The Gatherer

Meaning

From j-m-ʻ, which Ibn Fāris gives as one origin: the drawing together of a thing. The Name’s form stands twice of Allah in the Qurʼan, each time with its object: You are the Gatherer of mankind for a Day about which there is no doubt (3:9); Allah is the Gatherer of the hypocrites and the disbelievers in Hell, all together (4:140). Six times a Day is said to hold no doubt, and a word of this root stands in all six. At 42:7 the Day of Gathering is named and at once divided: a party in the Garden and a party in the Blaze. Does man think We shall not gather his bones? (75:3). The joining of hearts at 8:63 is allafa, another root, which aṭ-Ṭabarī explains with this one.

Root j-m-ʻ — to draw together, to gather (jamaʻa); a host (jamʻ)

Counted on the Tanzil text, every word read in its verse: 129 words of j-m-ʻ, no look-alikes. Jamīʻ, all or together, 53; ajmaʻūn and ajmaʻīn, all, 26. Of Allah 17: the Name’s form jāmiʻ at 3:9 and 4:140, the verb at 3:25, 4:87, 5:109, 6:12, 6:35, 18:99, 34:26, 42:15, 45:26, 64:9, 75:3 and 77:38, and His gathering as a noun at 18:99, 42:29 and 75:17. The Day’s gathering with no agent named 5 (11:103, 56:50, yawm al-jamʻ at 42:7 and 64:9, and 75:9). People who gather, amass or combine 14, among them 3:157, 10:58, 43:32, 70:18 and 104:2. The fourth form, to resolve on a matter, 4 (10:71, 12:15, 12:102, 20:64). Jamʻ, a host, 6 (al-jamʻān at 3:155, 3:166, 8:41, 26:61; 54:45; 100:5); majmaʻ, the meeting of the two seas, 2 (18:60–61); al-jumuʻah 1 (62:9). Jāmiʻ said of a matter, not of Allah, at 24:62. Ibn Fāris (Maqāyīs al-Lughah, vol. 1, pp. 479 and 480): one origin, the drawing together of a thing; jamʻ is Makkah, named for the gathering of people there, and likewise the day of al-Jumuʻah; his editor Hārūn notes that Jamʻ is the name of al-Muzdalifah, as the six editions use it, and that the words stand only if read as Jamʻ of Makkah, the places being near. The definite al-Jāmiʻ stands in no āyah; in the six ḥadīth editions it is said of Allah only in the lists at at-Tirmidhī 3507 (weak: Aḥmad Shākir, al-Albānī, Zubair ʻAlī Zaī) and Ibn Mājah 3861 (isnād ḍaʻīf with the list: Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ; weak: Zubair ʻAlī Zaī; ṣaḥīḥ without it: al-Albānī). 8:63, 52:21 and 13:23 are carried for the joining they name and hold no word of the root in their verbs. Ḥadīth: Muslim 2638a with al-Bukhārī 3336; al-Bukhārī 660 with Muslim 1031a; Muslim 2859a. Duʻāʼ: Qurʼan 3:9.

Story

The Qasim family was scattered across four countries in a single week in 1948, and stayed scattered for fifty-two years. Two of the six children ended up on the same continent; the rest did not. Letters crossed for a while and then thinned, as they do.

Two of them died before it was over. Widad, the eldest, spent thirty-three years writing to an address in Santiago that had stopped existing in 1961. Munir, the youngest, told his own children almost nothing and kept a tin of photographs they did not understand until afterward.

It was a grandchild with a computer who did it, in 2000 — a young woman in Amman with more patience than anyone had expected, working from one photograph and four surnames. It took her four years. The gathering, when it happened, was in a rented hall in Nicosia, and there were eighty-one people in it, most of whom had never met.

What they all remarked on afterward was how ordinary it was. There was a great deal of crying in the first hour, and after that they were simply a large family being loud in a room, arguing about food. Somebody had brought a cake with the wrong surname iced across it and nobody minded. Fifty-two years had not made a chasm. It had made a delay. The thing itself had been intact the whole time, waiting to be assembled.

Afterward, one of them — the second daughter, eighty-four, who had organized nothing and cried the least — was asked whether the day had been what she hoped. Better, she said. And not finished. There had been two chairs missing from that room, and every person in it had known which two. That was the flaw in any assembly people put together for themselves: you could only gather the ones still standing somewhere you could reach them. She was not complaining. She had simply stopped expecting this to be the one that came out complete, and had moved the expectation somewhere it would hold.

The four remaining siblings sat together at the end, four people in their eighties who had last been in one room in their parents’ house. They did not say much. There was not much that needed saying.

Poem

The question in the Book is not rhetorical and it is not grand.
Does man think We shall not assemble his bones?
Bones. His own.
The ordinary framework that will come apart
in a way he prefers not to picture,
in ground he will not have chosen,
over a stretch of time long enough
that the word him will stop applying to any of it.

