99. Sūrat al-Zilzāl

Eight verses. It takes its name from the verb زُلْزِلَتْ in the first verse and from زِلْزَال, the absolute object that belongs to it. In the tradition it is also called al-Zalzala and Idhā zulzilat.

The sūra can be taken hold of at two points. The first is the scene: the earth is shaken, it brings out what is inside it, man is startled, the earth speaks, people come out scattered. The second is the measure: the last two verses say in which unit this whole scene is to be read — the weight of a mote.

The relation between the two halves carries the entire force of the sūra. The text opens with the largest movement in the universe and closes with the smallest weight a human being can imagine. Between them there is a narrowing: the earth → those in the graves → people → a single person → one mote. A field of vision that narrows like a funnel across eight verses.

And there is a single word-root that carries this narrowing. In the second verse of the sūra the things the earth brings out are called أَثْقَال (weights); in the seventh and eighth verses the unit of measure becomes مِثْقَال (a measure of weight). Both are from the root ث-ق-ل. The sūra closes with the lightest thing the reckoning it opened with the heaviest — and it names the two with the same word.

Keep this root in mind; two sūras later, in al-Qāriʿa, when it says "the one whose scales weigh heavy", the same root will come before us a third time.

In this sūra the disagreement is genuinely alive. It is transmitted in the classical sources both that it is Meccan and that it is Medinan, and neither side can be counted a minority. The ground of those who say Meccan is the style: short verse-endings, a scene of the resurrection, the absence of legal content laying down rulings, the address to the species as "man". The ground of those who say Medinan is the scope of the last two verses and certain reports transmitted around those verses.

I state no definite preference. This distinction has no effect on the understanding of the sūra; it stands merely as a matter of record.

The basmala was treated in earlier sections and is not taken up again here; the verse numbers are counted without the basmala.

Idhā zulzilati'l-arḍu zilzālahā "When the earth is shaken with its own shaking."

Arabic has two basic instruments for framing a condition about the future, and the difference between them is at work in the first word of this sūra.

إِنْ is used for what is merely possible: it may happen, it may not. إِذَا is used for what is certain to occur and whose time alone is unknown. This is why إذا is in origin an adverb of time; the conditional sense was loaded onto it later. In English we render both with "if" or with "when", and the difference disappears.

Almost every one of the Qurʾān's sūras of the resurrection opens with this particle: "When the sun is folded up" (al-Takwīr 81/1), "When the sky is split apart" (al-Infiṭār 82/1), "When the sky is rent" (al-Inshiqāq 84/1), "When the Event comes to pass" (al-Wāqiʿa 56/1). In all of them the same choice is made: the event is not opened for debate, its time is awaited.

With its first word the sūra frames no claim; it sets a date and leaves the content of the date empty.

Root: ز-ل-ز-ل. This is a root of the kind Arabic calls muḍāʿaf rubāʿī: a four-letter root built by doubling a two-letter core (zal). Most of the lexicographers attach it to the verb zalla (to slip, the slipping of the foot) from the root ز-ل-ل; the words zalla (a lapse) and zalūl belong to the same family.

In Arabic these doubled roots do a particular job: they convey a repeated, back-and-forth, oscillating movement, and the sound that movement makes. The examples show this plainly:

• صَلْصَلَ — to ring, the clattering of dry clay (ṣalṣāl, al-Raḥmān 55/14)
• قَلْقَلَ — to joggle a thing and shift it from its place
• زَعْزَعَ — to shake and toss about
• دَمْدَمَ — to come down upon, to rumble (al-Shams 91/14)
• كَبْكَبَ — to tumble headlong (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/94)
• وَسْوَسَ — to whisper over and over

This last example was treated earlier in this commentary: the doubled structure of the word waswasa in Sūrat al-Nās showed that the whispering is not a single occurrence but a continuous one. Zalzala has the same grammar: not a single blow but a movement that breaks off and starts again, that oscillates.

That is, the structure of the word carries the shape of what it describes. An earthquake is not a single tremor; it is a repeated wave. The root too is built that way: zal-zal.

I record this not as a claim of miracle but as the apt use, here, of a working rule of Arabic. The same rule operates in exactly the same way in dozens of words such as ṣalṣāl, qaʿqaʿa and hamhama.

زُلْزِلَتْ is passive: "was shaken", "has been shaken". Who does the shaking is not said.

This is a gap deliberately left in the first verse of the sūra — and the gap will be closed in the fifth verse: "because your Lord has revealed to it." That is, the agent is not named for four verses, and is then given in a single sentence. The scene is first set up without an agent; the bewilderment is undergone first; the explanation comes afterwards.

There is one further reading, and it deserves recording: the passive form announces from the outset that the event is not the earth's own doing. The earth is shaken, but it does not itself set the shaking in motion.

Here is the crux of the sentence.

زِلْزَال is an absolute object: the verbal noun of the verb repeated in order to reinforce the verb or to qualify it. English has no counterpart for it; something on the order of "it was shaken with a shaking". But the verbal noun here has not been left bare, it has been annexed to a pronoun: zilzāla-hā — "its shaking", the earth's own shaking.

What does this annexation do? These are the explanations the exegetes dwell on:

These explanations do not exclude one another. The work they do in common is this: to give the shaking an owner. Without the annexation ("when the earth is shaken") there would be merely an event. With the annexation the event becomes an occurrence belonging to the earth's own history, set apart for it, of a determined measure.

