التكوير · الآية 5

Commentary

The root w-ḥ-sh denotes a parting that comes away clear and then scatters into open ground. From it comes waḥsha, the emptiness of a place of anyone who keeps company, and awḥasha al-makān is said of a place emptied of those who were in it. So in its very name the waḥsh is what neither takes to company nor is taken to; its quality is distance, that of a thing not to be approached.

The plural takes the pattern fuʿūl, a gathering in the wording and a scattering in the meaning, that is, a multitude in which each stands alone, forming no rank and driven along no single thread. This is exactly what the following verb undoes.

The root ḥ-sh-r denotes the pressing together of scattered things by a running motion until they are taken in. The material denotes a driving that narrows upon the scattered until it closes, and not mere assembly. From it a fine ear is called ḥashra, meaning what was pressed until it grew fine.

The verb is in the passive, which leaves the agent unnamed, and it stands on the bare fuʿilat, with no doubling to multiply it. So this is one complete pressing, neither repeated nor drawn out, in which what does not gather is gathered once, and the gatherer goes unmentioned.

Al-wuḥūsh contains a ḥāʾ and a shīn, as does ḥushirat, a ḥāʾ and a shīn. The same core stands twice in one verse: a wāw goes before it in the first word and opens it out into the empty ground, while a rāʾ follows it in the second and holds it in a single course.

So a letter at the edge turns the whole direction around: what the wāw scattered the rāʾ gathers, and the verse needs no description of a driver or a driving. The two words face each other within it the way a door faces itself, open and then shut.

Al-wuḥūsh, from the root w-ḥ-sh, is a parting that comes away clear and then scatters into open ground; from it come waḥsha and the emptying of a place, and the plural on fuʿūl keeps each one alone. Ḥushirat, from the root ḥ-sh-r, is the pressing together of scattered things by a running motion until they are taken in, in the passive with the agent unnamed, on fuʿilat with no doubling: one complete pressing. The core ḥ-sh stands in both words together, opened out into the empty ground by the wāw and brought back into its course by the rāʾ. So the verse takes the noun whose meaning is that it is not gathered, and gathers it.

Two Readings

The two readings do not conflict. The first fixes a fate; the second hears, in one core, a scattering returned into a gathering. This book chooses the additional listening.