al-Ikhlāṣ 112:3

Lam yalid wa lam yūlad "He has not begotten, and He has not been begotten."

Both verbs are from the root w-l-d: to beget, to be born. From the same root: walad (child), wālid (father), wālida (mother), mawlid (the place or time of birth), awlād.

The difference lies in the voice: يَلِد is active (he begets), يُولَد is passive (he is begotten, he is born). One root, two directions. English covers the two ends of this root with two unconnected everyday expressions — give birth and be born; the symmetry survives only with the older verb beget, which carries a passive of its own, and that is the rendering used above. In the original the two verbs are all but the same word; only their direction is reversed.

There are several ways of negating the past in Arabic. Mā + the perfect verb ("mā walada") could have been used. Instead the construction lam + the imperfect has been chosen.

The property of this construction is as follows: in form it is a present or general-tense verb, but its meaning has been turned towards the past; and the negation is definite and comprehensive — it has at no time taken place. Mā walada, in saying "he did not beget", is closer to denying a particular event; lam yalid declares that the act has never occurred at all, from the beginning.

Furthermore the negation built with lam, while it negates the past, leaves no possibility open with regard to the future either — because the act is being denied as a kind, not as a single instance.

Why "He has not begotten" first and "He has not been begotten" second?

The logical order would be the reverse: a being is first born, then begets. The verse breaks this order, and the reason is the priority of the one addressed.

The first addressees were not claiming that God had been born. The mushrikūn of Mecca accepted God as creator and as the one who brought the heavens and the earth into being (the Qurʾān records this in several places: al-ʿAnkabūt 29/61-63, al-Zumar 39/3). Their claim was that God had children: the angels are His daughters. The Qurʾān brings this belief up many times and refuses it: "The daughters are His and the sons yours? That is an unfair division" (al-Najm 53/21-22); also al-Naḥl 16/57, al-Ṣāffāt 37/149-153, al-Zukhruf 43/16-19.

The verse, that is, first denies what the one addressed actually said, and then closes off the logical extension of that claim. The sequence is the order of the polemic, not the order of cosmology.

But the second clause is not merely a completion. The expression "He has not been begotten" closes off every road by which the defenders of the claim might escape. For if a being can have a child, that being is itself part of a chain of generation; whoever accepts one end of the chain cannot deny the other. The sūra cuts both directions at once of the idea of generation.

The act of begetting carries a series of deficiencies in its background:

• Division. The one who begets gives a part of himself. But verse 1 had said aḥad: that which is not divided. Begetting contradicts being aḥad outright.
• Sex and a consort. Begetting requires two parties. The Qurʾān says this plainly: "How should He have a child when He has no consort?" (al-Anʿām 6/101). And in the words of the jinn: "Exalted is the majesty of our Lord; He has taken neither consort nor child" (al-Jinn 72/3).
• The search for continuance. Why do living things reproduce? Because they die. Reproduction is the remedy the species has found against the perishing of the individual. What is deathless has no need of reproduction — this follows directly from the attribute ṣamad (needing nothing) in verse 2.
• Producing a like. What is born resembles the one who begot it; it is of the same kind. But verse 4 will say that He has no equal. To have a child is to produce a second being of one's own kind.

Not having been begotten closes another door: beginninglessness. A being that is born does not exist before it is born; it takes its existence from another; it is the effect of a cause. Not to have been begotten is to stand outside the chain of causation. In the tradition of kalām this has been held to be the expression of God's being qadīm (without beginning).

There is not one single group facing this verse. In the region and the period in which it came down, the idea of "the child of a god" was widespread in different forms:

The mushrikūn of Mecca. They counted the angels as God's daughters; al-Lāt, Manāt and al-ʿUzzā were named within this frame as well (al-Najm 53/19-23). The function of this belief matters: the daughters are intermediaries, intercessors. God is distant, unreachable; one draws near to Him by way of His daughters. The Qurʾān records this logic too: "We serve them only so that they may bring us nearer to God" (al-Zumar 39/3). The claim of descent, that is, is the foundation of the institution of mediation. To cut the descent is to cut the mediation as well.

The Christian Trinity. In the period in which the Qurʾān came down there were Christian communities in the Arabian Peninsula — at Najrān, among the Ghassānids in the north, and by way of relations with Abyssinia. The concept of "son" stood at the centre of that theology. The Qurʾān takes up this belief separately and by name: "Those who say that God is the third of three have disbelieved" (al-Māʾida 5/73); "They said, God has taken a child" (Maryam 19/88 and what follows, where the gravity of that saying is set out in extraordinary language). And al-Nisāʾ 4/171 addresses the Christians directly and says "do not say three".

Note: Christian theology does not use "begetting" in a biological sense; in the classical formulations "eternal generation" is not a bodily reproduction. Whether what Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ denies coincides one-to-one with the internal self-definition of Christian belief is a matter for the debates of kalām and of the history of religions. What the verse denies with certainty is the establishing of a bond of the order of descent between God and any other being — by whatever fine definition it may be established.

A saying ascribed to the Jews. In al-Tawba 9/30 the Qurʾān records that a section of people said "ʿUzayr is the son of God". The historical scope of this expression — which community, how widely — is disputed; and the Qurʾān itself transmits the sentence without generalising it, saying "they said".

The general Near Eastern and Mediterranean background. In the world into which the sūra came down, that gods should have a line of descent was not the exception but the rule: families of gods in the Greek and Roman pantheons, triads of gods in Egypt, dynasties of gods in Mesopotamia. "The child of a god" was not a deviation but part of the standard grammar of the religious language of the period. Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ speaks against the whole of that grammar.

All four verses of the sūra end in the sound d: aḥad — ṣamad — yūlad — aḥad. This is one of the examples of the dense weave of sound in the short Meccan sūras. The unity of sound has a further meaningful side here: four different statements are sealed with the same sound.