Here too is the point at which this parts company with the earthquakes of daily life. Known earthquakes happen in one piece of the earth and do nothing to the earth itself. This verse speaks not of a place on the earth's surface but of the earth itself: the shaking is no longer upon the earth but in the earth.

A difference is transmitted concerning the first vowel of the word: زِلْزَال (with kasra) and زَلْزَال (with fatḥa). In Arabic, of these two patterns the one with kasra is usually counted a verbal noun and the one with fatḥa a noun; but the lexicographers record that both may be verbal nouns. It yields no practical difference in meaning. Since I cannot state with certainty which reading belongs to which imām, I give no names.

The same root occurs in the Qurʾān in both an otherworldly and a this-worldly context:

• "O people! Fear your Lord; the shaking of the Hour is a mighty thing" (al-Ḥajj 22/1). The same root, the same event; there the greatness of the shaking is stated, here its owner is stated.
• "And they were shaken, shaken with a severe shaking…" (al-Aḥzāb 33/11). Here it is not the earth that is shaken but people — the situation during the siege of the Trench is being described. The root can slide from a physical shaking to a psychological one.
• "Or did you suppose that you would enter the Garden without there coming upon you the like of what came upon those before you? Such poverty and hardship touched them, and they were so shaken…" (al-Baqara 2/214). Again the shaking of people.

This distribution shows the following: the root conveys a thing's being torn loose from the ground it rests on. The ground may be physical or mental.

Wa akhrajati'l-arḍu athqālahā "And when the earth brings out its weights."

There is a small but decisive movement in the grammar, and it becomes visible once the two verses are set side by side:

• Verse 1: zulzilati'l-arḍ — the earth is passive. Something is being done to it.
• Verse 2: akhrajati'l-arḍ — the earth is active. It is doing something itself.
• Verse 4: tuḥaddithu akhbārahā — the earth speaks.

Three stages in three verses: shaken → bringing out → recounting. What was an object first becomes a subject, then becomes a witness. The first half of the sūra consists entirely of this ascent.

One further detail: in the second verse the word "earth" is repeated. It had occurred in the preceding verse; in Arabic it was both possible and more economical to use a pronoun here (wa akhrajat athqālahā). The repetition of the noun does the work the lexicographers call tafkhīm and tathbīt: the subject is magnified and attention is held upon it. That "the earth" is said twice in two verses announces who the protagonist of the first half of the sūra is.

Root: ث-ق-ل. Weight, to be heavy. From the same root:

• ثِقْل (thiql) — a load, a heavy thing carried. Its plural is أثقال.
• مِثْقَال — a measure of weight, the value of a thing on the scales. It will come in verses 7 and 8 of this sūra.
• ثَقَلَان (thaqalān) — the dual used in Sūrat al-Raḥmān for humankind and the jinn (al-Raḥmān 55/31).
• مُثْقَل — one whose load is heavy (Fāṭir 35/18: "And if one heavily laden calls for his load to be carried…").

The word's use in the Qurʾān spreads in two directions, and both are at work in this verse:

• A concrete load: "And they bear your loads to a land you could not reach except with great toil" (al-Naḥl 16/7). Here athqāl are the loads on the backs of camels.
• A moral load: "They will bear their own loads, and other loads along with their loads" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/13). Here the same word is sin.

The exegetes differ over the scope of this word. The principal views:

That the word comes not without an annexation, but nevertheless unrestricted (athqālahā — "its weights", but which weights is not said), is what gives rise to this variety. In Sūrat al-Takāthur "the multiplying of what" was not said; here too "which weights" is not said. The same technique.

If I am to state my own reading: the leaving of the word unrestricted looks deliberate, and the third view — that it takes in both together — sits better with the structure of the text. But this is a preference and it is not binding; the continuation of the sūra plainly brings the dead to the fore.

أَخْرَجَ (Form IV, afʿala) — to bring out. The verse does not say "the earth was split open" or "the graves were opened"; it says that the earth brought something out.

This verb is used in the Qurʾān most often in the context of plants: "and brought out fruits thereby as provision for you" (al-Baqara 2/22 — this verse was treated in this commentary), "We give life to the dead earth and bring out grain from it" (Yā Sīn 36/33). The earth's bringing something out is one of the most familiar movements of the language: the soil gives back what is put into it.

The verse takes this familiar verb and applies it to the graves. If the seed put into the soil comes out as a plant, the human being put into the soil will one day come out too. The Qurʾān frames this comparison explicitly elsewhere: "From it We created you, to it We shall return you, and from it We shall bring you out one more time" (Ṭāhā 20/55); "Thus shall We bring out the dead" (al-Aʿrāf 7/57 — following the revival of dead ground).

That is, the verb "bringing out" is not merely a description but a reminder of a proof. The raising of the dead is the doing once more of the work the earth already does every season.

Wa qāla'l-insānu mā lahā "And when man says, 'What is the matter with it?'"

The two verses of the sūra before this one were about the earth. Here man enters the scene and says two words.

Mā lahā — literally "what is with it?", "what is happening to it?". One of the shortest formulas of astonishment in Arabic. There is no structure beyond an interrogative particle, no verb, no explanation.

Now set this verse side by side with the next:

• Man: two words — mā lahā.
• The earth: tuḥaddithu akhbārahā — it recounts its reports. A long telling, and with the verb "to recount" at that.

The speaking party changes. Man, who has spoken, explained, given reasons and defended himself for a lifetime, falls to two words; while the ground, which has never spoken, begins to recount reports. The sūra does not say this; it builds it.

