One Stop Shahada

 A short post about a single word This one is not a miracle claim, and I want to say that at the top so you can calibrate. It is a post about word choice — about a verb that is more exact than it needed to be. Whether that means anything is a question I will leave open at the end. But the observation itself is real, and if you have any feeling for language you may enjoy it. The scene Sūrat al-Naml, verse 18. Solomon is moving with his forces, and they pass into a valley. حَتَّىٰ إِذَا أَتَوْا عَلَىٰ وَادِ النَّمْلِ قَالَتْ نَمْلَةٌ يَا أَيُّهَا النَّمْلُ ادْخُلُوا مَسَاكِنَكُمْ لَا يَحْطِمَنَّكُمْ سُلَيْمَانُ وَجُنُودُهُ وَهُمْ لَا يَشْعُرُونَ Ḥattā idhā ataw 'alā wādi'n-naml, qālat namlatun: yā ayyuhā'n-namlu'dkhulū masākinakum, lā yaḥṭimannakum Sulaymānu wa junūduhu wa hum lā yash'urūn. "Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said: 'O ants, enter your dwellings, lest Solomon and his troops shatter you without perceiving it....

Jerusalem, May 614 The Persians had been besieging the city for twenty-one days when the walls gave way. What followed is described by Antiochus Strategos, a monk who lived through it: churches burned, the population killed or marched east into captivity in Mesopotamia. The relic that Christendom called the True Cross was crated up and carried to Ctesiphon, to sit in the treasury of a Zoroastrian king. For the Eastern Roman Empire — Byzantium, the superpower that had held the eastern Mediterranean for six centuries — this was not a setback. It was the beginning of what looked, to everyone alive at the time, like the end. The sequence is not survivable on paper. Antioch fell in 613. Damascus in 613. Jerusalem in 614. Egypt, the empire's granary, would go in 619. By 626 a Persian army stood on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, looking across the water at Constantinople, while an Avar army pressed the walls from the European side. The emperor Heraclius had already considered aband...