وَوَضَعْنَا عَنكَ وِزْرَكَ ٱلَّذِىٓ أَنقَضَ ظَهْرَكَ
Wa waḍaʿnā ʿanka wizrak / alladhī anqaḍa ẓahrak "And We set down from you your burden — that burden which had made your back crack."
The two verses must be taken together; the second is the qualifier of the first and has been counted as an independent verse.
The Turkish words vaziyet (situation) and mevzu (subject — that which has been set down) are borrowings from this root.
An interesting usage: the same verb is used in Arabic also for giving birth. "I have given birth to her, a female" (Āl ʿImrān 3/36); "Every pregnant one lays down what she carries" (al-Ḥajj 22/2). The reason is direct: to give birth is to set down a carried load. The Arabic word ḥaml means both burden and pregnancy.
"…that Prophet who commands them what is right and forbids them what is wrong, who makes the good things lawful for them and the foul things unlawful, and who sets down from them their heavy loads and the chains that were upon them" (al-Aʿrāf 7/157).
The verb is the same (yaḍaʿu), the preposition is the same (ʿanhum — "from them"), the act is the same. The difference is this: in al-Sharḥ this operation is performed upon the Prophet, in al-Aʿrāf it is performed by the Prophet.
When the two verses are set side by side an order emerges: first the one whose load is set down, then the one who sets loads down. What is given becomes what is passed on. This is the same logic as the symmetry al-Ḍuḥā established — there too the favours received turned into the commands given.
- وَزِير (wazīr) — one who shares the load, who takes on the ruler's burden. The word's present-day political sense comes from here.
- وَزَر (wazar) — refuge, a shelter in the mountains. Al-Qiyāma 75/11: "No! There is no refuge!"
- وِزْر (wizr) — both burden and sin.
The last item is settled in the Qurʾān. There is a pattern repeated in five separate places: "No bearer of a burden bears the burden of another" (al-Anʿām 6/164, al-Isrāʾ 17/15, Fāṭir 35/18, al-Zumar 39/7, al-Najm 53/38). The "burden" here is the responsibility for the act committed.
That is, Arabic conceives sin as a weight that is carried. English carries the same intuition in "to shoulder the blame", "a weight on the conscience", "to be weighed down by guilt".
The prayer at Ṭāhā 20/25-28 was mentioned above. The continuation of the prayer runs thus:
"And give me a helper (wazīr) from my family: my brother Aaron (Hārūn)" (Ṭāhā 20/29-30).
The root is the same: و-ز-ر. Moses asks for a wazīr — a partner in the load. In al-Sharḥ, on the other hand, the wizr — the load itself — is set down.
That the two texts should use the same root in two different derivatives is striking. But I draw no ruling from this: Moses asked for someone to share the load, Muhammad's load was set down — these are not the same thing. What I record is the common root; the link to be built is left to the reader's judgement.
The text does not say what the burden was. Several explanations are given in the classical commentaries:
| View | What it means | Its ground | Its weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shortcomings before prophethood | A forgiven past | A link is made with the verse "that God may forgive you what went before of your sin and what came after" (al-Fatḥ 48/2) | It enters into the debate about the impeccability of the prophets; moreover "wizr" is described here as a weight that is set down, not as an offence that is pardoned |
| The weight of the message | The load of the task of conveying | "We shall cast upon you a weighty word" (al-Muzzammil 73/5). Revelation itself is characterised as "heavy" in the Qurʾān | The verse says "We set down"; the load of the message was not set down, it continued |
| The distress caused by his people's not believing | The inner weight arising from the resistance of those addressed | The Qurʾān records this weight repeatedly: "You will almost destroy yourself because they do not believe" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/3; also al-Kahf 18/6, Fāṭir 35/8) | The text does not state it; it is inferred from the context |
| The weight of the uncertainty before revelation | The weight of the state of "not knowing the way" at al-Ḍuḥā 7 | The link between the two sūras; the state of ḍāll was a deprivation, and deprivation weighs | The connection is indirect |
1. The verse says "We set down from you" — that is, the burden was a weight standing upon him. This describes pressure rather than guilt. 2. The verse comes immediately after the first verse, and the first verse recounts an inner widening. The two together describe a psychological lightening. 3. The third verse describes the burden by the effect it left on the body of the one carrying it — as will be seen below. This too shows that the speech is not in the language of guilt but in the language of carrying.
These three observations support the second, third and fourth readings. But I state no definite preference; the text does not name it.
Its settled usage in the Qurʾān has to do with the covenant: "Those who break the covenant of God after its confirmation" (al-Baqara 2/27). And an extraordinary comparison: "Do not be like her who unravelled her yarn after she had spun it firmly" (al-Naḥl 16/92).
In Form IV (anqaḍa) the word takes on a special sense: a thing's cracking, its joints giving out a sound, under a weight. The lexicographers explain this usage by the sound the spine gives out under a load; its link with the root's sense of "coming undone, unravelling" is direct — what cracks is what has begun to come apart.
The sound of the word. Anqaḍa — the nūn comes out through the nose, the qāf bursts from deep in the throat, the ḍād is a heavy, thick sound. The pronunciation of the word seems to imitate the sound it recounts.
That certain roots in Arabic have the character of sound-imitation (onomatopoeia) is recorded by the lexicographers. I do not present this as a definite ruling; but it is something observable for one who reads the word aloud.
The verse does not describe the weight of the burden. How heavy it was is not said, what it resembled is not said, it is not weighed.
What is described is the effect the burden left on the body of the one carrying it: it had made his back crack.
This shifts the measure from the objective to the subjective. The question is not how many kilos the load was; it is how the one under it stood.
And this has a consequence: the weight of a burden cannot be weighed from outside. The same load gives out two different sounds in two people. The measure the verse chooses is closed to comparison.
- ظَاهِر (ẓāhir) — what appears, what is in the open. The opposite of bāṭin.
- ظُهُور (ẓuhūr) — coming into view.
- ظَهِير (ẓahīr) — supporter, one who backs another. In the Qurʾān, the word of Moses: "I shall never again be a supporter of the guilty" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/17).
- ظُهْر (ẓuhr) — noon; the clearest moment of the day, when the shadow is shortest.
The point is here: the back is both what carries and what is leaned on. English carries the same double sense: to back someone, to have backing, to lean one's back against something.
That is, when the back cracks two things go at once: the power to carry and the support. The choice of word intimates that being crushed under a load is not only a matter of strength.