I record this not as a transmitted report but as a reading that emerges from setting two verses side by side. But the datum of the language is plain: the whole of man's speech in this sūra is two words.

There is one further detail and it escapes notice: man asks about the earth. Not "what is happening to me?" but "what is happening to it?"

That is, man's first reaction is still to look outward: something odd is going on, and the thing that needs explaining is outside. The sūra's answer turns this direction around: "on that day the earth recounts its reports" — and the reports it will recount are your reports. The question is asked outward; the answer turns inward.

The word comes with the article al-. In Arabic this article can be read here in two ways:

For the genus — the human species, any human being. On this reading the astonishment is universal: before that spectacle no one can stand unastonished.

For the known referent (ʿahd) — a particular group, that is, the one who denies. On this reading the astonishment is born of ignorance: the one who did not expect the raising of the dead is astonished; the one who expected it is not.

The ground of those who defend the second reading is that the Qurʾān elsewhere describes the reaction of the believers before the Hour differently. The ground of the first reading is that the word comes absolute and that the name of the species is used throughout the sūra.

As was recorded earlier in this commentary, the places where the Qurʾān says "al-insān" are mostly diagnostic sentences and address the species: "Man is surely in loss" (al-ʿAṣr 103/2), "Man was created anxious" (al-Maʿārij 70/19), "Man transgresses" (al-ʿAlaq 96/6). We shall meet the same word in the next sūra as well: "Man is indeed ungrateful to his Lord" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/6). This distribution supports the first reading; but the preference is not binding.

Qāla — "he said". Something that has not yet happened is being recounted in the perfect.

This is a choice the Qurʾān uses constantly in its scenes of the world to come, and most of the lexicographers explain it by certainty: what is certain to occur is recounted as though it had occurred. The future tense carries a margin of possibility; the perfect does not.

In the fourth verse of the same sūra the verb will turn to the imperfect (tuḥaddithu). That is, the text changes mood between two verses. This should be read not as an inconsistency but as two layers of the scene: what has taken place is given in the perfect, what is continuous in the imperfect.

Yawmaʾidhin tuḥaddithu akhbārahā · bi-anna Rabbaka awḥā lahā "On that day it recounts its reports — because your Lord has revealed to it."

This is the most discussed and the least understood place in the sūra. The two verses must be taken up together, because the second is the ground of the first.

The sūra opened with three "when…" clauses (when it is shaken, when it brings out, when he says). Where is their answer?

The exegetes and the grammarians divide in two:

The first view — the answer is verse 4. "When the earth is shaken… on that day it recounts its reports." On this reading the sentence is complete, and yawmaʾidhin (on that day) carries the answer to the condition.

The second view — the answer has been dropped. "When the earth is shaken, when it brings out, when man says 'what is the matter'… [what things will happen then!]." On this reading verse 4 is a new sentence, and the answer to the condition has been left to the imagination of the one addressed.

The first view is the more widespread and settles more comfortably into the flow of the text. The second view rests on a manner of speech that has its like elsewhere in the Qurʾān — as in Sūrat al-Takāthur, where the answer to the condition "if only you knew with the knowledge of certainty" is left unsaid. We treated that technique in detail there: the one addressed completes the unspoken answer himself, and the answer a person completes himself is always the more effective.

I prefer the first view here, because the adverb yawmaʾidhin naturally attaches to what precedes it. It is not binding.

Root: ح-د-ث. The root's original sense is to be new, to happen, to come about. Ḥādith — what comes into being afterwards, the new. Ḥudūth — coming into being. In the tradition of theology the distinction between qadīm (that which has no beginning) and ḥādith (that which comes into being afterwards) is built from this root; this distinction was touched on in the section on Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ.

From the same root comes حَدِيث, and it carries two senses at once: new ("a new saying") and speech, report, narration. That the two are joined in one word is no accident: a report, by definition, is what is new. A thing already known is not a report.

تَحْدِيث (Form II, tafʿīl) — to recount an event, to convey it, to report it. The choice of the verb is decisive here:

The verse does not say قَالَتْ ("it said"). It does not say نَطَقَتْ ("it spoke"). It does not say شَهِدَتْ ("it bore witness"). It says تُحَدِّثُ — it recounts, it gives its report, it conveys what took place.

The difference is this: "to say" is to frame a sentence; "to recount" is to convey a sequence of events. The work the earth will do is not to make a statement but to transmit, in order, what passed upon it. The word calls to mind not a witness giving testimony but the reading out of a record.

Root: خ-ب-ر. Khabar — the knowledge of a thing, the thing announced. But beneath the root there is a more concrete core: to know a thing by trying it, by looking inside it. From the same root come اِخْتِبَار (trial, testing) and خِبْرَة (knowledge gained by experience).

This is why خَبِير, as one of the names of God in the Qurʾān, is used in the sense of "the one who knows the inner face of the matter"; not merely "the knowing" (ʿalīm) but the one who knows from within.

And this connection is worth recording: the next sūra, al-ʿĀdiyāt, ends with precisely this word. "Surely on that day their Lord is fully aware of them (khabīr)" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/11). In al-Zilzāl the earth gives akhbār; in al-ʿĀdiyāt the Lord is khabīr. Two sūras that come one after the other in the arrangement of the muṣḥaf hold the two ends of the same root: the one that gives the report and the one that already knows the report.

I record this as an observation about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf; it is not a claim about the order of revelation.

The work the pronoun does. The verse does not say "it recounts reports"; it says "its own reports". What are the earth's reports? What took place upon the earth. That is, what you did.

