moment at which it becomes absent. We are asked to consider the star’s lack. The Qur’n swears by the event of the star’s full exposure as impermanent and thus unworthy of worship.
If the oath by a star in 53:1 is part of the sra’s polemic against astral worship, it might be notable that although the peoples of pre-Islamic Arabia had names for hundreds of stars, the Qur’n mentions only one star specifically by its name: al-Shi’r (Sirius, Canis Majoris), the brightest fixed star (confession: The Qur’n itself does not explain that al-Shi’r is a specific star, or a star at all; as with everything else, the reference can have no meaning without outside sources). The mention occurs later in this sra (53:49), as the Qur’n asserts that Allh is “the lord of Sirius” (rabb al-Shi’r). It could be reasonable to see al-Shi’r as the star by which the Qur’n swears in 53:1, which would also connect the start of the sra to its later polemic against idolatry.
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.”)
moment at which it becomes absent. We are asked to consider the star’s lack. The Qur’