al-Naḥl 16:128

Inna'llāha maʿa'lladhīna'ttaqaw wa'lladhīna hum muḥsinūn

"God is with those who guard themselves and with those who do good."

The sūra closes with two attributes, and both had occurred earlier within it.

Both occurrences can be verified from the text.

And the link with the ninetieth verse must be recorded, and I give it as my own reading: the ninetieth verse commanded three things, and the second was iḥsān. The hundred and twenty-eighth uses the same root as the sūra's last word: muḥsinūn.

The sūra, then, gives back at the end, as an attribute, what it had commanded. The command turns, at the close, into an identity.

And the order is worth recording: first taqwā, then iḥsān.

Taqwā — root و-ق-ي: to guard oneself, to keep clear. At the centre of the word stands avoidance — what is not to be done. Iḥsān — root ح-س-ن. At the centre of the word stands the surplus — what is to be done.

I record this as my own reading, and my ground is the direction of the words themselves: the two attributes look in two opposite directions — the one towards drawing back, the other towards going forward. And the sūra's last sentence names them together.

And this is the same structure as in the ninetieth verse: there too three commands (forward) and three prohibitions (back) were given together. The sūra keeps its account of the moral life two-directional to the very end.

مَعَ — and the last word conveys a being-with: maʿa'llāh. At al-ʿAnkabūt, 29/69 (wa inna'llāha la-maʿa'l-muḥsinīn), almost the same sentence occurs. The two sūras close with the same attribute and the same particle. This is an overlap verifiable across the sūras.