The subtlety here is this: you did it, but the report became its own. The moment an act is performed, it ceases to belong to the one who performs it and passes into the record of the place where it was performed. The verse does not say this as a ruling; it does it by using a pronoun.

The word in the verse that raises the most questions. Was revelation not something that came to prophets?

Root: و-ح-ي. The original sense the lexicographers give: a swift and hidden communication. A transfer of information made by a sign, by a hint, by a route outside speech, which third parties do not notice. There is no "sacredness" at the centre of the word; there is speed and concealment.

The Qurʾān uses this root outside the prophets as well, and the distribution of the usages settles the matter:

• To the bee: "And your Lord revealed to the honeybee: take houses in the mountains, in the trees, and in what they build" (al-Naḥl 16/68).
• To the mother of Moses (Mūsā): "And We revealed to the mother of Moses: suckle him" (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/7).
• To the heavens: "And He revealed to each heaven its own command" (Fuṣṣilat 41/12). In point of structure this verse is the closest to the one before us: the revealing, to an inanimate thing, of a matter belonging to it.
• Among the satans, to one another: "They reveal gilded speech to one another in order to deceive" (al-Anʿām 6/121). The clearest proof that the word is neutral.
• To the people of Zechariah (Zakariyyā) by a sign: "And he signalled to them" (Maryam 19/11) — the verb used here is from this root too, and it conveys a communication made without speech.

This distribution shows the following: in the Qurʾān waḥy is the command given to each existing thing in its own language. The revelation that comes to a prophet is the highest and most particular form of this general category; but it is not the whole of the category.

What, then, does "revealing to the earth" mean? The explanations the exegetes give are close to one another: to make known to the earth the permission to speak and the thing it is to speak. The earth had been silent until that day; on that day it is commanded to speak, and it speaks. Some exegetes put it more plainly: God commands the earth, and the earth carries out the command; "revelation" here is the command itself.

A small letter, but one that has been dwelt upon.

In Arabic the verb awḥā is normally used with إِلَى: awḥā ilayhi — he revealed to him. Nearly every one of the verses I listed above has this particle (awḥaynā ilā ummi Mūsā, awḥā Rabbuka ila'n-naḥl).

In this verse, however, لَ (lām) is used: awḥā lahā.

The explanations the grammarians give:

The last possibility looks unimportant at first sight, but it is not: verse 3 ended with "mā lahā"; verse 5 ends with "awḥā lahā". Man's question and God's answer close with the same two syllables. The question was asked as lahā, and the answer was given as lahā.

I record this as an observation about sound; not as a ruling.

The sūra is third-person narration from beginning to end: the earth, man, people. In this verse there is a sudden move to the second person singular: "your Lord."

This is the manner of speech Arabic calls iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address); it was treated in detail in the section on Sūrat al-Humaza, and I do not repeat it here. Its function here has three sides:

One. The narration is cut off all at once and a turn is made to the one addressed (in the first place, to the Prophet). The scene ceases to be a report and becomes an address.

Two. This is the first and only place in the sūra where the agent is named openly. In the first verse the verb was passive, in the second the subject was the earth, in the third it was man. In the fifth verse the curtain lifts.

Three. And the agent is named not by a name but by an attribute: not "Allāh" but "your Lord". Rabb — the one who raises, who nurtures, who watches over and cares for. In the section on al-Fātiḥa we saw that this name carries ownership and nurture together.

That this name should have been chosen in a place where the scene is as hard as this is striking. The power that shakes the earth, opens the graves and makes the ground speak is named not as an alien power but as the one who nurtures.

Now we can come to the real subject: why is the ground a witness?

In the Qurʾān's scenes of the resurrection the theme of witness recurs, and the witnesses are always chosen from unexpected places:

• "Until, when they reach it, their hearing, their sight and their skins bear witness against them concerning what they used to do. And they say to their skins, 'Why have you borne witness against us?' They say, 'God, who gave speech to all things, gave speech to us.'" (Fuṣṣilat 41/20-21)
• "On a day when their tongues, their hands and their feet bear witness against them concerning what they used to do." (al-Nūr 24/24)
• "On that day We set a seal upon their mouths; their hands speak to Us, and their feet bear witness to what they earned." (Yā Sīn 36/65)

The structure common to these verses is this: the witness is the one who was inside the event. The ear bears witness to what it heard, the eye to what it saw, the hand to what it did. Bearing witness is not the work of an observer from outside; it is the work of the one who took part in the event.

Al-Zilzāl adds the ground to this list — and the ground is the most comprehensive member of the list. Because:

The limbs belong to the person, the ground belongs to everyone. The hand bears witness only to what its own owner did. The earth bears witness to everything that takes place upon it.

The limbs cannot be escaped, but the ground cannot be escaped at all. A person can do something without using his hand; but he cannot do anything without being on some piece of ground. Place is the necessary condition of an act.

And the ground is the party nobody takes into account. When the witnesses of an act are counted, the ground is not counted. This is exactly why the verse strikes: the record is being kept in the place nobody is looking at.

On this subject it is transmitted, in a report found in al-Tirmidhī, that after reciting this verse the Prophet asked, "Do you know what the reports of the earth are?", and that when the Companions said, "God and His Messenger know better", he announced that the earth would bear witness against every servant who does a deed upon its back concerning what he did. Al-Tirmidhī transmits this report and records an assessment of it; since I cannot speak with certainty about the state of the chain of transmission, I pass the report on with the record "it is transmitted thus", not as a firm ground.

