Sad · Makki · ayah 15 of 88

Sad 38:15

وَمَا يَنظُرُ هَـٰٓؤُلَآءِ إِلَّا صَيْحَةً وَٰحِدَةً مَّا لَهَا مِن فَوَاقٍ

“And these [disbelievers] await not but one blast [of the Horn]; for it there will be no delay.[1324]”

Saheeh International

Essence

After many warnings comes one cry, with not even the pause between two milkings: no delay, no second time, no coming round.

A reflection

Not even the time between two milkings

Every herder in Arabia knew the fawāq. You milk a she-camel, and the udder empties. Then you wait. The young camel suckles a little, the milk comes down again, and you return for the second milking. That short wait, while the milk comes back, was the fawāq. It became a way of measuring a moment.

The lexicons tie the word to return. To afāqa was to come round from a faint, from drunkenness or from illness, the way milk comes back to the udder. The commentaries draw three meanings from this picture, and the ayah holds all of them.

First, no pause. When its time comes, the cry will not hold back even the space between two milkings.

Second, no repetition. It is one cry only, not repeated, not sounded twice. An early explanation glosses the word simply as 'no return, no going back over it'.

Third, no recovery. Those it overtakes will not come round from it, as a sick man comes round, or one who has fainted.

Two canonical readings differ by one vowel here: fawāq and fuwāq. One early commentator concluded they were simply two dialect forms with one meaning, since the earliest authorities never told them apart.

Think of a lift whose doors are closing. Put your hand in the gap and they spring back open. That is a lift's fawāq, its small mercy of return. Most of life has a gap like that. A missed train, and another in twenty minutes. A failed exam, and a resit. A quarrel, and the chance to make it up tomorrow. We live surrounded by second chances, and we come to assume them.

The ayah describes the one door with no gap. There is no hand to put in, no resit, no coming round. That is not said to freeze us with fear. It is said so that we use the gaps we have now. Every fawāq in your life today, every pause in which the milk returns, is a chance that will not always be there.

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.