الإسراء · الآية 62

Commentary

The verse before this closed on a question, and this one opens on a question. Two questions running from one speaker, and no answer to the first between them. Araʾaytaka is not one word but a compound: an interrogative hamza, a past verb of seeing, a subject tāʾ, and then a kāf stuck to it after the verb has already taken its subject. The form is not asking for information; it is asking for a look. Look at this one. And the root r-ʾ-y is the very root that ran in this sūra two lines back, in ﴿الَّتِي أَرَيْنَاكَ﴾, "which We showed you." There a showing comes down; here a creature stops the One who showed, and asks Him to look.

In the verse before he said "before one whom." Here he says "this one whom." A demonstrative and a relative standing where a name was spoken in the command itself. Twice in two lines, and the name does not cross his tongue. Then read the word that does cross it. He does not say "preferred" and does not say "raised." He says "honoured." And this same root the sūra will state eight verses further on, as a report rather than an objection. So the favour was called by its own name on the tongue of the one contesting it, before it was set down in its own place. And "over me" is a particle of elevation. He does not deny the honouring, nor dispute that it happened; he measures it against himself and finds it above him. He denied the position and conceded the grace, and so bore witness from the very place where he quarrelled.

Then a lām preparing an oath, followed by a conditional in. The sentence is a swearing built on a supposition, not a report of anything that stands. And putting back, from ʾ-kh-r, is neither a cutting off nor a leaving without end; it is the setting of a thing behind a gap through which a stretch of time runs. Which is why ilā follows, the particle of a reached limit, and why the limit is then named: the Day of Standing. What he asks for is dated in his own wording, and he names its end himself. He asked for a gap and set a bound to it, so he did not ask for what does not end.

A lām answering the oath and a heavy nūn at the end of the verb: the claim is sworn to with the strongest swearing there is. And the word has no counterpart anywhere in the recorded text, so it is taken from its letters and from nothing else. The ḥāʾ is a narrowing that contains within; the nūn is a containing held in a hollow; so the nucleus ḥ-n is a narrow hollow that keeps whatever enters it. Then the kāf is a sealing and a gripping that closes upon that hollow. The material of the root is a narrow hollow that is gripped shut. Then the form. The eighth form turns the act back on its doer and makes him take the thing for himself, so the sense is that he takes that inner grip as his own. And whoever gets his hand into the narrow hollow drives the whole body with the slightest motion, and needs to touch nothing else of it. This is what the letters give, and nothing is added to them.

Then look at whom it falls on. He does not say "I shall take him." He says "his offspring," and offspring has its own entry in the glossary: the scattered issue that goes out from an origin and spreads. The quarrel was over one, and the claim lands on the widest thing in the verse. He left the root and aimed at what scattered from it. And then the exception: he was not asked for one, and he was not contradicted so as to draw back. It comes out in the same breath as the claim. "A few" is indefinite, with no number in it. It is not known how many they are or who, and a place remains inside the sworn verdict which the verdict does not reach. The oath came out with a hole in it, and the one who swore it is the one who made the hole.

He would not say the name, and he did say the word for the favour. The whole boast is fenced by two limits of his own making: a term that ends, and a few he cannot reach.

Two Readings

The two readings do not conflict. The first supplies what is omitted and specifies who is excepted; the second reads the make-up of the form, the particle of elevation, the particle of limit, and the letters of a verb with no counterpart. This book chooses the additional listening.