A War-Horse Image Borrowed and Repurposed

Al-Adiyat's opening oath by panting war-horses charging at dawn, striking sparks from the rocks (100:1-5), draws on a register of vivid animal and battle description well attested in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, where praising a tribe's horses and raiding prowess was a well established literary convention. Literary scholars of the Quran's style read the surah as adopting this familiar poetic register precisely so its unfamiliar moral conclusion, that despite such vigour and daring the human remains fundamentally ungrateful (100:6), would land with maximum rhetorical force on an audience primed by the opening imagery to expect praise of martial valour rather than a rebuke of character.

The technique, borrowing a genre's surface form while redirecting its conventional payoff, is read by some scholars of Quranic rhetoric as characteristic of a number of short Meccan surahs that open with oaths drawn from ordinary, culturally resonant experience, horses, stars, the fig tree, before pivoting to a moral or theological claim the opening imagery does not obviously anticipate, a pattern distinguishing these surahs' persuasive strategy from more directly stated argument found elsewhere in the Quran.