A modern connection looks tempting here: that a place should carry the trace of events that have passed upon it is the working principle of the forensic sciences today. The traces left at the scene of an incident are described as that place "recounting" the incident; in criminalistics there is even a settled principle used for this — every contact leaves a trace.

I frame this connection as a comparison, not as a claim, and I must draw its limit plainly. The verse does not speak of forensic science; it does not speak of a technique, a method, a discovery. What the verse says is that the earth will be made to speak — that is, not the reading of a trace but the ground's speaking as a witness. The two are not the same thing.

The only work the comparison does is this: the idea of "a place keeping a record" is not foreign to us today, whereas for the first hearers it was an entirely unaccustomed conception. This is why it is in one way easier and in another way harder for the present-day reader to feel the force of the verse.

The rule laid down by the method (Method) holds here: modern information is not fitted onto a verse. Nor am I fitting any; I only point to an intuition the present-day reader already has.

Yawmaʾidhin yaṣduru'n-nāsu ashtātan li-yuraw aʿmālahum "On that day people come forth in separate bands, so that their deeds may be shown to them."

The second yawmaʾidhin. The fourth verse said what the earth would do; here what people will do is said. The two verses open with the same adverb and show the two sides of the same day.

Root: ص-د-ر. The concrete sense this verb has in Arabic is lost entirely in English translations.

Ṣadara — to come back from the watering place. Flocks are taken down to water (this is وَرَدَ warada), then, once watered, they come back (this is صَدَرَ ṣadara). The two verbs are the pair that names the most basic rhythm of life in the desert: wurūd (the going down to water) and ṣudūr (the coming back from water).

The Qurʾān uses this itself, and the proof lies there: "[The two young women] said: We cannot water until the shepherds bring back their flocks from the water." (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/23). The verb here is exactly this verb, and its meaning is beyond dispute.

The word's use in this verse dresses the scene in an image: people are coming back from somewhere — there was a place they had gone to, their business there is finished, and now they are leaving.

From this a disagreement arises:

The strength of the second view lies in the verb itself: ṣadara conveys not going but coming back; the flock goes to the water, then comes back. Some place must have been reached for there to be a coming back from it.

The strength of the first view lies in the flow of the sūra: in the second verse the earth had brought out its weights; the sixth verse can be read as the continuation of that coming out.

My own reading is close to the second view, because the dictionary sense of the verb calls for it and because the expression at the end of the verse, "so that their deeds may be shown", looks as though it were announcing an outcome. But this is a preference and it is not binding; both views have been defended in the classical sources.

One more word from the same root: صَدْر — the chest. This root was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Inshirāḥ; as was recorded there, the core of the root is the sense of what comes forward, the place of issuing: a maṣdar is a place of issuing, the ṣadr al-majlis is the head of the assembly, and the chest is the part of the body that comes forward. Coming back from water, too, is the flock's parting and issuing from the water's edge.

And this must be recorded: the next sūra will describe the inner side of the reckoning with ٱلصُّدُور (breasts), a word from the same root (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/10). Two neighbouring sūras describe, with the same root, the one the outside (the coming forth of people) and the other the inside (the sifting of what is in the breasts).

Root: ش-ت-ت. To scatter, to fall apart, to break away from one another. Shattat — it scattered. Close to tafarruq but different: in shatt, alongside the separation, there is also unlikeness to one another.

Its derivatives:

• شَتَّى (shattā) — various, differing from one another, each apart.
• شَتِيت — scattered, sparse.
• أَشْتَات — the plural of shatt or of shatīt: scattered groups, communities separate from one another.

The link with al-Layl 92/4. The same root occurs in a most striking place in the Qurʾān:

"Surely your strivings are shattā — they go apart from one another." (al-Layl 92/4)

Sūrat al-Layl says that people's exertions are not alike, that they go in separate directions, and then it counts two types (the one who gives and guards himself / the one who is miserly and counts himself beyond need). That is, there the separateness lies in the quality of the striving.

In al-Zilzāl, however, the same root is used for people themselves: ashtātan — in separate bands.

When you set the two verses side by side a movement becomes visible: in this world what was separate was the striving; on that day what is separate becomes people themselves. An invisible parting turns into a visible ordering. People who walked the same street, sat at the same table and could not be told apart from one another are, on that day, parted according to where their striving has placed them.

I record this as a reading that emerges from comparing two verses.

The root's other occurrences confirm this core as well: "Their hearts are utterly divided" (al-Ḥashr 59/14 — qulūbuhum shattā, that is, a community that looks united being inwardly split); "plants of various kinds" (Ṭāhā 20/53).

One more contrast. In the next sūra the horses "plunge into the midst of a gathering (جَمْع)" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/5). Jamʿ — assembling, coming together; the exact opposite of ashtāt. Al-Zilzāl works by scattering, al-ʿĀdiyāt by plunging into a gathering.

The verb is passive: li-yuraw — "so that it may be shown to them". The verse does not say "so that they may see" (li-yaraw).

The difference matters. Seeing can be a matter of choice; being shown is not. A person can choose not to look, but he cannot choose not to see what is placed before him.

This is the very same distinction that was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Takāthur: knowledge depends on choice, seeing does not. There the sūra was moving from knowing to seeing; here seeing is built as passive from the start.

A note on the variant reading: it is transmitted that this verb is also read in the active — li-yaraw, "so that they may see". The direction of the meaning changes, the ruling stays the same. Since I cannot state with certainty to which imām it belongs, I give no name.

