al-Zilzāl 99:3

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.