طه · الآية 91

Commentary

The reply opens with the strongest denial Arabic has for what is to come, and it closes off the future at once. The verb that follows it is a verb of leaving, not a verb of staying. To quit, in b-r-ḥ, is a going out that runs and gets clear of its place; from this material comes the word for open ground with nothing standing in it. So the sentence keeps them where they are by denying departure rather than by asserting residence, and that lands harder on the ear than "we shall remain": whoever denies leaving has shut the one door out.

Then a second state is laid over the first. Cleaving, in ʿ-k-f, is a confinement in a place and a keeping to one single business from which its holder is not turned. The verb is governed here by the particle of over-ness, and that phrase is put before the participle. So the sentence carries two holdings and not one: a denial of departure, then a confinement within a place. The first shuts the way out; the second fills what is inside.

That very word will come back in this same scene, in the singular and with the same governing particle: "you kept cleaving to it." It is said here of a body of people and there of one man, and the preposition is identical in both.

Then the limit. The particle takes the verb after it into the subjunctive and makes what follows the end-point of what precedes; so a refusal reinforced by the strongest of denials is bounded within its own line. And the end-point is not an argument that might be raised nor a proof that might appear. The end-point is a man coming back.

Five verses earlier it was said: "So Mūsā returned to his people." The telling put the return first and the waiting for it after, so the reader hears the limit already reached. The order of the report is not the order of the events. And the name stands last in the sentence, after the verb and after the phrase, pushed to the final position, where the verse's rhyme falls on it.

A refusal that carries its own ending inside it, and the reader hears the ending as already arrived.

Two Readings

Both readings hear the same refusal; the second hears the end-point spoken inside it. This book chooses the additional listening.