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Sura 53, al-Najm, "the Star", is a famous short sura in which the speaker describes a vision of God and/or His angel. It consists of 62 verses in rhymed prose, with the same rhyme used in all but the last seven verses and falls into four parts.
The disputed á¹£Äḥib
Part I opens with an oracular verdict on the credibility of "your man" (á¹£Äḥibukum), narrated in the style of a pre-Islamic diviner (kÄhin) delivering a verdict in a dispute brought to him, if we may trust the tradition on JÄhili Arabia.1But whereas a kÄhin delivers a verdict on another person, the speaker in sura 53 is delivering a verdict on himself: namely, that he is speaking the truth when he claims to have seen a heavenly being and is neither mistaken nor trying to mislead - he has indeed received a revelation from a mighty power. He proceeds to describe how this revelation was imparted and asks if they are going to dispute what he saw, adding that he saw the mighty power on another occasion too, describing that as well (53:1-18).
There are several problems in this section. Leaving aside the oddity of the fa- in verse 6, where it introduces an earlier event rather than a subsequent one, who is the heavenly being imparting revelation to the disputed person? One takes the answer to be God, since the recipient is identified as "His servant" (53:10), but this identification has always been controversial, and a parallel passage in sura 81 identifies the power as the angel by the throne. Here, the oracular verdict on the disputed person's claim is that "this is the statement of a noble messenger (rasul karim), a powerful one by the firm throne whom your á¹£Äḥib did see in the clear horizon" (81:19-23), presumably giving us an oracular verdict on the disputed person again. Maybe there is no contradiction, for in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere angels are sometimes manifestations of God, not least the angel of the throne. This is, however, at odds with the rest of the Quran, for the Messenger devotes immense energy to distinguishing angels from God, stressing...