al-Shams 91:8

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.