-layli, wa's-samāʾi, wa mā banāhā, wa'l-arḍi, wa mā ṭaḥāhā, wa nafsin, wa mā sawwāhā.
• If you reduce the oaths to their subject-units, seven: the sun (together with its forenoon), the moon, the day, the night, the sky, the earth, the soul.

Both are correct; they are counting different things. When I say "seven oaths" from here on, I mean the second count — because that is the one that shows the structure of the sūra.

On either count this does not change: this is the longest unbroken series of oaths in the Qurʾān. For comparison: Sūrat al-Fajr opens with five, al-Nāziʿāt with five, al-Mursalāt with five, al-Tīn with three. Al-Shams reaches seven, and this suggests that the length of the series is itself carrying a meaning.

Set the seven side by side in order and a movement appears:

The movement runs one way: from outside inward, from large to small, from far to near. It begins with the sun and ends inside man.

This narrowing has three stages, and the stages can be told apart:

The first stage — the heavenly bodies (1-2). The sun and the moon. Things in which man has no hand at all, running entirely by their own order.

The second stage — the rhythm these bodies produce on earth (3-4). Day and night. What is now spoken of is not the heavenly bodies but the alternation they create in the place where man lives. The sun is far off; the day is the thing man stands inside.

The third stage — the stage and what is above it (5-7). Sky, earth, soul. There is a striking shift here: whereas in the first four the oaths are sworn only by objects, in the last three an agent enters alongside the oath — "the one who built it", "the one who spread it", "the one who ordered it". As the series advances, that is, there is a passage from the stage to the builder.

And at the last step two things happen at once: the subject descends into man's interior and the power that ordered that interior is named. All seven oaths are ranged so as to build the single sentence of the eighth verse: "And He inspired it with its wickedness and its guarding of itself."

In Sūrat al-ʿAṣr we saw that the piling up of oath and emphases shows the addressee to be in the position of one who denies. In al-Shams the piling up is not within a single sentence but spread over seven verses. I think this has two functions — and I state that this is a reading, not a transmitted report:

The first is delay. A long series of oaths keeps what is to be said waiting. A text that moves for seven verses saying "by… by… by…" builds in the listener's mind, in advance, the weight of what it will say at the end. The expectation prepares the ground that will carry the sentence when it comes.

The second is positioning. The series sets the soul beside the sun, the moon, the sky and the earth. When the things sworn by are gathered into a list, the items that enter the list acquire a weight equal to one another. Man's interior is placed inside the same sentence as the great pieces of the universe.

The reverse is true as well: the soul has been put at the end of that list. What comes last in an oath is very often what is actually meant. The sky and the earth appear to have been counted not for their own sake but to be the ground for what will come at the end.

Wa'sh-shamsi wa ḍuḥāhā "By the sun and its forenoon."

Root sh-m-s. The word counts as feminine in Arabic; it is the first referent of all the هَا pronouns that come through the sūra.

The sun occurs in some thirty places in the Qurʾān, and almost every time it stands in a context of order and measure: "The sun and the moon move by a reckoning (ḥusbān)" (al-Raḥmān 55/5); "It is He who made the sun a light and the moon a brightness… and determined stations for it, that you might know the number of the years and the reckoning" (Yūnus 10/5). In the Qurʾān's description of nature the sun is not an element of warmth or of beauty; it is first of all a clock.

Against this, the sun is one of the objects the Qurʾān forbids worshipping: "Do not prostrate yourselves to the sun or to the moon; prostrate yourselves to God, who created them" (Fuṣṣilat 41/37). In the account of Sheba a people is described as prostrating themselves to the sun (al-Naml 27/24). That is: when an oath is sworn by the sun, it is spoken on a cultural ground where worshipping that same sun is forbidden. An oath is an exaltation, but it shuts the door on worship: the difference between the one who swears and the thing sworn by is exactly the difference between the Creator and the created.

Root: ض-ح-و. Its concrete sense is to be open to the sun, to be out under the sun. Ḍaḥā is the lifting of shade and the opening of a place to the light. From the same root ادَّاحَى/ضَاحِيَة — a place left in the open, without shade.

In the Qurʾān this sense occurs once in its bare form, in the description of the Garden: "there you shall not go hungry, nor go naked; there you shall not thirst, nor be left in the sun (lā taḍḥā)" (Ṭāhā 20/118-119). The verb here means directly "to be scorched under the sun". Under the root, then, lies not the pleasantness of light but the nakedness of light: being left without cover.

As the name of a time, ḍuḥā is the forenoon, when the sun has climbed and the light has spread fully — the early vagueness of morning is past, the steepness of noon has not yet come. The hour when shadows have shortened and everything is seen at its clearest.

Why, then, "the sun and its forenoon"? After an oath has been sworn by the sun, swearing further by its forenoon looks at first like surplus. It is not. The sun is a body; the forenoon is the result of that body's work. The oath is sworn both by the source and by the state the source produces. This is the first instance of the logic that runs on through the sūra: a thing and the condition that thing brings out are named together.

And there is this too: the sūra sets up the theme of "bringing out into the open" in its very first verse. Ḍuḥā is the time when the covering is lifted. Ten verses later, deliverance will be described with zakkāhā (he purified it and made it grow, he brought it out) and loss with dassāhā (he buried it, he hid it). From its first word the sūra carries the tension between being in the open and being concealed.

Wa'l-qamari idhā talāhā "And by the moon when it follows it."

Root: q-m-r. The lexicographers connect the root with whiteness; qamar is the name that carries the brightness around the full moon. Arabic has different names for the phases of the moon (hilāl — the new moon; badr — the full moon); qamar is the general name standing over these.

The Qurʾān makes a careful distinction between the sun and the moon, and the distinction is at the level of the words: "He made the sun a ḍiyāʾ (a light) and the moon a nūr (a brightness)" (Yūnus 10/5); "and made the moon a brightness among them, and made the sun a sirāj (a lamp)" (Nūḥ 71/16). Sirāj is a thing kindled, a thing burning; nūr is diffused brightness. Nowhere does the Qurʾān call the moon sirāj.

There is a side of this that agrees with what is known today — the moon does not produce its own light but reflects what it takes from the sun — but I do not write this down as a claim of miracle. The verse is not doing astronomy. I say only this: two distinct words have been used consistently for the two heavenly bodies, and that choice implies a relation of dependence between them.

Root: t-l-w. Its primary sense is to come after, to go behind, to follow. One camel walking behind another is described with this verb.

The word's second sense, far more frequent in the Qurʾān, is to recite — tilāwa. The link between the two senses is direct: to recite is to range letters one behind another. The person reading a text goes along after the words. From the same root come tālī (following, coming after) and the expression in the Qurʾān "and by those that recite a reminder" (fa'l-tāliyāti dhikrā, al-Ṣāffāt 37/3).

The sentence "the moon talā the sun", that is, is built with a word that can place the moon in the position of the sun's reciter. I record this as an opening for interpretation, not as a classical report: the moon is like one who reads what the sun has written — it says nothing of its own, it passes on what it has received.

The referent of the pronoun is disputed, and the disagreement is real:

The third reading has a beauty of its own: only at the full moon does the moon carry the whole of the sun's light. But the text gives no indication that would narrow it in that way; the first is the safest reading.

In the first verse the oath was unqualified: "by the sun and its forenoon." From the second onward إِذَا enters: "by the moon when it follows it". The same qualification continues in the third and the fourth.

The difference is not small. The oath by the sun is unqualified, while the moon, the day and the night are named together with a state. That is, these become the subject of an oath not for themselves but for the work they do. The moon matters in its following, the day in its displaying, the night in its covering.

This prepares in advance what will be said about man at the end of the sūra: the soul too will be weighed not for itself but for what it does.

Wa'n-nahāri idhā jallāhā "And by the day when it displays it."

Root: j-l-w. Its concrete sense is to polish, to burnish, to clear a surface of rust and dirt so that it becomes visible. In Turkish the borrowed word cila — "polish" — comes from this root. Jalā'l-sayfa — he burnished the sword, that is, he lifted the layer on it and brought its real surface out.

Two directions open from here:

• To open, to bring out. Tajallī — a thing's becoming visible. In the Qurʾān: "When his Lord manifested Himself to the mountain, He broke it to pieces" (al-Aʿrāf 7/143).
• To drive out, to remove, to send away. Jalāʾ — exile. In the Qurʾān: "Had God not decreed exile for them…" (al-Ḥashr 59/3).

The two directions are in fact one work: to bring a thing out you must remove what lies over it.

The pattern matters. The verb is in the تَفْعِيل pattern (Form II), that is, transitive and intensified: not merely "it opened" but "it opened and went on opening, it brought it fully out". This form very often conveys the repetition or the force of the act.