The verse does not say "the recompense of their deeds", "the register of their deeds", "the punishment of their deeds". It says their deeds.

Here the exegetes divide in three:

The indications within the Qurʾān that support the first view are strong:

• "On the day when every soul finds present whatever good it did, and whatever evil it did…" (Āl ʿImrān 3/30). The verb is "finds", and the object is the deed itself.
• "The book is placed before them… 'Woe to us, what a book is this! It has left out nothing small or great but has counted it all up,' they say. And they find present before them what they did." (al-Kahf 18/49). The last sentence of the verse is also striking: there is both a book and the deeds themselves being present.

This prepares the last two verses of the sūra. There too the verb will be to see.

Fa-man yaʿmal mithqāla dharratin khayran yarah · Wa man yaʿmal mithqāla dharratin sharran yarah "Whoever does a mote's weight of good will see it; and whoever does a mote's weight of evil will see it."

The two best-known and most often repeated verses of the Qurʾān. It is transmitted that in the tradition these two verses together are called "al-āya al-jāmiʿa" (the comprehensive verse).

Let us look at the structure first. Between the two verses a single word differs:

Four of the five elements are the same; one differs. And the one that differs stands exactly in the middle.

Now look at this table once more: two pans of equal length, a measure of equal weight, and, as the only difference, what is placed inside. The structure of the two verses is a balance.

I record this not as a transmitted report but as a reading I draw from the form of the two verses. But this must be added: two sūras later, in al-Qāriʿa, the balance will come openly onto the stage, and there too two pans will come before us in two sentences identical to each other (fa-ammā man thaqulat mawāzīnuh… wa ammā man khaffat mawāzīnuh). Two sūras build the same structure twice.

Root: ث-ق-ل — the same root as athqāl in the second verse of the sūra.

Mithqāl is on the mifʿāl pattern; in Arabic this pattern mostly forms nouns of instrument and of measure (miftāḥ — a key, mīzān — a balance, mikyāl — a measuring vessel). Mithqāl — the value of a thing on the scales, a quantity of weight.

The sequence of the sūra is this:

• Verse 2: the earth brings out its أَثْقَال — the heaviest loads it can carry.
• Verses 7-8: the reckoning is conducted by the مِثْقَالُ ذَرَّة — the smallest weight that can be weighed.

The same root, at two extremes, across eight verses. The sūra uses the word "weight" first for the heaviest loads in the world and then for the smallest thing a human being can imagine. The scale changes, the unit does not.

The most disputed word of the sūra, and the word most often misused in the modern period.

Root: ذ-ر-ر. Beneath the root lies the sense to scatter, to sprinkle, to disperse: dharra'l-ḥubūb — he scattered the grains. From the same root comes ذُرِّيَّة (dhurriyya — lineage, offspring); some of the lexicographers explain this link by "the scattering and spreading of a lineage", while others attach dhurriyya to another root. I do not enter into this disagreement.

The explanations transmitted concerning what the word answers to in the classical language:

What these explanations have in common is that the word announces not so much the name of an object as a limit: there is nothing smaller than this. In the Arabic language, the last step of smallness.

Here one must speak plainly.

In modern Arabic the word ذَرَّة is used as the equivalent of "atom": al-ṭāqa al-dharriyya — atomic energy, al-qunbula al-dharriyya — the atomic bomb. In English too the word is regularly rendered "atom" in translations of this verse.

This equivalence was given to the word afterwards. As scientific terms were being carried over into Arabic in the twentieth century, the existing word meaning "the smallest particle" was chosen as the counterpart of the new concept. In the search for an equivalent of the Greek atomos (indivisible), the word that already meant "the smallest" in the language was taken. This is a normal operation of term-coining and happens continually in languages.

To say that this verse speaks of the atom is to read a later-given term back into the text. The verse does not speak of physics; it speaks of the smallest weight its hearers knew.

The rule laid down by the method (Method) holds here exactly: no hunting for scientific miracles. Nor am I hunting for any.

And this must be added: the force of the verse has no need of this claim in any case. The verse does not rest on how small a mote physically is; it rests on its being the smallest thing a human being can imagine. For the first hearers this was the young of an ant; today it may be something else. The function of the measure stays the same: even the smallest quantity you can bring to mind is inside the reckoning.

Indeed the Qurʾān does the same work with another word as well: "Even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, and be within a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth, God will bring it forth" (Luqmān 31/16). There the unit is a mustard seed. The Qurʾān's concern is not a particular particle but that the smallest thing should not fall outside the record.

Both words are in the accusative, and the grammarians differ over their parsing:

• A specifier (tamyīz) — the distinguishing element that removes the vagueness in mithqāla dharra: "a mote's weight — of the kind that is good".
• A substitute (badal) or an explicative apposition (ʿaṭf al-bayān) — an element that explains mithqāl.
• A circumstantial qualifier (ḥāl) — it states a condition.
• The object of an elided verb: yaʿmal ʿamalan khayran.

No practical difference in meaning arises. What is worth recording is this: good and evil stand here in the position of the substance being weighed. What is placed in the pan is not intention or character but the deed itself.

The key word of the sūra, and the place most easily passed over.

The verse could have said the following and does not:

• yujzā bihī — he receives its recompense / he is requited for it
• yusʾal ʿanhu — he is questioned about it
• yajiduhu — he finds it

It says يَرَهُ: he sees it.

