The title dahriyya is derived from the word dahr (q.v.), used in Q 45:24, which states: ‘And they say: “There is naught but our life of the world; we die and we live, and naught destroyeth us save time”; when they have no knowledge whatsoever of (all) that; they do but guess’. The word dahr also appears at Q 76:1, which asks the rhetorical question: ‘Hath there come upon man any period of time in which he was a thing unremembered?’. This chapter is known either as al-Dahr or as al-Insān, both words appearing in this first verse. But it is from the usage at Q 45:24, often seen in conj…