Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 97 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:97

فَمَا ٱسْطَـٰعُوٓا۟ أَن يَظْهَرُوهُ وَمَا ٱسْتَطَـٰعُوا۟ لَهُۥ نَقْبًا

“So they [i.e., Gog and Magog] were unable to pass over it, nor were they able [to effect] in it any penetration.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The verse uses a lighter verb for climbing over and the full one for boring through, because one was the easier task.

A reflection

One letter heavier, for the heavier job

The two halves of this verse use the same verb twice, and not in the same form.

The first is shortened. One letter has gone. The second is given in full.

A narration-based commentary explains it directly. Since getting over the barrier was easier than boring through it, he matched each with what suits it, and so said it this way.

A linguistic commentary agrees in one line: the elegance of bringing the letter back here is not hidden.

And a long commentary gives the mechanical reason the grammarians record. The letter was lightened because it is close in articulation to the one beside it. The readers divide over several ways of pronouncing it.

So you have a text in which the weight of a verb matches the weight of the task it describes.

A specification for a lifting job uses the word lift for one component and crane for another. To a reader it is a style choice. To the man pricing the work, those two words are the difference between a morning and a week, and the entire job is in them.

And this is worth sitting with, because it is the kind of thing that cannot be done on purpose by a committee.

A writer deciding to make his verbs heavier in proportion to his subject matter would produce something laboured and obvious within a page. Here it happens once, in one verse, inside a single clause, and the commentaries noticed it and recorded the observation.

Which tells you what sort of attention this text has had paid to it for fourteen centuries.

Not an attention looking for wonders. An attention that reads a dropped consonant and asks why.

And the answer turns out to be simple. Climbing a smooth wall is hard; boring through iron and copper is harder. The sentence knows it.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.