This has to be compared with its counterpart in Sūrat al-Layl, because the difference is meaningful: there the same root comes as تَجَلَّى (Form V) — "wa'n-nahāri idhā tajallā" (al-Layl 92/2). Form V is reflexive: "it opened itself, it came out." In al-Shams the day brings something out into the open; in al-Layl the day itself comes out. Al-Shams points to an object, al-Layl does not. This is the first sign that the two sūras are looking at different places.

Again there is disagreement, and again it needs to be given in a table:

All three come out in the same place: the day is what lifts the covering. Whatever the referent of the pronoun, the work of the verse does not change. The disagreement has to be recorded, but it is not worth enlarging.

Wa'l-layli idhā yaghshāhā "And by the night when it covers it."

Root: gh-sh-y. Its concrete sense is to spread over the top of a thing, to wrap it, to come over it and enfold it.

Its derivatives show the tangible side of the root:

• غِشَاوَة (ghishāwa) — the film over the eye. It occurs at al-Baqara 2/7: "and over their eyes is a covering."
• غَاشِيَة (ghāshiya) — the thing that covers, that enfolds. The name of a sūra: "Has the account of the Enveloper reached you?" (al-Ghāshiya 88/1). Also "fire covering their faces" (Ibrāhīm 14/50).
• تَغْشِيَة — the covering of a thing with a case.

The Qurʾān uses the same verb of the night in other places as well: "He covers the day with the night" (al-Aʿrāf 7/54; similarly at al-Raʿd 13/3). In the Qurʾān, that is, the night is not an "absence" but something that actively comes and settles over. It is described not as the withdrawal of light but as the coming of darkness.

This is the finest point here, and it is easily missed.

In the sūra's first three oaths the verbs are in the perfect (māḍī): talāhā (it followed), jallāhā (it displayed). In the fourth the verb turns to the imperfect (muḍāriʿ): yaghshāhā (it covers).

This may not be accidental. In Arabic the perfect conveys completedness, the imperfect continuity and renewal. The day's displaying is a finished work; the night's covering is a work that goes on, that happens again each time.

The same distinction is preserved in Sūrat al-Layl as well — and its holding in both sūras at once suggests that the choice is deliberate:

To be honest, this has to be added: the distinction is not a rule valid everywhere in the Qurʾān. In Sūrat al-Ḍuḥā the night comes in the perfect ("wa'l-layli idhā sajā", al-Ḍuḥā 93/2); so it does in al-Takwīr ("wa'l-layli idhā ʿasʿasa", al-Takwīr 81/17). No general rule can be laid down, that is. But that al-Shams and al-Layl are consistent within themselves and with one another is a fact worth recording.

I can offer a reading as to its meaning — stating that it is my own reading: being covered is a more "continuing" thing than being brought into the open. Lighting is a moment, covering is a process. Ten verses on, the sūra will speak of the burying of the soul; and burying too is not an instantaneous work but a continual suppression.

The first four oaths build a structure of pairs:

• Sun / moon — the source and the reflector
• Day / night — the opener and the coverer

The second pair is the earthly counterpart of the first. And the second pair gives in advance the language of the sūra's real matter: bringing into the open and covering over. Ten verses on, this duality will be carried into man's interior — he who brings his soul out and he who covers his soul over. The day-night cycle of the cosmos is set up as the metaphor of moral choice.

The difference between them is this, and here lies the core of the sūra: in the sky these two states come in turn and of necessity; in man they come by choice. The sun does not choose its own rising, the night does not choose its own coming. Man chooses which of them he will be inside.

Wa's-samāʾi wa mā banāhā "And by the sky, and by the one who built it."

Here the character of the series changes. In the first four oaths there was only the object; now the maker enters alongside the object.

Root: b-n-y. To construct, to establish, to bring a structure into being by setting one thing upon another. From the same root come bināʾ (a building), bunyān (a firm structure), ibn (a son — the one upon whom the line is built).

This verb is used of the sky again and again in the Qurʾān: "And We built above you seven firm (shidād) heavens" (al-Nabaʾ 78/12); "And the sky We built with power" (al-Dhāriyāt 51/47).

The word was already touched on in Sūrat al-Baqara: "He who made the earth a bed for you, and the sky a building" (al-Baqara 2/22). What was said there is repeated here: in the Qurʾān the sky is not a void but a structure that has been raised. A void comes about of itself; a structure requires a builder. The choice of the word already prepares the expression that will come in the next clause: "the one who built it".

This is the most debated point of grammar in the sūra, and the debate concerns all three of verses 5, 6 and 7.

The problem is this: in Arabic مَا is generally used of things without reason, and مَنْ of those possessed of reason. Here the builder of the sky and the earth is God. Why, then, is it not wa man banāhā (and by the one who built it) but wa mā banāhā?

Three answers have been given:

To the objection raised against the second view this answer is given, and the answer is a serious one: مَا, when it is used of those possessed of reason, looks not to the essence but to the attribute. It is the answer to the question not "who did it?" but "what kind of thing did it?" For this reason mā here produces not an indefiniteness but a magnification: do not set about describing what the thing that did this is. There is a comparable usage in the Qurʾān: "God created you and what you make (mā taʿmalūn)" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/96) — there too mā is disputed.

Preference. If I must state a preference — and saying that it is not binding — the second and third views sit better with the sūra's own flow. The reason is this: the continuation of the seventh verse is the eighth, and there the verb turns to an agent: "fa-alhamahā" — "then He inspired it." One who inspires is a person. If the agent were not already on the stage at the third step of the oath, the hidden subject of the eighth verse would be left hanging.

But the maṣdariyya view has a real force too, and it would not be right to present the disagreement as settled: on that reading the oath is sworn by the act — by the building, the spreading, the ordering. And that is a reading that does the sūra's work, since what is stressed throughout the sūra is precisely the work done.

This should be added as well: all three views point in the end to the same place. Say "by His building of it", or "by the one who built it", or "by a power that built it" — the sentence is saying that the sky did not come about of itself.

Wa'l-arḍi wa mā ṭaḥāhā "And by the earth, and by the one who spread it out."

Root: ط-ح-و / ط-ح-ي. A word that occurs only here in the Qurʾān. The lexicographers give its sense as to spread, to lay out, to spread flat, to stretch and widen. Ṭaḥā'l-shayʾa — he spread a thing out, made it flat and broad. Some lexicographers say the root also carries the sense "to drive, to push away"; in that case a picture emerges of the ends of the earth being pushed outward from the centre and so widened.

That the word occurs in one single place in the Qurʾān makes it harder for exegesis — there is no second use to compare it with. For its sense, therefore, one has to look at the other words with which the Qurʾān describes the same work:

• دَحَا (daḥā) — al-Nāziʿāt 79/30: "And after that He spread out the earth." The word is very close to ṭaḥā in both sound and sense; the lexicographers count the two as near neighbours.
• فِرَاش (firāsh) — al-Baqara 2/22: "He made the earth a bed for you." Root: to spread, to lay out.
• مِهَاد (mihād) — al-Nabaʾ 78/6: "Have We not made the earth a cradle?"
• بِسَاط (bisāṭ) — Nūḥ 71/19: "And God has made the earth a carpet for you."
• ذَلُول (dhalūl) — al-Mulk 67/15: "It is He who made the earth submissive to you."

Five separate words, one single idea: the earth has been made ready to be lived upon.

In al-Baqara these two words had stood side by side: "He who made the earth a bed (firāsh) for you, and the sky a building (bināʾ)" (al-Baqara 2/22). Verses 5 and 6 of al-Shams repeat the same pair, in the same order, but in verbal form: banāhā (He built it) and ṭaḥāhā (He spread it out).

The difference between the two texts is interesting. In al-Baqara the pair is presented as a proof — "serve your Lord… who made the earth a bed and the sky a building" — that is, as the ground of the command to serve. In al-Shams the same pair comes as an oath: not the ground of the ruling but the thing sworn by in laying the ruling down.

What is common is that both build the same picture: man is inside a room that has been prepared. The floor beneath him laid, the roof above him raised. As in al-Baqara, so here the expression describes not the shape of the earth but its function; a "bed" is not flat either — it conforms to the ground it is spread on.

The function of this picture within the sūra is as follows: the room is ready, the one who made it ready is known, and in the next verse the one who will sit inside the room will be named. The seventh verse passes to the soul. Verses five and six, that is, describe the place where man will be set.

When sky and earth are named together in the Qurʾān the order is generally "the heavens and the earth". So it is here: first the sky (5), then the earth (6). But looked at as part of the whole series, this is seen to be a step in the narrowing — the sky is farther, the earth nearer. The order agrees with the movement from far to near that the sūra has been keeping up from the start.

Wa nafsin wa mā sawwāhā "And by a soul, and by the one who ordered it."

The last step of the series and the sūra's centre of gravity.

This is the most striking grammatical feature of the verse, and it is lost in most translations.