And this agrees exactly with the preceding verse: "so that their deeds may be shown to them." The sūra declared seeing in the sixth verse and applies it one by one in the seventh and eighth. The same root (ر-أ-ي) three times in three verses.

The disagreement of the exegetes:

The first view is the closest to the plain sense of the word and is directly connected to the sixth verse of the sūra. I prefer this reading; it is not binding.

And the preference has a consequence. If the verse really does say "he sees", then the first layer of the punishment is the seeing itself. Before the recompense comes as an operation applied to the person from outside, it comes as the person's watching what he himself did.

This works in both directions. For evil: a person sees, as it is, from outside, the thing he had forgotten or made light of or thought himself justified in. For good: a person sees the thing he does not remember, did not enter in any record, the thing of which he said "is that anything?".

By not using two separate verbs — by saying "he sees it" for both — the verse preserves this symmetry.

A note on the variant reading. It is transmitted that the verb is also read in the passive: يُرَهُ — "it is shown to him". This reading agrees exactly with li-yuraw (so that they may be shown) in the preceding verse and strengthens the meaning: the person is not looking, it is being shown to him. Since I cannot state with certainty to which imām it belongs, I give no name; that the reading is transmitted has been recorded.

To escape the reckoning of deeds, man has used two sentences throughout history, and these two verses close both at once:

The first sentence: "What use is so small a good?" — This is the most widespread way of escaping from doing good, and it requires no ill will; it is merely an error of measurement. A person compares his own contribution with the size of the problem and finds it meaningless.

The second sentence: "What harm does so small an evil do?" — The reverse of the same error of measurement. A person compares his own harm with the sum of harm in the world and finds it negligible.

The logic of both sentences is the same: to measure the value of an act by its proportion within a total. The verse invalidates this way of measuring. What is placed in the pan is not a proportion but a quantity; and there is no lower limit to quantity.

Concerning this measure, it is transmitted in a well-known hadith found in al-Bukhārī and Muslim that the Prophet said, "Guard yourselves against the Fire, even with half a date." The idea the report carries is the idea of the verse: that there is no threshold.

There is one further point to be noticed, and it is important:

The verse does not say "the one who believes" or "the one who disbelieves". It says مَن (whoever) — the particle of condition, in its most general form.

That is, the ruling has been attached not to the person's identity but to his act. This is the textual counterpart of the principle recorded in this commentary's method (Method): what the verses describe are attributes, and whoever bears that attribute is included in them.

A theological debate has been conducted over these two verses throughout history: what is the standing in the world to come of a good deed done by someone who does not believe? The relation of deeds to faith is taken up in other verses of the Qurʾān, and the matter is not confined to these two verses. The detail of the debate goes beyond the limits of this section; the only thing I record here is that there is no note of identity in the wording of these two verses.

The construction mithqālu dharra occurs in several places in the Qurʾān, and each time it does the same work — the impossibility of falling outside the record:

• "God does not wrong by so much as a mote's weight; and if there is a good deed He multiplies it." (al-Nisāʾ 4/40). The same unit, in the context of justice.
• "Not a mote's weight escapes Him, neither in the heavens nor in the earth." (Sabaʾ 34/3; the like of it at Yūnus 10/61). The same unit, in the context of knowledge.
• "And We set up the scales of justice for the Day of Resurrection; no soul is wronged in the least. Even if it be the weight of a mustard seed, We bring it forth." (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/47). This verse joins two sūras: it contains both al-Zilzāl's dharra and al-Qāriʿa's mawāzīn.

The last verse is especially important, because it shows that the link we have framed between al-Zilzāl and al-Qāriʿa already exists within the Qurʾān: the measure of the mote and the balance occur in the same sentence.

Three movements are visible in the table:

One — the ascent of the earth. Object (1) → subject (2) → speaker (4). In the first half of the sūra the silent ground turns into a witness.

Two — the descent of man. Man enters the scene with a question of two words (3), then becomes plural and scatters (6), and at the end is set one by one before a measure (7-8). He ceases to be the party that speaks and becomes the party that is spoken about.

These two movements in opposite directions are another form of the descent we recorded at the end of Sūrat al-Takāthur: there the one addressed passed from the position of subject to the position of object; here he changes places with the ground.

Three — the narrowing of the scale. The earth → those in the graves → people → a single person → one mote. A descent in eight verses from the cosmic scale to the microscopic.

The verse-endings of the eight verses: zilzālahā — athqālahā — mā lahā — akhbārahā — awḥā lahā — aʿmālahum — yarah — yarah.

The first five verses close with -hā. Entirely a feminine pronoun — because the subject is the earth (al-arḍ is feminine in Arabic). In its sound too, the first half of the sūra is the sūra of the earth.

In the sixth verse the verse-ending turns to -hum: the subject passes to people, and the sound changes along with them. The last two verses close with yarah, twice, with the same word.

That is, the sound draws three sections: the earth (1-5) → people (6) → each and every one (7-8). As we recorded in the section on al-Takāthur, in the short Meccan sūras sound and content frequently move together. I record this not as a claim of miracle but as an example of the dense sound-texture of these sūras.

The things not found in al-Zilzāl are striking:

• Paradise and Hell do not occur. There is neither a description of fire nor a description of reward. The sūra ends with seeing.
• There is no command and no prohibition. The same gap we recorded in the section on al-Takāthur is here as well: the text makes no demand.
• No one is accused. No group, no person, no behaviour is taken as a target. A measure is laid down, and its application is left to the one addressed.

