البقرة · الآية 169

Commentary

The verse sets out in detail what the verse before it said, "He is a plain enemy to you". It opens with innamā, an instrument of restriction built out of the emphasising inna and the restraining mā. It enters upon the sentence and shuts its meaning down onto what comes after it: he commands you to nothing but these three. And this shutting down closes every question about the kind of the command: however the footsteps of the one who leads astray may vary, what they run to does not step outside these classes. And the verb "commands" is in the imperfect and carries continuance: not a command that issued once and was done, but a command renewed at every moment a human being pauses over a step. And the root ʾ-m-r gives the issuing of a word with a force that presses for an answer, so a command is not a suggestion but a compelling push, and it hangs on whoever receives it. And the striking thing is that in this verse the one who leads astray does not act, he commands: the real power is not in his hand but in the answering of the listener. Refuse the command and it falls; obey it and the enemy comes to work through your own limbs.

The bāʾ in "to harm" is the bāʾ of carrying across, joined to the verb "commands": the command passes by the bāʾ onto a named thing commanded. And the root s-w-ʾ gathers the sīn, a stretching and a flowing, the wāw, a joining and a binding, and the hamza, an affirming and a cutting. So harm is, at the letter, a flow that encloses and is then affirmed: an injury that runs through the one it enters, closes around him, and settles firm. Harm is not a passing moment of wrongdoing but a state that spreads through the weave of a life and takes on a settled cast. And "harm" arriving first among the ranks inside the restriction is intended: it is the lowest rank, the one the entanglement begins at, the rank of what does injury while its ugliness has not yet been recognised. The one who leads astray begins with what is no more than harm, a thing disliked but still under the line, not yet come out into the open. And this fits the shaping of "the footsteps" in the verse before: harm is the first step, the one that raises no outcry.

Joining "what goes beyond decency" onto "harm" by the wāw is a rising by degrees and not a saying of one thing twice. The root f-ḥ-sh gathers the fāʾ, a parting and a piercing, the ḥāʾ, a hot life and a taking in, and the shīn, a spreading and a scattering. So faḥsh is at the letter a breaking loose that pierces through and spreads: a crossing of the line so plain that it will not be hidden. And the shaping on the pattern faʿlāʾ, as in ḥamrāʾ and ṣaḥrāʾ, gives fixity and clinging: what goes beyond decency is not a deed of one moment but a quality that has settled. So harm is a stage still open to a turning back, because it keeps something of a veil, and what goes beyond decency is the stage after it, with no veil left in it. So in this verse the acts of disobedience divide according to how open they are: "harm" is what has not reached the open declaration, and "what goes beyond decency" is what crossed over into the open and took a spreading breakout as its description. And the order rises from the least visible to the most declared.

Joining "and to say" is the joining of a verbal noun read out of a clause onto the plain verbal nouns before it, since "an" with the imperfect verb is read as a verbal noun: and your saying. And this joining uncovers that saying of God without knowledge stands at the rank of harm and of what goes beyond decency, and indeed at the summit of them both. And the striking thing is the use of ʿalā and not ʿan: to speak ʿan someone is a neutral report, while to speak ʿalā someone makes ʿalā an adverb of lying over that carries the crossing of a line and the inventing. Whoever speaks ʿalā God has set himself above God, ascribing to Him what He does not accept. Then the relative "what" came with its denying clause "you do not know": not "they do not know" in the wording of the absent but "you do not know" in the wording of the address. And the turn from an absent doer in "he commands you" to an addressed doer in "you do not know" brings the listener in as a party to the responsibility. And "you know" is an imperfect from ʿ-l-m, and it gives a knowledge settled inside the soul, not a supposing and not a copying. So speaking of God with what has never settled in the soul as knowledge is the summit the one who leads astray reaches: not a bare luring towards a deed but a pushing towards the twisting of the law itself.

The order in the verse rises by exact degrees: harm, a deed under a veil; then what goes beyond decency, a deed in the open; then saying of God without knowledge, a law invented. And the rising from the deed of a single self to the word of a whole body and then to a religion invented uncovers the strategy of the ruining entire. The first stage ruins the individual in his conduct, the second ruins the body of people by declaring the breaking loose, and the third ruins the point of reference itself, so that no measure is left by which the swerving might be set straight. And whoever has brought people as far as saying of God without knowledge has gained the utmost the one who leads astray can gain, because every disobedience after that will be carried on a reading of the religion, and the way back becomes hard. And this is why the Qurʾān set the forbidding of saying of God without knowledge at the summit of its defining of this enmity.

So the word precedes the term, and the role precedes the identity: innamā is a restriction that files every command of the one who leads astray under three headings with no fourth; harm is an enclosing flow not yet declared; what goes beyond decency is a blatant breaking loose made fixed by the faʿlāʾ pattern; saying of God is an inventing carried on the particle of lying over; and "what you do not know" is a ruling that never settled in the soul as knowledge. So the summit of the enmity is not in a declared deed that every eye finds ugly, it is in a word that puts on the garment of the truth without having come from it.

The verse sets out in detail the enmity declared in the verse before it, shutting the contents of his commands into three with no fourth. The first is "harm", an enclosing flow, s-w-ʾ, not yet declared, the first silent step. The second is "what goes beyond decency", the blatant breaking loose that spreads, f-ḥ-sh, on the pattern faʿlāʾ for permanence and fixity, so that the crossing has become a quality and not a moment. And the third is the summit: "and to say of God what you do not know". The particle ʿalā, the particle of lying over, uncovers it: to speak ʿalā someone is to invent against him, unlike speaking ʿan him, which is a neutral report; the inventor sets himself above the source and ascribes to it what it never issued. And the order rises from the deed of a single self to the word of a whole body to the twisting of the religion: whoever brings people to saying of God without knowledge has gained the utmost the one who leads astray can gain, since every later disobedience comes to be carried on a reading of the religion, and the road back grows hard.

Two Readings