All six of the preceding oaths were definite: al-shams, al-qamar, al-nahār, al-layl, al-samāʾ, al-arḍ. Each has the article of definiteness at its head. In the seventh there is no article: nafsin — with tanwīn, indefinite. Not "by the soul" but "by a soul."

Why? Two explanations are given, and both fit the text:

The first — magnification (taʿẓīm). In Arabic indefiniteness sometimes conveys diminution, and sometimes the exact opposite: dread and greatness. We saw this for khusrin (a loss) in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr: "such a loss that". So here too: "such a soul that." Something that cannot be described, whose bounds cannot be drawn.

The second — generality. An indefinite noun in an affirmative context generally indicates a single instance, but in some contexts it opens out to the whole of the kind. On this reading "a soul" = "every soul". The oath is sworn not by one person but by everyone who carries a soul.

These two explanations do not exclude one another. But I want to draw attention to a third thing — as my own reading: the indefiniteness completes the narrowing of the series.

The sun is one, the moon is one, the sky is one, the earth is one. These are things of which there is a single instance in the world, at which everyone looks at the same one; for this reason they take the article of definiteness. The soul, however, is many, and different in each. Everyone looks at the same sun; no one looks at the same soul. The dropping of the article lodges within the grammar itself the passage of the subject from what is shared to what is singular.

The series thus arrives here: what is to be looked at is no longer outside, and it is different for each person.

Root: n-f-s. Under this root lies breath. Nafas — the air that is breathed. Tanaffus — breathing in and out; in the Qurʾān it is used of the morning: "and by the morning when it breathes" (al-Takwīr 81/18) — the morning is described as a taking of breath after the constriction of the night. Nafīs — precious, of value; a thing that is sought after. Munāfasa — to compete for something of value; it occurs in the Qurʾān (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/26).

Two ideas, that is, stand side by side under the root: the breath that is the sign of life, and value.

In the Qurʾān nafs is used across a wide range, and the distinctions need to be seen:

• The person himself. "You wronged your souls" = you wronged yourselves.
• Life. "Every soul shall taste death" (Āl ʿImrān 3/185).
• The direction of inclination within man. In the account of Joseph (Yūsuf): "The soul commands evil much" (Yūsuf 12/53).

Starting from this third use, three states of the soul are often named in the tradition: ammāra (commanding to evil — Yūsuf 12/53), lawwāma (blaming itself — al-Qiyāma 75/2), muṭmaʾinna (at rest — al-Fajr 89/27). All three are expressions occurring in the Qurʾān; but the Qurʾān does not present them as a "system of degrees". The systematising is the work of a later period. I record it, because it is a useful classification; but I do not present it as a scheme belonging to the Qurʾān.

The nafs of al-Shams is none of these three. Here the soul is named in its state before it has yet taken a direction: ordered, but not yet having chosen.

Root: س-و-ي. This root is one of the most productive in Arabic, and the idea beneath it is equality and evenness.

• سَوَاء (sawāʾ) — equal, the same. "It is all one to them (sawāʾun ʿalayhim)" (al-Baqara 2/6).
• مُسْتَوٍ (mustawin) — level, in balance.
• تَسْوِيَة (taswiya) — flattening, bringing into balance. The building trade still names exactly this operation: levelling a floor.
• سِوَى (siwā) — other, apart from. (A second branch of sense.)

In Form II (sawwā) the verb becomes transitive and intensive: to bring the parts of a thing into evenness with one another, to get their proportions right, to make it complete and without flaw.

Rendering it into English as "to straighten" falls short. The work the word describes is the setting of a thing's parts into their right proportion. Bringing the walls of a building to plumb, balancing the two pans of a scale, making the limbs of a statue to a measure fitting one another — all of these are taswiya.

The Qurʾān uses this verb insistently of the creation of man:

• "He who created you, gave you balance (fa-sawwāka), set you in measure (fa-ʿadalaka)…" (al-Infiṭār 82/7)
• "Then He gave it balance and breathed into it of His spirit" (al-Sajda 32/9)
• "When I have given it balance and breathed into it of My spirit…" (al-Ḥijr 15/29; Ṣād 38/72)
• "who created and gave balance" (al-Aʿlā 87/2)

In all these verses there is a common order: first creation, then taswiya, then the breathing of the spirit or the giving of a capacity. Taswiya, that is, is the stage of bringing raw material to the point where it can work.

The conclusion that follows sits at the centre of the sūra: the soul was not created faulty or defective. What is called "sawwāhā" means brought into balance. The possibility of evil within man is not a manufacturing error; it is a part of the balance.

This is a necessary ground for understanding the next verse. Had the soul been created defective, evil would be its flaw and responsibility would fall away. The verse closes this off: the soul was made in balance — and because it is in balance it can incline in either direction.

And this must be noted too: the same verb will come once more at the end of the sūra, in the fourteenth verse — this time for the destruction of a people: "fa-sawwāhā". That the same word should stand at the two ends of the sūra does not look like coincidence; we shall dwell on it when we come there.

Fa-alhamahā fujūrahā wa taqwāhā "Then He inspired it with its wickedness and its guarding of itself."

The core of the sūra. The seven oaths were ranged for this sentence.

The sentence begins with فَ. In Arabic this letter conveys succession and immediacy: A happened, and right after it B. Wāw (and) does not mark order; fāʾ does.

The sentence is therefore saying: there is no gap between the ordering and the inspiring. The soul was brought into balance, and immediately upon its being brought into balance — or precisely by its being brought into balance — the two directions were made known to it. Inspiration is not a piece of equipment added afterwards; it is the continuation of the taswiya.

Grammatically this verse is still inside the section of the oath: a clause attached to sawwāhā. The answer to the oath has not yet come; it will come in the ninth verse.

Root: ل-ه-م. And here the concrete sense of the root carries the whole weight of the word.

Lahima'l-shayʾa — to swallow a thing in a single mouthful, without chewing. This is the primary sense of the root in the lexicons: to swallow, to draw in, to take at one go. From the same root الْتَهَمَ (iltahama) — he swallowed it down, he cleaned it out; and لُهْمُوم — a great eater, a glutton.

In Form IV (alhama) the verb becomes transitive: to make someone swallow, to drop a thing down inside him. Inspiration thus settles into a picture of this kind: knowledge is given not by being taught from outside but by being let down inside. A person does not acquire it; he finds himself together with it.

This is the word's only use in the Qurʾān — the root ilhām occurs in this verse alone. But for similar work the Qurʾān uses another word: waḥy, in its lexical sense "to make known secretly and swiftly". What is made known to the bee is described with this word: "And your Lord inspired the bee" (al-Naḥl 16/68). What is revealed to the bee is not something the bee learns; it is knowledge that comes along with the bee itself.

The difference between inspiring and teaching matters. What is taught can be forgotten, can be learnt wrongly, may never have been taught at all. What is inspired, however, is part of the equipment. The verse positions man's capacity to tell good from evil as not a learnt knowledge but a settled one.

The consequence is heavy: no one can say "I did not know." He may not know the details — he may not know which act falls under which ruling — but he knows that fujūr and taqwā exist, and that there is a difference between the two. Moral judgement itself has been inspired.

Root: ف-ج-ر. And the concrete sense of this root sets up one of the sūra's strongest connections.

Fajara — to split, to break open, to burst and make flow. Its concrete uses:

• فَجْر (fajr) — the dawn. The moment when the darkness of the night is split and the light gushes out. The name of a sūra.
• تَفْجِير (tafjīr) — to make gush forth. Moses (Mūsā) striking the rock with his staff: "and twelve springs gushed from it" (al-Baqara 2/60). Also: "until you make a spring gush for us out of the earth" (al-Isrāʾ 17/90).
• انْفِجَار (infijār) — an explosion. It is close to the Turkish borrowing infilak; in present-day Arabic this is the word for a bomb going off.

How, then, does this concrete sense connect to the moral one? The explanation the lexicographers give is this: the fājir is the one who splits the covering over himself and comes out, who breaches the boundary that holds him in. Who tears the veil of modesty, who breaks the ring of religion and decency. Fujūr is not a "deficiency" but an overflow — like water that will not fit its vessel bringing down the dyke.

The uses in the Qurʾān confirm this: "And the wicked are indeed in a blazing fire" (al-Infiṭār 82/14); "No — man desires to go on with his wickedness before him (li-yafjura amāmahū)" (al-Qiyāma 75/5) — here the verb has something of the flavour of "breaking through the obstacle before him".

There is an overlap here worth dwelling on, and I state plainly that this is an inference of mine, not a classical report:

In the next verse of the sūra, deliverance comes with the verb أَفْلَحَ. In Sūrat al-Baqara we saw that the concrete sense of the root f-l-ḥ is to split: fallāḥ — the ploughman, the one who splits the soil.

