al-Maʿārij— The Ascending Stairways

The Shāṭibiyyah: سَأَلَ is read with the hamzah by those coded غ (the Kūfans and Abū ʿAmr) and د (Ibn Kathīr); the others — Nāfiʿ and Ibn ʿĀmir — read سَالَ, the alif being a replacement of the hamzah, or from a wāw or a yāʾ.

Read without hamzah, on the pattern of qāla — the dialect of Quraysh. Either it is from al-suʾāl with its hamzah replaced irregularly (in Sībawayh's view the regular treatment would be bayna bayna), or it is from al-sayalān (flowing), its alif then standing for a yāʾ as in bāʿa, the meaning being: a valley in Hell called Sāʾil flowed with punishment. Read with hamzah it is only from al-suʾāl, the widespread dialect, and this meaning fits better: the disbelievers asked for the punishment to be hastened and said 'When is it?' It was revealed about al-Naḍr ibn al-Ḥārith, when God knew he would say 'O God, if this is the truth from You, rain down stones on us from the sky or bring us a painful punishment' (8:32). (Ṭalāʾiʿ 268)

When al-Sūsī joins this āyah to the next, ٱلْمَعَارِجِ تَعْرُجُ carries his idghām kabīr of the jīm into the tāʾ — either full assimilation or incomplete assimilation (with rawm). The couplets: when the two like or near letters fall in two words, the first is merged, in the letters coded by the initials of the following verse; and in ذِي الْمَعَارِجِ تَعْرُجُ the jīm is merged, as in أَخْرَجَ شَطْأَهُ before it.

The Shāṭibiyyah: the reader coded ر (al-Kisāʾī) reads يَعْرُجُ with the yāʾ (the same line gives يَذَّكَّرُونَ and يُؤْمِنُونَ with the yāʾ for others, one of them with khulf).

Al-Kisāʾī alone reads it with the yāʾ: the verb belongs to the angels, and the feminine of 'the angels' is the feminine of a plural, not a true feminine, so a masculine verb is good. It is also read taʿruju with the tāʾ: al-malāʾikah is a group and carries the feminine tāʾ of plurality, so a feminine verb is good too. Both are sound, and it has many precedents, such as fa-nādāhu l-malāʾikah and fa-nādathu. (al-Mūḍiḥ 3:1295)