The whole weight of the sūra lies in the measure itself. The one thing said is this: there is a reckoning, and the reckoning has no lower limit.

First: the fixity of the ground is man's last assumption.

A person can question everything in his life — his health, his work, his relationships, his belief. But one thing he does not question: that the ground under his feet will hold. This is not even an assumption that has been thought; because it is the ground of thinking, it is invisible.

The first verse of the sūra takes aim at exactly this assumption. An earthquake is the taking into account of the one thing man does not take into account. And everyone who has lived through one knows this: the real effect an earthquake leaves in a person is not material damage but the loss of the sense of ground.

The Qurʾān had other images it could have chosen for the resurrection, and it uses some of them in other sūras: the folding up of the sun, the splitting of the sky, the boiling of the seas. This sūra has chosen the most familiar. The one kind of catastrophe that has a counterpart in everyone's body.

Second: the leaving of small acts outside the accounting.

The overwhelming majority of the things modern life has a person do are small: a message, a signature, a silence, a redirection, a purchasing choice, a comment. None of these on its own produces a measurable result — and precisely for that reason none of them enters the accounts.

The balance sheet a person keeps on his own life is generally made up of large line items: the profession followed, the family founded, the great decisions taken. The small ones do not appear even as a total.

What the verse does is to change the unit of the accounting. The large items are not removed; but they are no longer the only items.

And note this detail: the verse does not say "he sees the total", it says "he sees it". The mote is seen as itself, not dissolved within a total.

Third: the devaluing of good by scale.

Today the scale of the problems a person meets is incomparably larger than the scale of the means in his hand. The news is worldwide; the power to intervene is confined to a single street. There is a widespread feeling this mismatch produces: whatever I do, nothing changes.

This feeling does not rest on a wrong observation. A good deed a person does really is immeasurably small beside the scale of the problem he faces.

The answer of the verse is not to correct the observation but to change the measure. The value of an act is determined not by whether it solves the problem but by whether it was done. This is not a sentence of consolation; it is a rule of accounting.

Fourth: the inescapability of the record.

There is no place where an act leaves no trace — this is what the fourth verse of the sūra says. For the present-day reader this idea has a familiarity of its own: the greater part of what we do is entered into a record in places we are not aware of.

This resemblance is not the content of the verse and should not be presented as such. But it makes one thing easier: that the idea of "an act nobody sees" is harder to maintain today than it once was. For the first hearers of the verse, "the witness of the ground" was a strange conception. For the present-day reader, what is strange is the opposite.

Fifth: seeing — the hardest part of the reckoning.

The sūra makes no description of punishment; it says seeing. And it says this with the same word for both.

For a person to see what he himself did from outside, as it is, unabridged — this is something almost never undergone in daily life. A person's access to his own act always comes together with the reasons: he knows why he did it, under what pressure he did it, what he knew at that moment; and this knowledge softens the act.

The seeing the verse describes appears not to contain these layers. Yarah — he sees it. Not the reason, the act.

The counterpart of this works in both directions, and this is perhaps the most subtle side of the sūra. The same nakedness holds for a forgotten good deed as well. A person remembers his own good deeds together with the reasons too — and the reasons often diminish them as well. The sūra removes both the defence and the belittling.

Al-Zilzāl closes with the bringing out of those in the graves and with the seeing of deeds. The next sūra will build the same scene again with another verb: "When what is in the graves is overturned" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/9). In al-Zilzāl the earth brings out what is inside it; in al-ʿĀdiyāt what is in the grave is overturned.

But al-ʿĀdiyāt will add one more thing — and that addition is a dimension not present in this sūra: "and when what is in the breasts is sifted out" (100/10). Al-Zilzāl is content with the seeing of deeds; al-ʿĀdiyāt goes inside the breasts.

I shall return to the whole of the three-sūra sequence at the end of the section on al-Qāriʿa.

• Whether the sūra is Meccan or Medinan is genuinely disputed; no preference was stated.
• The views on the scope of the word athqāl (weights) were given in a table; a preference was stated and it was recorded that it is not binding.
• Whether the answer to the conditional sentence is verse 4 or has been dropped is disputed; both views were given.
• Where the verb yaṣduru describes the coming forth from (the graves / the place of reckoning) is disputed; a preference was stated and it was recorded that it is not binding.
• The variant reading zilzāl / zalzāl in verse 1, and the active-passive differences of reading in verses 6 and 7-8, are transmitted; since I cannot state with certainty to which imāms they belong, no names were written.
• Whether the word dhurriyya is from the same root as dharra is disputed among the lexicographers; no side was taken.
• Concerning the witness of the earth, the report transmitted in al-Tirmidhī was passed on; since I cannot speak with certainty about the state of its chain of transmission, it was given with the record "it is transmitted thus". For the hadith about half a date, al-Bukhārī and Muslim were recorded.
• It was stated plainly that the matching of "dharra = atom" is an equivalence given to the term afterwards; the claim that the verse speaks of the atom was rejected.
• The comparison framed with the forensic sciences was presented as a comparison, and it was separately recorded that it is not the content of the verse.
• The observation that the structure of verses 7-8 sets up a balance is my own; it was not presented as a transmitted report.
• The theological debate about the standing in the world to come of the deed of one who does not believe was not entered into; it was only stated that there is no note of identity in the wording of these two verses.
• The links framed with al-ʿĀdiyāt and al-Qāriʿa are observations about the arrangement of the muṣḥaf; they are not a claim about the order of revelation.