And the answer does not say: yes, We can manage the bones.
It says something smaller, and much worse for the argument.
Yes — able to proportion his very fingertips.
Not the skeleton only. The fingers,
which He could have made one piece, like a hoof,
and parted, so that a hand can take hold.

Then the same verb, at the other end of the scale.
Say: the first and the last
are to be gathered together for the appointment of a known Day.
Everyone. Not a representative sample.
The ones with monuments,
and the ones whose names were never written down anywhere
by anybody, ever, including at the time.

And the manner of it was described, and it is not a reunion.
Barefoot. Naked. Uncircumcised.
She asked him — the women and the men, looking at one another?
He said the matter that day will be graver
than that anyone should be concerned with looking.

Because the gathering is not the purpose. It is the procedure.
Warn of the Day of Assembly, about which there is no doubt —
and then the next clause, with no pause taken for it:
a party in the Garden, and a party in the Blaze.
He assembles in order to divide.
The largest crowd that will ever stand anywhere
is being convened so that it can be taken apart
correctly.

Reflection

The Assembling

The Qurʼan gives this Name inside a prayer, and gives it bound: Our Lord, truly You are the Gatherer of mankind for a Day about which there is no doubt; truly Allah does not fail in His promise. Not the bare attribute floating free — the participle with its object attached. And read what those same people ask in the breath immediately before it: Our Lord, do not let our hearts deviate after You have guided us. The petition against private, inward scattering and the declaration of universal, public assembly are consecutive sentences in one supplication. The people most certain that everyone will be gathered are the people most worried about their own drift. That is not an accident of arrangement.

Now correct the thing almost everyone assumes about this Name, because the Book corrects it immediately and we do not listen. Jamʻ here is not reunion. And warn of the Day of Assembly, about which there is no doubt — and then, without so much as a pause: a party in the Garden, and a party in the Blaze. The same construction elsewhere: the Day He will assemble you for the Day of Assembly — that is the Day of Mutual Loss and Gain. The assembly is convened in order to separate. And the manner of it was described plainly enough that nobody should be picturing a hall: gathered barefoot, naked, and uncircumcised. ʻĀʼishah asked the obvious question — the women and the men together, looking at one another? — and was told that the matter that day will be graver than that anyone should be concerned with looking.

Notice, too, the range of the verb, because it is meant to close off a particular escape. At the largest scale: the first and the last are to be gathered together for the appointment of a known Day. And at the smallest: Does man think We shall not assemble his bones? Yes — able to proportion his very fingertips. Not the skeleton only: aṭ-Ṭabarī reads it that He could have made the fingers one piece, like a hoof, and parted them; as-Saʻdī, that with the fingertips the making of the body is complete. And observe the phrase attached to this event — about which there is no doubt. It is said of the Book and of the Hour; and six times it is said of a Day, and in every one of those six a word of this Name’s root stands in the verse, as though anticipating precisely the reflex that would like to file this under things a tradition maintains rather than things that are going to happen.

There is a second gathering, and it is the one we are least able to counterfeit. He brought their hearts together — the verb is allafa, from another root, and aṭ-Ṭabarī explains it with this one: He gathered the hearts of al-Aws and al-Khazraj after their scattering. Had you spent everything on the earth, you could not have brought their hearts together — but Allah brought them together. Read that as the flat refutation it is. The uniting of hearts is not a skill, not a technique, not something achievable by sufficient goodwill or sufficient funding; the verse specifies that the entire wealth of the earth would not purchase it. Which does not leave us idle — the day of the Friday prayer is al-Jumuʻah, which Ibn Fāris gives as named for the gathering of people on it, and He named among the seven who will stand in shade on the day there is no shade two who loved one another for Allah’s sake, coming together upon it and parting upon it. Coming together upon it. The bond is not the achievement. What it was built on is.

And this is where the hope that brought you to this Name has to be handled honestly, because it is a real hope and it has a condition on it. He has promised an assembly with no empty chair: those who believed, and whose descendants followed them in faith — We shall join their descendants with them, and We shall not deprive them of anything of their deeds. And: Gardens of Eden which they will enter, along with the righteous among their fathers and their spouses and their descendants. The promise is explicit, and so is the qualifier, and the qualifier is not blood. Every reunion people assemble for themselves is limited to whoever is still standing somewhere reachable; in the story at this Name there are two chairs missing, and everyone in the room knows which two. The one gathering that will not have that problem is not organized by research, and the people you most want in it are not secured by being related to you. If you want that particular room to come out complete, the work is not genealogical.

He does not fail in the appointment. The gathering with no missing chairs is real, and it is conditioned — not on what you share by blood with them, but on what you share by faith. Tonight, do something about the second one, for one person, by name.

Qurʼan

Dua

Hadith

Study Notes