وَيَمْنَعُونَ ٱلْمَاعُونَ
The choice of word matters. There is a difference between not giving and withholding: manʿ is not giving a thing that has been asked for. That is, there is a request in the case. If no one has asked, there is no "withholding". So in the picture someone has come to the door, has asked for something, and has been turned away.
This word occurs only here in the Qurʾān. Nowhere else. This is the main cause of the disagreement over its meaning: there is no possibility of comparison within the Qurʾān itself.
1. The root م ع ن. From this root maʿn means "a little thing, a small thing, an insignificant amount". On this view māʿūn becomes "a thing so small that no one would withhold it". The word itself carries within it how shameful the not giving of it is. 2. The root ع و ن. From this root maʿūna means "help, support". On this view māʿūn is "the thing given by way of help".
Both derivations have been defended in the classical sources, and both bring the word's semantic field to the same place: a small but necessary help.
| View | Ground | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| The alms-tax | The root's sense of "help"; and also the context: the mentioning of the alms-tax after the prayer is a usual pairing in the Qurʾān. This view occurs in reports ascribed to ʿAlī, Ibn ʿUmar, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and Qatāda. | Strong, but there is a problem: the institutionalising of the alms-tax with fixed rates belongs to the Medinan period. If the sūra is counted Meccan this reading is strained. Moreover the expression "they withheld the māʿūn" is a strangely vague word for an institutional obligation such as the alms-tax. |
| The everyday things neighbours borrow from one another — pots and pans, a bucket, an axe, a needle, salt, fire | In a report transmitted from Ibn Masʿūd it is stated that the Companions understood māʿūn as "the lending of the bucket and the cooking pot". It also fits the word's sense of "a small thing" exactly. | The most widely defended view. The dictionary sense of the word and the logic of the sūra support it. |
| Water | Some words to do with water in Arabic (such as maʿīn) are close in sound; water was the thing whose withholding was counted most shameful. | Weak. The derivation is disputed, and māʿūn and maʿīn are different words. It can be recorded as a subordinate possibility. |
| General: every kind of small benefit and support | The word occurs once in the Qurʾān and is left unexplained. Had the Qurʾān wished to define a word it would have defined it. The vagueness may be deliberate. | In my judgement the most apt reading. It does not exclude the others; it takes them all in. |
The preference and its ground. I prefer the last view: māʿūn is the whole of the small helps that go unnamed — borrowed goods, the alms-tax, water, a neighbourly service, all are included in it. The ground:
The whole structure of the sūra is built on bringing the threshold down step by step. In the third verse not even "feeding" was asked for, only "urging". In the last verse what is asked is smaller still: not even that it be given, but that it be lent. That is, a thing he will get back. The sūra descends a staircase that grows ever smaller and stops on the lowest step: an object of no value that will not leave his hand, that will come back. And the man will not even give that.
On this reading the vagueness of the word is not a deficiency but the technique itself. Māʿūn is not defined, because every place, every age, every person has its own māʿūn.
1. The Day of Reckoning — the largest claim in the universe. 2. The orphan — an unprotected human being. 3. The food of the needy — one meal. 4. The prayer — five moments of the day. 5. Ostentation — a glance. 6. Al-Māʿūn — a bucket, a cooking pot.
The sūra begins at the highest point and descends to the lowest, and there it stops. The last sentence is a matter of pots and pans.
This descent carries the sūra's real claim: great claims are tested in small things. Whether a person believes in the resurrection or not is known not from his talk about the resurrection but from whether he gives his neighbour his bucket. The difference of scale is deliberate; by tying the greatest question to the smallest object, the sūra shows where religion lives.
And the last verse is the knot that joins the two halves of the sūra. The man in the first half did not feed the needy; the man in the second half does not give his bucket. One denies the religion, the other prays. Their hands do the same thing. The whole argument of the sūra is gathered into this pairing: if the indicator of religion is the hand, then the one who rejects with his tongue and the one who rejects with his hand stand in the same place.
All the verses of the sūra end with the same sound: dīn, yatīm, miskīn, muṣallīn, sāhūn, yurāʾūn, māʿūn. A long vowel followed by a nasal nūn or mīm. A rhyme unbroken across seven verses.
This is a shared feature of the short Meccan sūras, and its function is memorability, rhythm and oral transmission. But here it has an additional effect: the unchanging sound makes the sharp change of subject in the middle of the sūra (the passage from the one who denies the religion to the one who prays) inaudible. The ear hears that the flow is not interrupted, while the mind notices that the target has changed. This tension increases the shock of the fourth verse.