At the two ends of the sūra, that is, stand two separate roots to do with splitting:

Both are the breaching of an obstacle. The difference lies in what is breached: he who breaches the boundary that holds him in is dispersed; he who breaches the husk that closes him in grows. The same energy, two different directions.

I do not say in definite language that "this is what the verse means"; the concrete senses of the two roots are given in this way in the lexicons, and the relation between them is one I am making.

Root: و-ق-ي. Its concrete sense is to protect, to shield, to keep a thing from harm. From the same root come wiqāya (protection), ittiqāʾ (to guard oneself), muttaqī (one who guards himself). This root was taken up at the second verse of Sūrat al-Baqara by way of al-muttaqīn.

One point has to be repeated: taqwā is not fear. There is no fear in the root; there is protection. He who fears runs; he who guards himself holds up a shield. Taqwā is a person's putting something between himself and harm.

Note the pattern of the word. Taqwā is a verbal noun formed from what was originally waqwā, the wāw having turned into a tāʾ, and it comes on the فَعْلَى pattern. This pattern fits the sūra's verse-ending (the -āhā sound). And indeed there is one further word of the same pattern in the sūra: طَغْوَى (ṭaghwā, verse 11), where the usual word is ṭughyān. The sūra, that is, has chosen both words in a pattern that will enter the harmony of sound.

This is a detail that shows how tightly the sūra is woven: taqwā and ṭaghwā are of the same pattern and end on the same sound. The one is to guard oneself, the other to overstep the boundary. The moral duality of the sūra's first half has been made to chime with the key word of the Thamūd account in its second half.

The verse does not say "He inspired it with wickedness and with guarding". It says "with its own wickedness and its own guarding." Both have been attached to the soul by the pronoun هَا.

This attachment matters. Fujūr is not an enemy coming from outside; it is the soul's own possibility. Nor is taqwā a device fitted from outside; it too is the soul's own possibility. Both belong to the same address.

The consequence for theology is this: evil is not positioned as a power outside man. Satan exists in the Qurʾān and whispers; but this verse does not consign evil to Satan. The fujūr is the soul's own fujūr.

What the verse says is this: not good alone but both together have been made known to man.

At first sight this is a disquieting sentence. Why should the knowledge of evil be given?

The answer stands ready in Sūrat al-Baqara, in the question of the angels. Of man, not yet created, the angels had said: "Will You place in it one who will work corruption and shed blood, while we glorify You with Your praise and sanctify You?" (al-Baqara 2/30). And the answer offered no proof: "I know what you do not know."

In the section on al-Baqara this observation was made: what the angels see is true — man really does corrupt and shed blood; but what they do not see is man's other end. And this was added: "Man's capacity for evil and his capacity for rising are two faces of the same property — the will. It is not possible to take the one and leave the other."

Al-Shams 91/8 says outright what was said there as an inference. Both capacities have been inspired. The angel is one-directional; for him there is no such possibility as fujūr, and for that reason his taqwā costs him nothing. Man is two-directional.

We may sum it up thus: a being that cannot choose cannot be good; it can only work well. A scale weighs correctly, but it is not honest. Man's being able to be a moral being depends precisely on the other direction's being open to him.

For this reason the verse announces not a defect but a possibility.

The order has been debated, and more than one explanation is proposed. The right thing is to give them all, showing how firm each is:

The first — the requirement of the verse-ending. This is the plainest and least ambitious explanation. All the verses of the sūra end in -āhā. Taqwāhā fits this sound, fujūrahā does not. The coming of taqwā at the end is therefore a requirement of the sound-structure. This explanation is correct but insufficient: a requirement of sound does not explain why some other word was not chosen; it explains only which of these two words will come last.

The second — emptying, then filling. There is a widespread principle in the ethical tradition: takhliya (emptying) comes before taḥliya (adorning). A vessel is first emptied, then filled; a person is first cleared of the bad, then furnished with the good. On this ordering, the naming of fujūr first shows that what must be abandoned must first be known.

The third — the default state. On one reading fujūr is the direction in which the soul will lean when it is left to itself, while taqwā requires intervention. Water flows downward of itself; to bring it up you need a pump. This reading agrees with the expression in the account of Joseph, "the soul commands evil much" (Yūsuf 12/53).

The fourth — symmetry with the following verses. The ninth verse ends with deliverance, the tenth with loss: aflaḥa / khāba. The eighth verse, however, runs in the order fujūr–taqwā. The order of the inspiring and the order of the outcome are thus the reverse of one another. This sets up a chiastic (crossing) structure:

`` fujūr ————————\ /——————— aflaḥa (zakkāhā) \/ /\ taqwā ————————/ \——————— khāba (dassāhā) ``

The text, that is, names last in the outcome what it named first in the inspiring. Crossed symmetry of this kind is one of the Qurʾān's known structural preferences.

A preference. All four explanations are reasonable; I make no binding preference. But I can say this: the first explanation (the verse-ending) is certain and does not exclude the others. A text can meet a requirement of sound and build a meaning at the same time; that is precisely what a good text is.

A question is asked about this verse, and it would not be honest not to ask it: if both fujūr and taqwā were inspired by God, is man really choosing?

One has to attend to what the verse says. What is inspired is knowledge; what is done is a deed. The verse does not say "He made it work wickedness"; it says "He made known its wickedness". The difference between the two is the difference between showing a person both the right and the left of a road and pushing him onto one of them.

And indeed in the two verses immediately following, the verbs are ascribed to man: زَكَّاهَا (he purified) and دَسَّاهَا (he buried). The one who inspires is God; the one who purifies and the one who buries is man. The structure of the sentences preserves this distinction.

In Sūrat al-Baqara the question "if God is the one who seals, who is responsible?" was taken up by way of 2/7; the matter here is another face of that one and looks to the same place. Briefly: the Qurʾān keeps side by side expressions that ascribe man's acts both to God and to man, and it does not resolve the tension. The schools of kalām have resolved this tension in differing ways; I do not adopt the view of one school here. The sūra's own sentence is clear: the inspiring is two-directional, the deed is chosen in one direction.

Qad aflaḥa man zakkāhā "He who purified it has been delivered."

The answer to the oath. The series of seven verses is fastened here.

A small note of grammar is needed. In Arabic, if the answer to an oath comes with an affirmative perfect verb, لَقَدْ is expected at its head. Here there is only قَدْ, without the lām.

There are three explanations of this:

1. The lām has been elided — so that the sentence should not grow heavy after a long series of oaths. This is the explanation of the majority of the lexicographers, and the eliding of the lām after long oaths is a known usage. 2. The answer is understood; "qad aflaḥa" is not the answer but a new sentence. On this view the real answer is supplied. It is a minority view and has nothing corresponding to it in the text. 3. قَدْ alone is sufficient; when it comes with a perfect verb it conveys certainty (taḥqīq).

In point of meaning the result is the same in all three. I record it but do not dwell on it.

This word was treated at al-Baqara 2/5 by way of al-mufliḥūn; the observation made there holds here as well and sits at the centre of the sūra.

To recall it briefly: the root ف-ل-ح means to split, to cleave. Fallāḥ — the ploughman; he takes this name because he splits the soil. Falāḥ — to break through an obstacle and come out, to crack the husk, to reach the state of yielding a crop. The call in the adhān, "ḥayya ʿala'l-falāḥ", is made with this word.

In the section on al-Baqara this picture was set up: "The seed is buried under the soil, stays in the dark, seems to be rotting. Its deliverance is to split the layer above it and come to the surface."

Sūrat al-Shams completes this picture — and it completes it by the opposing word in the next verse. For what will come in the tenth verse, دَسَّى, means exactly to bury. The sūra, that is, sets side by side the two halves of the agricultural picture built up in al-Baqara:

• Aflaḥa / zakkā — the seed split the soil and came out, grew, gave a crop.
• Khāba / dassā — the seed was left under the soil, it did not come out.

The observation in al-Baqara was at the level of inference; here, because the two verbs stand side by side, the picture stands in the text itself.

Root: ز-ك-و. Under this root lie two senses at once, and the two are inseparable:

1. Cleanness, purification. To be rid of what is mixed in. 2. Growth, increase, blessing. Zakā'l-zarʿu — the crop grew, it developed.

The lexicons do not divide these two into separate entries. From the same root comes zakāt — and that the alms-due should carry this name shows how the word's two senses join: wealth, when a portion of it is taken out, is cleansed and increases. The Qurʾān says this plainly: "Take from their wealth an alms by which you may cleanse them and purify them" (al-Tawba 9/103) — both verbs there belong to a field of meaning close to this root.

The joining of the two senses is seen in agriculture. A plant's growing depends on its being weeded of the wild growth that chokes it. Weeding is a subtraction, but its result is increase. Cleanness and growth are two sides of one operation.

