al-Ḥajj 22:37

Lan yanāla'llāha luḥūmuhā wa lā dimāʾuhā wa lākin yanāluhu't-taqwā minkum · Kadhālika sakhkharahā lakum li-tukabbiru'llāha ʿalā mā hadākum · Wa bashshiri'l-muḥsinīn

"Neither their flesh nor their blood reaches God; what reaches Him is the taqwā that comes from you. Thus has He made them subservient to you, that you may magnify God for having guided you. And give glad tidings to those who do good."

This verse is the ruling of the sūra's section on the ḥajj, and it deserves to be dwelt on in detail.

The verse proceeds in three steps:

The verb is negated with lan. In Arabic lan negates the future decisively. It is stronger than lā.

And the verb is yanālu — root ن-و-ل: to reach a thing, to attain it, to arrive at it. Nawāl — what is obtained.

The word order must be recorded, and this is the most striking feature of the verse: the subject of the sentence is luḥūm and dimāʾ, and its object is Allāh. The sentence is not built as "God does not take the flesh"; it is built as "the flesh does not reach God".

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the order of the elements: the agents are the flesh and the blood. The verse makes the material the moving party and reports that its motion cannot arrive. What is refused is not a taking but a reaching.

Two words are chosen: flesh and blood. Both are plural.

I record this as an observation about word order: the material side of the sacrifice is gathered into two items — the part that is eaten (flesh) and the part that is poured out (blood).

And that the two are enumerated separately is meaningful: flesh is the part distributed among people and producing benefit. Blood is the part that is not distributed, only poured out. The verse places both under the same ruling.

What is said, then, is that neither the part that produces benefit nor the part that does not, arrives. This shows that the distinction is not built upon benefit.

The particle of exception (lākin) does not lift the ruling; it adds a note to it.

And what does arrive is named: at-taqwā — the same word as in the thirty-second verse.

The two verses must be set side by side:

And the note in the thirty-seventh verse must be recorded: minkum — "from you". The taqwā does not belong to the animal; it belongs to the one who slaughters.

I give this as my own reading, and its ground is the contrast of the two annexations: there are two genitives in the verse — luḥūmuhā (its flesh) and taqwā minkum (the taqwā from you). One is bound to the animal, the other to the man. What does not arrive belongs to the animal; what arrives belongs to the man.

This distinction is the centre of the verse and can be generalised. I record it as my own reading, and its ground is the duality the verse builds itself.

Every act of worship has two sides:

What the verse does is not to cancel the material. This needs stressing: the verse does not abolish the sacrifice. The thirty-sixth verse described the slaughter in detail; the thirty-seventh comes immediately after that description.

The material therefore stands where it is; but it is not counted sufficient on its own.

And this measure works exactly as the verse treated at al-Baqara 2/197: wa tazawwadū fa-inna khayra'z-zādi't-taqwā — "take provision; the best provision is taqwā." The observation recorded in al-Baqara holds here too: the concrete command is not cancelled, a further layer is added upon it. And both verses use the same word: taqwā.

I rely on that treatment and add this: in al-Baqara the added layer lay upon provision (the material of a journey); in al-Ḥajj the added layer lies upon the sacrifice (the material of an act of worship). Both fall within the same section of a sūra — the discussion of the ḥajj.

The purpose clause must be recorded: the verb is tukabbirū — "that you may acknowledge as great".

The root ك-ب-ر, in Form II. And this is in the same pattern and doing the same work as the verb yuʿaẓẓim (to reckon great) in the thirty-second verse. The two verbs frame the sūra's section on the ḥajj:

I record this as an observation about word order: across the three verses the object of the honouring narrows step by step — the inviolable things, the marks, and finally the one who is marked.

عَلَىٰ مَا هَدَىٰكُمْ — "for having guided you". The ground of the takbīr is therefore not the sacrifice but the guidance.

And this can be compared with the usage in the fourth verse: there we had yahdīhi ilā ʿadhābi's-saʿīr — the same root, the opposite direction. The two ends of one root within a single sūra.

The ruling of the sacrifice, its time, upon whom it falls, which animals may be slaughtered, and how the meat is to be distributed have been debated in detail in the sources of law, and there are differences among the schools.

This commentary does not enter those debates and issues no ruling. What the verse treats is not the detail of the ruling but its measure; and the verse sets that measure itself.

The distinction the verse draws does not stay confined to the sacrifice.

Every visible work, because it has a measurable side, is open to supposing itself sufficient. The count comes out right, the quantity comes out right, the form comes out right. The verse says there is one more thing that has to come out right — and that this thing cannot be counted.

And it must be recorded again that in saying this the verse does not belittle the material. The meat is distributed, the poor are fed; that is commanded immediately before this verse. The distinction is not the preferring of one to the other; it is a statement of which of them arrives where.