al-Nūr 24:14

Wa law lā faḍlu'llāhi ʿalaykum wa raḥmatuhū fi'l-dunyā wa'l-ākhirati la-massakum fī mā afaḍtum fīhi ʿadhābun ʿaẓīm

"Were it not for God's bounty towards you and His mercy in this world and in the hereafter, a great punishment would have touched you for what you plunged into."

Root: ف-ي-ض. And the concrete sense of the root is one of the most striking word-pictures in this section.

Fāḍa — a vessel's overflowing, water's going over the brim and spreading. Fayḍ — an overflowing, abundance. Ifāḍa — to make overflow, to pour out.

And the Qurʾān uses this verb in the setting of the pilgrimage: fa-idhā afaḍtum min ʿArafāt (al-Baqara 2/198) — "when you pour out from ʿArafāt". What is described there is a great crowd's pouring from one place to another.

The use of the word here is a verb of water chosen for a word:

The verse, that is, describes the spreading of a report as an overflowing.

And this picture carries three things, which I record as my own reading:

1. What overflows has passed the vessel's bound. A word has gone outside the place it belonged to. 2. An overflow cannot be steered. Water that has spilled does not go by a road the spiller has fixed; it finds its own way. 3. An overflow is the act of a crowd. A drop does not overflow; a mass does.

And that the verb comes in Form IV rather than Form V is worth noting: afāḍa — transitive. The verse names its addressees not as the water that overflows but as those who made it overflow. The word did not spread of itself; it is not told as "it spread" — it is said, you made it overflow.

This agrees with the whole logic of the sūra: talaqqawnahū bi-alsinatikum in the fifteenth verse, yuḥibbūna an tashīʿa in the nineteenth. In all three verses the spreading is set down not as a passive occurrence but as an act.

There is a grammatical point in the verse, debated in the classical commentaries: what does the phrase fi'l-dunyā wa'l-ākhira attach to?

Both readings are transmitted in the classical sources; I impose no preference, and neither is binding.

But the first reading's agreement with the position in the sentence may be recorded: the phrase comes immediately after faḍl and raḥma. I give this as an observation about the word order, not as a preference.

Root: م-س-س. Its concrete sense is to touch, to make contact — the lightest contact.

And the choice of the verb is not a softening but a sharpening. The verse does not say la-nazala ʿalaykum (it would have come down upon you) or la-akhadhakum (it would have seized you). It says "it would have touched you" — and what touches is described as ʿaẓīm.

Only the grazing of the thing described as "great", then, is at issue.

I record this as an observation about the style. The same verb will return in the thirty-fifth verse: wa law lam tamsashu nār — "though no fire had touched it". In both places the same verb, in the same sense of the lightest contact.