For this reason, to render the expression "he purified his soul" merely as "he cleaned his soul" leaves it half said. The sentence is saying: he purified his soul and thereby made it grow. Purification is not a loss; it is the condition of growth.

There is a real tension here and it would not be right to skip it. Elsewhere the Qurʾān appears to forbid purifying the soul:

"So do not claim purity for yourselves (fa-lā tuzakkū anfusakum); He knows best who guards himself" (al-Najm 53/32).

"Have you not seen those who claim purity for themselves? No — God purifies whom He wills" (al-Nisāʾ 4/49).

The same root, the same form, opposite rulings. The resolution lies in the verb's describing two distinct works:

The difference is between doing and saying. The first is a work, the second a claim. And the second is forbidden generally because it tries to take the place of the first.

The side of this distinction that looks to the present is plain: to talk about one's own moral condition and to put it right are two different works, and the first can obstruct the second by giving the feeling that it has been done.

A disagreement is transmitted about the agent of the verb as well:

The second view is a minority one and stands weak, because in the tenth verse دَسَّاهَا comes in the same structure; it is not possible to make God the agent of the verb "to bury". Since the two verses are in the same pattern, their agents must be the same as well. The text's own symmetry supports the first view.

Wa qad khāba man dassāhā "And he who buried it has lost."

The strongest word of the sūra is here.

Root: خ-ي-ب. Its sense is to fail to find what one hoped for, to come back empty-handed, to have one's expectation come to nothing. Khayb — disappointment, coming to nothing.

The word's difference from khusr (Sūrat al-ʿAṣr) is fine but real. Khusr is a term of accounting: the balance coming out negative. Khayb, however, is a term of expectation: something was hoped for, worked for, and it did not come out. In khusr there is a reckoning; in khayb there is a hope.

This difference adds something to the verse: the man who buries his soul is not someone who hoped for nothing. He hoped for something — comfort, perhaps, or safety, perhaps the peace of not being seen. The word says that this hope came to nothing.

The other uses in the Qurʾān confirm this flavour: "and every obstinate tyrant came to nothing" (Ibrāhīm 14/15); "He who invents a lie has lost" (Ṭāhā 20/61)

Root: د-س-س. The word was originally دَسَّسَ (dassasa); to avoid the heaviness of three sīns coming one after another, the last was turned into a yāʾ and it became دَسَّى. The lexicographers call this the avoidance of taḍʿīf. And the form that results fits the sūra's -āhā verse-ending.

The concrete sense of the root: to slip a thing secretly inside another, to hide it, to bury it. Its derivatives:

• دَسِيسَة (dasīsa) — a hidden trap, a stratagem. Turkish still uses the borrowed word. Beneath the word lies the idea of "slipping something in secretly".
• اندَسَّ (indassa) — he slipped in secretly, he stole away.

Its use in the Qurʾān is decisive. The root occurs in one further place in the Qurʾān, and there its sense is concrete enough to leave no room for debate:

"And when one of them is given the good news of a girl, his face darkens and he is filled with rage. He hides himself from the people because of the evil of the news given him: shall he keep her in humiliation, or bury her in the earth (yadussuhū fi'l-turāb)? See how evil is the judgement they make!" (al-Naḥl 16/58-59)

What is described here is the practice of burying a girl child alive, found among the Arabs of the Jāhiliyya. The Qurʾān names this practice elsewhere as well: "and when the girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed…" (al-Takwīr 81/8-9).

The verb دَسَّ, that is, in the Qurʾān's own usage means to put a living being under the earth.

This sets a chilling picture before us when we read al-Shams 91/10. And it must be stated that this connection is not merely one I am making: the only other place the root occurs in the Qurʾān is this one:

The man who buries his soul is doing, within himself, what the father of the Jāhiliyya did to his daughter. He puts what is alive, what is living, what could have grown, under the earth and covers it over. He does not even kill it — he buries it. The difference matters: what is buried does not die at once.

I do not present this connection as the verse's definite intent. But that the only other place the root occurs in the Qurʾān should be this one suggests that there is a purpose in the choice of the word.

The opposition of the two verses comes out fully when the root senses of the two words are set side by side:

And this opposition is the same as the cosmic opposition in the first four verses of the sūra:

• جَلَّاهَا — the day brought it out into the open → زَكَّاهَا — he brought his soul out, he made it grow
• يَغْشَاهَا — the night covered it → دَسَّاهَا — he covered his soul over, he buried it

The sūra is saying that what happens in the sky every day is repeated inside man as a choice. This is why the oaths were ranged: the cycle in the cosmos is the picture of the choice in the soul.

There is one difference, and this difference carries the whole seriousness of the sūra: in the sky the night is temporary. Morning comes, the covering is lifted. In the soul, however, the burying can be permanent, because the one who buries and the one buried are the same person, and no one comes to lift the earth.

The word must not be left abstract. What does burying one's soul mean in practice?

The verse does not explain this, and so what I say here is my own reading. But the sense of the root gives a direction: to bury is not to destroy but to make invisible. And that means the following:

• To act as though one did not know what one knows. Not to use the distinction that has been inspired — the fujūr–taqwā distinction of the eighth verse — but to cover it over.
• To set up a noise that will drown out the voice of conscience: busyness, entertainment, the manufacture of justifications.
• To show oneself as other than one is. The secrecy in the word's derivative dasīsa is not idle.

The point to be noticed: what is described here is not an open evil. Something is not done — something is suppressed. The sūra is saying that no murder is needed for loss; a covering is enough.

The two verses are in exactly the same pattern:

qad + verb + man + verb + hā. The number of words is the same, the metre the same, the rhyme the same. The only difference is in the two pairs of verbs.

This symmetry lodges within the form itself the fact that what the sūra says consists of two options. There is no third sentence. There is no neutral position — the same conclusion was reached in Sūrat al-ʿAṣr as well, but there by way of the passage of time; here by way of the condition of the soul.

And the same twofold structure will build the whole of the next sūra (al-Layl): fa-ammā man aʿṭā… wa ammā man bakhila… Al-Shams says this pair in two verses; al-Layl spreads it over six and fills it in.

From the eleventh verse the sūra passes to the destruction of a people. Before entering the verses a boundary has to be drawn, because around this account what the Qurʾān does not say has come to be told more than what it does.

The information the Qurʾān gives about Thamūd, when all the sūras are brought together, is this:

• They came after the people of ʿĀd (al-Aʿrāf 7/74).
• They made houses by carving the mountains (al-Aʿrāf 7/74; al-Ḥijr 15/82; al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/149). In Sūrat al-Fajr they are named as "those who hollowed the rocks in the valley" (al-Fajr 89/9).
• Ṣāliḥ was sent to them (al-Aʿrāf 7/73; Hūd 11/61; al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/142; al-Naml 27/45). The name of Ṣāliḥ does not occur in Sūrat al-Shams; here it says only "the messenger of God".
• A she-camel was given to them as a sign (al-Aʿrāf 7/73; Hūd 11/64; al-Isrāʾ 17/59).
• The water was divided by turns between the she-camel and the people (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/155; al-Qamar 54/28).
• They were commanded not to harm the she-camel (al-Aʿrāf 7/73; Hūd 11/64).
• They hamstrung her (al-Aʿrāf 7/77; Hūd 11/65; al-Shams 91/14).
• The hamstringing was done by one man — Sūrat al-Qamar uses a singular verb: "They called their companion, and he took [the sword] and hamstrung her" (al-Qamar 54/29). Al-Shams, however, uses the plural: "they hamstrung her" (91/14).
• They were destroyed. The words used change from sūra to sūra: ṣayḥa (a terrible cry — Hūd 11/67), rajfa/ṣāʿiqa (a shaking, a thunderbolt — al-Aʿrāf 7/78; Fuṣṣilat 41/17), and in al-Shams damdama.
• The three days' respite that occurs in some of the reports is in the Qurʾān as well: "Enjoy yourselves in your dwellings three days more" (Hūd 11/65).

The following come from the reports of exegesis and history; they are not in the text of the Qurʾān:

• That the she-camel came out of a rock. This detail is widespread in the reports and is very often put at the centre of the account. The Qurʾān characterises the she-camel as a "sign", but does not say how she came.
• The extraordinary size of the she-camel, her giving milk enough for the whole people.
• The name of the man who hamstrung her. In the reports he is named Qudār b. Sālif, and this name is widely transmitted; but it does not occur in the Qurʾān.
• The story of the women who instigated the affair, the number of those who took part in the hamstringing (nine men, it is related — al-Naml 27/48 speaks of "a band of nine men", but the relation of this group to the affair of the she-camel is not plainly established in the text).
• The number of the people, the population of the city, the date of the event.

I do not count these reports as worthless; some of them are found in the early sources. But they are not of the same degree of certainty as the text of the Qurʾān, nor are they needed for the working of the sūra. The information Sūrat al-Shams requires has been fitted into five verses, and more is not needed.

