Quraysh 106:1

Li-īlāfi Quraysh "For the familiar order of Quraysh."

Root: أ-ل-ف (alif-lām-fāʾ). One of the most productive roots in the Qurʾān, and one that no single English word can carry.

The concrete sense of the root: to grow warm towards one another, to become knit together, to grow accustomed, to come together and unite. A bond that forms between two things over time, built not by force but by repetition.

Its derivatives show how wide the root is:

• ulfa — closeness, warming to one another, cohesion.
• ilf — the intimate one a person does not part from, the companion he is used to.
• alifa (Form I of the verb) — to grow used to something, to warm to it.
• allafa / īlāf (Forms II and IV) — causative: to make things warm to one another, to knit them together, to bring them into one. The word in the sūra belongs here.
• taʾlīf — putting parts together into a whole. This is why authorship is called taʾlīf in Arabic: knitting scattered pieces of knowledge into a whole.
• alf — the number one thousand. Some lexicographers attach this to the same root: in the Arabic system of numbers, a thousand is the largest collective unit named by a single word; it is many things gathered into one. I record this connection as an observation; there is no firm agreement among the lexicographers.
• muʾallafa — those whose hearts are to be knitted together. When the Qurʾān lists the categories of alms it says "those whose hearts are to be won over" (al-Tawba 9/60).

The matter of the pattern. The īlāf of the sūra is the verbal noun of Form IV (afʿala), and this form conveys causation. The sense is therefore not "the custom of Quraysh" but, exactly, "Quraysh's having been given a custom", "their having been made used to an order". The subject of the verb is not Quraysh but the one who accustomed them to that order.

This is the grammatical point that carries the whole logic of the sūra. Quraysh believed they had built their trading network themselves. In its very first syllable the word reverses this: they had been placed inside an order that was built.

This root occurs rarely in the Qurʾān, but wherever it occurs it says the same thing: knitting hearts together is not a work in human hands.

• "Remember the favour of God upon you: you were enemies, and He knit your hearts together, so that by His favour you became brothers" (Āl ʿImrān 3/103).
• "He knit their hearts together. Had you spent everything on earth you could not have knit their hearts together; but God knit them together" (al-Anfāl 8/63).

The second verse is an economic sentence outright: "had you spent all the wealth on earth" — that is, cohesion cannot be bought. Sūrat Quraysh is likewise a sūra about trade, and it says the same thing: the very order Quraysh supposed it had built with wealth rested on something that wealth cannot build.

Īlāf here covers three things at once, and the exegetes weight them differently:

1. The cohesion of Quraysh within itself — the ability of Quraysh to hold together around Mecca in a region marked by tribal fragmentation. 2. The relationship of trust Quraysh built with neighbouring tribes and states — the caravan's being treated as inviolable across all the lands it crossed. 3. Quraysh's having grown accustomed to this order of travel — an economy that had become seasonal, regular and predictable.

All three are gathered in one word. No single English word carries it; renderings such as "familiar order", "cohesion" or "settled custom" each give one face of it.

This word occurs only here in the Qurʾān. That the name of a tribe should be named in a single place, and that in the context of an enumeration of favours, is worth noticing.

The origin of the name is disputed. Three proposals circulate in the classical sources: that it comes from taqarrush (to gather, to come together) or from qars (gain, earning by trade); that it comes from the name of a sea creature; or that it comes from the nickname of an ancestor. There is no settled conclusion. The first two proposals overlap meaningfully with the subject of the sūra — gathering and trade — but to prefer an origin on the strength of that overlap would be forced. It is enough to say this much: the name itself and the subject of the sūra circle the same two ideas.

The sources of the biographical tradition relate that Quraysh, living scattered around Mecca, were gathered in the centre of the city by Quṣayy b. Kilāb, and that the services of the Kaʿba were organised in that period. This is a historical report; it is not in the Qurʾān.