Using the tafsr al-Qur’n bi-l-Qur’n method—meaning that I treated the Qur’n’s text as the best commentary on itself—to get a sense of what the najm might have signified in 53:1, I went heavy into mentions of stars throughout the Qur’n. In another sra, Abraham briefly worships a star as his god, only to realize his error when the star disappears from view. To my eyes, 53:1 read as the Qur’n swearing by the inauthenticity of false gods and the impermanence of every object of worship other than Allh, the darkness that comes when lesser lights flicker out.
With its mention of a star, 53:1 at least offers the illusion of a universal, because there are such things as stars within my frame of reference. I can register the verse as though it’s speaking to me in my present, calling my attention to what I can directly observe. Of course, whatever meaning the word star conveys is a social construct and thus historically unstable. I live in an age that produces a particular knowledge about stars: When I look at a star, I cannot perceive it through the science and culture of seventh-century Mecca. Nonetheless, it’s easy enough to suspend this awareness and read star as signifying a self-evident, natural reality, as though every person throughout history who has ever looked up at the night sky has experienced these celestial phenomena in basically the same way. I have the luxury of pretending that to read the Qur’n’s najm as “star,” I am only rewriting an Arabic word as its best plain-sense match in English, rather than translating an experience across space and time.
With 53:2, however, the illusion collapses, and my reading hits the wall:
Ma alla ibukum wa m ghaw
(“Your companion has not strayed, nor has he erred.”)
Who is this person that the Qur’n calls my ib, my companion? I can look at the sky and think that I know what the Qur’n means by star, but I cannot know this supposed ib. To my eyes, the verse reads almost as sarcasm, because this companion cannot be my companion. I have never met my ib, except in dreams and drug visions. The Qur’n rubs this in my face.
Something gets lost in the translated your, because English has only one your, regardless of number or gender. When the Qur’n refers to my ib, it expresses the second-person possessive with the plural masculine suffix, kum. The Qur’n here reminds me that I am not its only reader; I am one man among many men for whom he is a companion. In