Thamūd is not a name occurring only in religious texts; there is a record of it in independent sources.

The name occurs in the Assyrian records — under Sargon II (the eighth century BC) it is named among the communities in Arabia. Greek and Latin geographers record a similar name as well: Pliny has Thamudaei, Ptolemy uses a similar form. A great number of rock inscriptions found in north-west Arabia have been associated by researchers with this name and called "Thamudic" inscriptions — but this naming is itself a modern classification and does not mean that all the inscriptions belong to the people of Thamūd.

The Qurʾān's description "they made houses by carving the mountains" is associated with the rock-cut tomb façades in the region of al-Ḥijr (today called Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ) in north-west Arabia. Care is needed here: the monumental façades standing today belong to the Nabataean period (roughly the first century BC to the first century AD). Thamūd, however, is a community dated far earlier than that. The rock-carving tradition of the region shows a continuity, that is, but the structures tourists see today are not the structures of Thamūd. Making this distinction is necessary in order to avoid an easy but false equation of the kind "here are the houses of Thamūd".

What is certain: for the addressees of the Qurʾān, Thamūd was not a distant and legendary name. The caravan road running from Mecca to Syria passed through this region. The Qurʾān says this plainly elsewhere: "and you pass by their dwellings" (al-Ṣāffāt 37/137, of the people of Lot (Lūṭ); similar expressions are used of Thamūd as well). The sūra is not telling a fable, that is; it is speaking of a ruin the addressee saw on his road.

Kadhdhabat Thamūdu bi-ṭaghwāhā "Thamūd gave the lie, out of its overstepping."

The tenth verse closed with a ruling: he who buried his soul has lost. The eleventh verse begins, without any connective, with the name of a people.

This is a structure often seen in the Qurʾān and it is a literary choice: the general principle is laid down, then a case in which the principle was realised is shown. That the transition is without a connective shows that the relation between the two parts is not explanation but exemplification. The text does not say "because" or "indeed"; it puts the file on the table.

The connection is left to the reader. And the connection is this: Thamūd is a people that buried its soul. They had been inspired — as everyone is inspired. They were given, besides, a messenger and a sign. Even so they covered it over.

Root: ك-ذ-ب. In Form II it is transitive and intensive: not "he told a lie" but "he counted it a lie, he gave it the lie".

The difference matters. Kadhaba (Form I) is a person's own telling of a lie. Kadhdhaba (Form II) is declaring what another has said to be a lie. The verse describes not Thamūd's telling of a lie but their counting as a lie what was said to them.

The object of the verb is not stated here. There is no answer to the question "what did they give the lie to?" In Arabic this is a deliberate leaving-open: when the object is dropped the verb becomes general. Giving the lie becomes not the rejection of a single proposition but a stance.

Root: ط-غ-ي. Its concrete sense is to exceed the limit, to pass the boundary, to overflow. Water overflowing its vessel is described with this verb; in the Qurʾān it is used of the flood of Noah: "When the water overflowed (lammā ṭaghā'l-māʾu), We carried you in the ship" (al-Ḥāqqa 69/11).

From the same root:

• طَاغُوت (ṭāghūt) — an authority that oversteps the boundary and knows no bounds. In the Qurʾān it is used of the false reference-point that is worshipped.
• طُغْيَان (ṭughyān) — overstepping. It occurs at al-Baqara 2/15: "and leaves them floundering in their overstepping."
• طَاغِيَة (ṭāghiya) — both the one who oversteps and the overstepping itself; interestingly, at al-Ḥāqqa 69/5 it is used of the thing by which Thamūd was destroyed.

The matter of the pattern. Where the expected word in the verse is ṭughyān, ṭaghwā has been used. This pattern (faʿlā) is rare in Arabic, and there is an obvious reason for its being chosen here: the sūra's -āhā verse-ending. And indeed three verses earlier taqwā was of the same pattern.

This is too regular to be left as a coincidence. In the eighth verse the sūra had said تَقْوَاهَا; in the eleventh it says طَغْوَاهَا. The same pattern, the same rhyme, the opposite sense:

And note: ṭaghwā and fujūr look to the same place. Fujūr too was splitting and overflowing. Thamūd is presented as a people that chose the first of the two directions inspired in the eighth verse. The link between the two halves of the sūra has been made at the level of the words.

There are two readings of the bāʾ in بِطَغْوَاهَا:

The first is the more widespread and the stronger. The sense it gives is this: the giving of the lie does not come first, the overstepping comes first. Thamūd did not examine the proof and then reject it. First they passed the boundary, then they counted a lie the word that would have kept them from passing it.

This agrees with the Qurʾān's understanding of unbelief. The observation treated at al-Baqara 2/6 was just this: the matter is not ignorance but the covering over of what is known. Here the same thing is shown by way of a people — the rejection is the result not of a want of knowledge but of a way of life.

The side of this that looks to the present is direct: people very often do not live in a certain way because they believe something; they believe it because they live that way. The idea comes very often after the deed and justifies it.

Idhi'nbaʿatha ashqāhā "When the most wretched of them shot forth."

Root: ب-ع-ث. Its primary sense is to raise a thing from its place and send it, to set it in motion. From the same root come baʿth (resurrection — the raising of the dead from their place), baʿatha (He sent a prophet), baʿtha (a detachment, a company sent out).

Here the pattern is decisive. The verb is in the انفعل pattern (Form VII). In Arabic this form conveys muṭāwaʿa: coming under an effect and yielding to that effect. Kasartuhū fa'nkasara — "I broke it, and it broke."

Inbaʿatha, that is, means exactly this: he did not rise of himself; he was raised, and he rose. He was pushed, and he shot forth.

This is a detail easily missed in reading the verse, but it changes the law of the sūra. The sentence does not say "the most wretched of them rose"; it says "the most wretched of them was thrust forward". There is a push behind him.

The Qurʾān shows this push plainly in another sūra:

"They called their companion, and he took [the sword] and hamstrung her" (al-Qamar 54/29).

Here the order of the verbs is clear: first the calling (nādaw — plural), then the hamstringing (ʿaqara — singular). The deed was done by one man, that is, but there was a community that called him.

Now we can come to what looks like an inconsistency within Sūrat al-Shams itself:

• Verse 12: inbaʿatha ashqāhā — singular. One man.
• Verse 14: fa-kadhdhabūhu fa-ʿaqarūhā — plural. They gave him the lie, they hamstrung her.

Who hamstrung the she-camel? By the twelfth verse one man, by the fourteenth all of them.

The classical answer is this, and it is sound: the deed came from the hand of one man, but it was written against everyone who consented. Consent is partnership. Even if a person does not take part in fact, if he approves, the outcome belongs to him too.

The sūra does not merely assert this; it shows it by grammar: the verb of the one who did the deed is in Form VII — that is, it was done "by being pushed". Those who pushed are partners in the crime, because the deed came about by their pushing.

This is the sūra's most contemporary place, and it can be said without forcing: an extreme act appearing within a community is very often the product of that community's average. A crowd does not commit the crime; it produces the person who will commit it and pushes him forward. And then it separates that person from itself: "he is not like us."

The verse does not permit this separating. In the twelfth verse there is one man; in the fourteenth the punishment comes down on all of them.

Root: ش-ق-و / ش-ق-ي. Its sense is wretchedness, unhappiness, being in hardship. Its opposite is saʿāda. Shaqiya — he fell into distress, he became unhappy.

The Qurʾān uses this root for the distinction in the hereafter: "Among them are the wretched (shaqī) and the happy (saʿīd)" (Hūd 11/105).

The pattern: an elative (the afʿal pattern) — "more / most wretched". The annexation here (ashqāhā — "its most wretched") places the word at a degree of superiority within the people: the most wretched of this people.

The choice of the word gives one pause. Of the man who hamstrung the she-camel it could have been said "the most unjust", "the most overstepping", "the most unbelieving". It is not said. "The most wretched" is said — that is, the word looks less to the harm the agent did to another than to what came upon himself.

This is directly connected with the first half of the sūra. There too the verbs turned back upon the soul: zakkāhā, dassāhā — both the one who purified and the one who buried were doing it to his own soul. So here too: the man who hamstrung the she-camel did it, in truth, most of all to himself. The sūra keeps in both its halves the idea that a moral act returns upon the agent.

And there is this too: the word al-ashqā will come again in the next sūra — "None enters that fire but the most wretched" (al-Layl 92/15). This is one of the bridges of vocabulary between the two sūras, and it will be taken up all together at the end.

The verse begins with إِذِ: "when, at that time". This adverb indicates a particular past moment and is attached to the verb kadhdhabat in the preceding verse: the giving of the lie took place at the moment their most wretched shot forth.

The giving of the lie and the hamstringing of the she-camel are not two separate events, that is. The hamstringing is the giving of the lie itself. Thamūd gave the lie not with a word but with a hand.

Fa-qāla lahum rasūlu'llāhi nāqata'llāhi wa suqyāhā "Then the messenger of God said to them: 'The she-camel of God, and her turn at the water!'"

The sūra does not name the messenger. That he is Ṣāliḥ is known from the other sūras of the Qurʾān (al-Aʿrāf 7/73; Hūd 11/61; al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/142; al-Naml 27/45).

The omission of the name is not a lack but a choice. What matters here is not the person but the attribute: "the messenger of God". The work of the sentence is to show whom the other side is standing against. For the same reason the she-camel too is named not "the she-camel" but "the she-camel of God".

The name الله occurs twice in the verse: rasūlu'llāh and nāqatu'llāh. This name occurs nowhere else in the sūra; only in this verse, and twice. This concentration does not look like coincidence: the verse is making the parties to the event plain. On one side a people, on the other two things ascribed to God.

This part of the sentence looks at first incomplete: "the she-camel of God and her turn at the water" — there is no verb.

The word نَاقَةَ is in the accusative. Why? Because there is here a structure the lexicographers call taḥdhīr: warning, putting on guard. It is the Arabic counterpart of what English does in "Mind the dog!" or "Mind the train!" A verb is concealed in the sentence; it is supplied thus: "Dharū nāqata'llāh" (Leave the she-camel of God alone) or "Iḥdharū nāqata'llāh" (Beware of the she-camel of God).

The dropping of the verb is not accidental; it is the sign of haste. Sentences of warning are shortened because a warning must be given fast. The verse conveys the messenger's word not as a complete sentence but as a shout.

Note further: the whole of the messenger's speech has been compressed into one verse, indeed into half a verse. In other sūras the Qurʾān conveys long conversations of Ṣāliḥ with his people. Here there is a single warning. The economy of the sūra requires this — the subject is not the history of Thamūd but the consequence of a choice.

Root: ن-و-ق. Nāqa means a female camel. The male camel is jamal. Arabic has dozens of words for the camel, each distinguished by age, sex and function; nāqa denotes in particular the adult female.

This carries a weight of meaning. The female camel is the animal that gives milk and bears young — that is, for a community she is productive capital. What was cut down is not a mount or a source of meat; it is a means of production.

What does it mean that the she-camel is "the she-camel of God"? The camel does not have to be biologically different from other camels. What sets her apart is to whom she is ascribed. The Qurʾān says this plainly: "This is the she-camel of God, a sign for you" (al-Aʿrāf 7/73).

The she-camel is a sign, that is; and what makes her a sign is not her own properties but the ruling laid upon her. This says something about the Qurʾān's understanding of a sign: what is sacred is not the object but the command attached to the object. When the she-camel was hamstrung, the crime committed was not the killing of an animal but the trampling of a boundary.

Root: س-ق-ي. Saqā — he gave to drink, he watered. From the same root come siqāya (the office of distributing water — it occurs at al-Tawba 9/19), sharāb/mashrūb, and suqyā — the water given to drink, the share of drinking.

And here is the real matter. The verse does not merely say "do not touch the she-camel"; it says "do not touch her share of the water". The prohibition is in two layers, that is: the animal herself and the animal's right.

The Qurʾān explains this sharing of water in other sūras:

"This is a she-camel; she has a turn at drinking (shirb), and you have a turn at drinking on a known day" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/155).

"And tell them that the water is divided between them; each turn at drinking shall be attended" (al-Qamar 54/28).

This changes the core of the account. The trial is not a trial of mercy in the form "do not harm an animal". The trial is a trial of sharing: giving up a certain portion of a scarce resource.

One has to consider what water meant in the arid geography of north-west Arabia. A source of water is the reason for a settlement's existing. What was asked of Thamūd was to leave one of that source's days to a creature not their own.

And in telling this the sūra is speaking within a text that two verses earlier had spoken of a man's making his own soul grow. The link is this — and I say it as my own reading: purification is giving up a portion of what is in your hand. The word itself was saying this too; zakāt is the share taken out of wealth. What Thamūd cut away was precisely that share.

The next sūra (al-Layl) will make this link far more plainly: there the man who purifies his soul will be described as "he who gives his wealth" (92/18).

Fa-kadhdhabūhu fa-ʿaqarūhā fa-damdama ʿalayhim Rabbuhum bi-dhanbihim fa-sawwāhā "So they gave him the lie and hamstrung her. Then their Lord came down upon them for their sin and levelled it."

The densest verse of the sūra. Four verbs, four فَ.

The verse uses فَ four times: fa-kadhdhabūhu, fa-ʿaqarūhā, fa-damdama, fa-sawwāhā.

In Arabic this letter conveys coming immediately after. Thumma (then) puts time in between; fāʾ does not.

The result: no gap has been left between the four events.

`` they gave the lie → they hamstrung → it came down → it levelled ``

The verse gives the chain of cause and effect in a single breath. And the first two links of the chain belong to man, the last two to God. The symmetry is even: two verbs they did, two verbs were done to them.

There is a matter of sound as well: all four of the verbs are of the same pattern and begin with fa. Read aloud, the verse is heard to accelerate. The longest verse of the sūra is at the same time the fastest-read.

Root: ع-ق-ر. The concrete sense of the word is lost when it is rendered simply "they slaughtered her".

ʿAqara'l-baʿīra — to cut the leg tendons of a camel. This is not killing the camel directly; it is a work done in order to bring her down. A large animal cannot be slaughtered standing; first its leg is disabled, the animal collapses, then its throat is cut.

The verb describes, that is, a two-stage and cruel work: first maiming, then killing.

From the same root:

• عَاقِر (ʿāqir) — barren. In the Qurʾān it is used of the wife of Zechariah (Zakariyyā) (Maryam 19/5, 8; Āl ʿImrān 3/40). The link between barrenness and the cutting of a leg: both are the cutting off of yield.
• عُقْر الدَّار — the heart of the house, its main place.

The sense of barrenness is not a piece of side information here. What was cut down was a female camel — a being that bred, that gave milk, that multiplied. The root of the verb that cut her down means, at the same time, "barren". What Thamūd did is recorded, within the word itself, as the stopping of reproduction.

And this looks to the same place as the verb dassā (to bury) in the first half of the sūra: both are the keeping of what would have grown from growing. The man who buries his soul and the people who hamstring the she-camel are doing the same work at different scales.

Root: د-م-م, in doubled (muḍāʿaf) form: damdama. It occurs only here in the Qurʾān.

The lexicons give the root thus: damma'l-shayʾa — to plaster over a thing, to cover it, to overlay it. Covering over the mouth of a well or a grave with earth is described with this verb. Damdama is the doubled form, and in Arabic doubling conveys force and repetition: to cover layer upon layer, to heap up over and over, to overlay entirely and destroy.

The senses given to the word gather within this frame: it came down upon them, it closed over them, it enveloped them all at once and destroyed them.

عَلَيْهِمْ — "upon them". The particle indicates something coming from above downward. Not from the side, from over the top.

There is an overlap here worth recording: damdama means to cover over. In the fourth verse of the sūra yaghshā (it covered) was said of the night; in the tenth dassā was said of the man who buries his soul. Now damdama is said of the destruction. Three separate roots, one single idea: covering over the top.

And the sequence gives one pause — I write this as my own reading: the people that covered its own soul is covered over. What they did is done to them. The punishment is the deed itself, enlarged.

Root: ذ-ن-ب. And the concrete sense of this root is of interest: ذَنَب (dhanab) — a tail. Dhanūb — the tail portion; istadhnaba — he attached himself behind someone.

That the word dhanb (sin) comes from this root is explained thus: a sin is a deed that drags something behind it. It has a tail; it has a train. Not a thing done and finished but a thing that draws a consequence after it.

This is exactly what the verse says: bi-dhanbihim — because of their sin. The bāʾ here is causal. The destruction is not an arbitrary punishment; it is the tail of the deed.

Its coming in the singular. The word is not dhunūbihim (their sins) but dhanbihim (their sin) — singular. This may be the singular used to denote a kind; but on one reading what is meant is a single sin: the hamstringing of the she-camel. This reading fits the text, since the verse had already named that deed.

And that one sin should suffice to wipe out a people says something about the character of that sin. What was cut down was not an animal; it was a word that had been given.

The sūra's most telling repetition of a word.

سَوَّى. It had occurred in the seventh verse: "wa nafsin wa mā sawwāhā" — "and by the one who ordered it". Now the same verb comes again, in the same form, with the same pronoun.

The same verb does two works:

The sense of the root is the same in both: to make equal, to make level. What changes is what is made level.

The same verb is used both in building a structure and in tearing it down, because both are a "levelling": in the one the parts are ordered so as to come out even with one another, in the other everything is brought level with the ground.

Its function within the sūra: the sūra is saying that the power which balances man is the same as the power which levels the one who breaks the balance. The giver and the taker are one. The sawwā of the seventh verse is a favour; the sawwā of the fourteenth is a judgement; and there is no contradiction between them — two faces of the same principle of order.

The Qurʾān uses the same verb in describing the Resurrection as well: "On that day… they will wish that the earth were levelled over them (tusawwā bihimu'l-arḍ)" (al-Nisāʾ 4/42). Levelling again.

There are three views on the هَا in fa-sawwāhā:

The first two views both fit the text and do not exclude one another. The second has a force of its own: making equal means, on the first reading, a favour (the balancing of the soul), and on the second a judgement (the setting of everyone at the same end). And this closes the matter of the singular agent in the twelfth verse: the deed was done by one man, but the outcome made everyone equal.

Wa lā yakhāfu ʿuqbāhā "And He does not fear its outcome."

The last verse of the sūra. Five words.

There is in this verse a variant reading that does not affect the sense but has to be recorded: some of the leading reciters read the verse as فَلَا يَخَافُ (fa-lā yakhāfu), the majority as وَلَا يَخَافُ (wa lā yakhāfu). This difference is reflected in the codices as well; it is transmitted that in the codices of Medina and Damascus it is written with the fāʾ.

In point of sense the difference is small: read with the fāʾ, the sentence attaches to the outcome of the preceding verse ("He levelled it and so did not fear its outcome"); read with the wāw, it becomes an independent descriptive clause.

The real disagreement is here, and it is a real one:

The majority's preference is the first, and its ground is strong: the agent of the sentence is grammatically the nearest noun, and that is Rabbuhum. Moreover the verb's coming in the imperfect is meaningful — it conveys not a past event but a continuing quality.

Root: ع-ق-ب. And the concrete sense of the root is again something that can be handled: عَقِب (ʿaqib) — the heel. The part that comes down last in walking; what comes after.

Derived from this:

• عَاقِبَة (ʿāqiba) — the end of a matter, what comes after it. Frequent in the Qurʾān: "The outcome belongs to those who guard themselves" (al-Aʿrāf 7/128; similarly al-Qaṣaṣ 28/83).
• عُقُوبَة (ʿuqūba) — punishment. What comes after the deed.
• يَعْقُوب — Jacob (Yaʿqūb); the widespread explanation of the name is that he was born after Isaac (Isḥāq), at his heel.
• تَعَاقُب — following one after another.

عُقْبَى means the thing that comes after a matter. The English "outcome" too is built the same abstract way — what comes out; but the picture in the Arabic is more concrete: the print left behind the step.

"God does not fear the outcome of what He has done."

At first sight this looks like unnecessary information — that God will not fear is obvious in any case. But the work of the sentence is different: it is setting up a comparison.

Consider the things a human ruler is obliged to take into account when he imposes a punishment:

• The retaliation of the party punished.
• The reaction of public opinion.
• The possibility that the punishment will later prove unjust.
• The shaking of his own position.
• The cost of the punishment.

All of these are fear, and all of them corrupt justice. No judgement in the world is given independently of its consequences. The punishment given to the strong is not the same as the punishment given to the weak — because their consequences are not the same.

The verse speaks of a judgement in which this dependence is absent. And note: it says this not in the language of praise but in a negative sentence. It does not say "He is just"; it says "He does not fear the outcome". It describes justice not as an attribute but as the absence of what would corrupt it.

The sūra closes an account of destruction with this sentence. The wiping out of a people is not the result of an unreckoned anger; it is a judgement given from the only position able to make the reckoning.

The last of the fifteen verses meets the oaths of the opening verses at a certain point.

The oaths spoke of an order: the sun, the moon, the day, the night, the sky, the earth. The working of this order depends on no one's consent. The sun does not give up rising because objection is made to its rising.

The last verse says the same thing for the moral domain: judgement too depends on no one's consent. The order in nature and the judgement in morality come from the same source, and neither fears the outcome.

The sūra thus closes a circle: the cosmic order opened with the oaths is presented as the same thing as the moral order closed with the judgement.

If al-Shams has to be reduced to a single sentence: man's interior is an order too, and orders, when they are broken, are levelled flat.

The two halves of the sūra build the same structure at two scales:

That the verb sawwā binds the two halves together is the architectural centre of the sūra. The same verb both builds and tears down.

And there is this repetition: all fifteen of the verses end in -āhā. And that hā pronoun turns, through the sūra, to fifteen different things. The thing turned to at the very end is ʿuqbāhā — "its outcome". After all the things it has pointed to, the sūra closes by pointing last of all to "the outcome".

The place in the sūra most easily understood today is the word دَسَّى. To bury one's soul — that is, to make something inside oneself invisible without killing it.

It is possible to point to the counterpart of this in modern psychology, but only on condition of keeping measure. From the end of the nineteenth century onward a concept called "repression" developed in the literature of psychology: a person's pushing out of the field of consciousness a thought or a desire he cannot accept. The basic claim of this concept is that what is repressed does not disappear; it changes place and returns in other forms.

The overlap with the sense of the root is real: dassā means not to kill but to bury. What is buried stays there.

But the difference has to be stated as well, or a modern theory will have been fitted onto the verse: repression in psychology is for the most part involuntary — the person does not know that he is repressing. The dassā of the verse, however, is a deed and is ascribed to the person; it gives rise to responsibility. The two are not the same thing. The overlapping side is the observation that "what is covered over goes on existing"; the diverging side is the share of the will.

The verse's own emphasis is on the will. And this is an important emphasis for today: to describe one's own moral condition as the result of a mechanism is the most elegant way of removing responsibility.

The side of the eighth verse that looks to the present lies in its rejecting, both at once, two widespread errors about man.

The first error: man is good by origin, evil comes from outside. This view — in its various forms — always ties man's corruption to an external cause: society, the system, education, circumstances. The verse does not accept this: the fujūr is the soul's own fujūr.

The second error: man is evil by origin, goodness is a veneer. This view too is widespread and generally comes with a claim to "realism". The verse does not accept this either: the taqwā too is the soul's own taqwā, and the soul has been sawwā'd — made in balance.

The place the verse leaves is a third: man is a being that carries both possibilities and decides which of them he will make grow. This is both a harder and a more honest description. Harder, because it leaves no room to blame anyone or anything. More honest, because it can load both the savagery in history and the self-sacrifice in history onto the same species.

The انبَعَثَ pattern in the twelfth verse is one of the places most in need of thought today.

That an extreme act appearing within a community is independent of that community is almost never true. The crowd finds someone who will carry its own inclination, pushes him forward, and then, once the deed is done, distances itself from him. The agent is singular; but the agent is the product of the plural.

The sūra does not accept this separation. In the twelfth verse there is one man, in the fourteenth the punishment comes down on all of them. The only thing done in between is that the people brought that man out from among those who gave the lie.

The concrete counterpart of this for today is: the words spoken within a community, the anger produced, the enmity made legitimate — none of these is "only words". Words produce the person who will do the deed. And when the deed is done, for those who produced it to say "we did not do it" is not, by the grammar of the sūra, a valid defence.

That the trial given to Thamūd was a sharing of water ties the account directly to the present.

What was asked of them was not a declaration of belief. It was a conduct: giving up a certain portion of a scarce resource. And what they refused was likewise not a belief but this giving up.

What this says for today is plain: the place where a belief is tested is very often not the content of the belief but its cost. Thamūd did not hamstring the she-camel out of a theological objection; they hamstrung her over water.

The next sūra (al-Layl) will continue from exactly this point and will measure the confirming of belief directly by the spending of wealth.

The she-camel is not described as an extraordinary being. It is said "the she-camel of God" — that is, what sets her apart is the ruling laid upon her.

This says something about the concept of a sign (āya), and it joins with the first half of the sūra: the oaths too were sworn by ordinary things — the sun, the moon, the day, the night, the earth, the sky. These are things everyone sees every day. What makes them signs is not their being extraordinary but what they are attached to.

The same holds for the soul. The soul is not presented as an extraordinary substance; it is presented as something brought into balance and told two directions. It takes its value not from its own structure but from what will be done with it.

For this reason the sūra's measure of deliverance is not an identity but a deed: zakkāhā.

Al-Shams puts moral choice in its most abstract form: to purify or to bury. It does not open out what either of these means.

The sūra that comes immediately after, al-Layl, repeats the same structure — a long series of oaths, then a twofold moral distinction — but this time it fills it in. Al-Shams's zakkāhā will be described in al-Layl as "he who gives his wealth, to purify himself" (92/18). The same root, the same work; this time with its concrete counterpart.

The bridges of vocabulary between the two sūras have been taken up all together at the end of Sūrat al-Layl.