Āl ʿImrān 3:195

Fa'stajāba lahum rabbuhum annī lā uḍīʿu ʿamala ʿāmilin minkum min dhakarin aw unthā, baʿḍukum min baʿḍ, fa'lladhīna hājarū wa ukhrijū min diyārihim wa ūdhū fī sabīlī wa qātalū wa qutilū la-ukaffiranna ʿanhum sayyiʾātihim wa la-udkhilannahum jannātin tajrī min taḥtiha'l-anhār, thawāban min ʿindi'llāh, wa'llāhu ʿindahū ḥusnu'th-thawāb

"Their Lord answered them: 'I do not let the work of any worker among you go to waste, male or female; you are of one another.' Those who migrated, who were driven from their homes, who were hurt in My way, who fought and were killed — I shall surely cover over their evil deeds and shall surely admit them to gardens beneath which rivers flow. A recompense from God; and with God is the best of recompense."

This verse is the answer to the long prayer, and the first sentence of the answer enters a note. It will be treated in detail.

And the word order must be recorded: after a prayer running four verses the answer comes at once, with the particle fa.

The root ج-و-ب: to cut, to cleave; and from this, to answer. In Form X (istajāba) it conveys responding. And the same verb occurred at verse 172: alladhīna'stajābū li'llāhi wa'r-rasūl.

The same verb, two directions. This is a repetition verifiable within the sūra.

And the word order of the sentence must be recorded:

Lā uḍīʿu ʿamala ʿāmilin minkum min dhakarin aw unthā

And the construction ʿamala ʿāmilin is a figure of ishtiqāq in Arabic (derivation from the same root) and reinforces: "the work of the worker".

And the place of the second note in the sentence must be recorded: min dhakarin aw unthā is an explanation of the word ʿāmilin. That is, the sentence does this: first a general subject is set down (ʿāmil — worker), then it is written separately that this subject covers both sexes.

I record this as an observation about the word order: the word ʿāmil is masculine in form in Arabic, and in the ordinary working of the language it covers women as well. The sentence does not content itself with this; it adds the note separately.

al-Aḥzāb 33/35 is the central text of this matter in the series, and I rely on it. What was recorded there:

This verse is the longest parallel enumeration of man and woman in the Qurʾān: ten pairs, twenty words. And this was recorded there: an alternative was possible. In Arabic the masculine plural can be used for a mixed company, and that is the ordinary working of the language. Had the verse gone on inna'l-muslimīna wa'l-muʾminīna… it would grammatically have covered women too, and the verse would have been half the length. The Qurʾān does not do this; it raises ten words to twenty.

And now I compare the two verses:

The two verses do the same work by two different methods: one by repeating, the other by entering a note.

And what Āl ʿImrān adds is the ground. I open this out separately.

"Some of you are of others."

And the structure of the construction must be recorded: the word baʿḍ twice, with the particle min between them.

And the same construction had occurred twice more in the sūra:

Three occurrences, in a single sūra. This is a repetition verifiable within the sūra and worth recording.

I record this as my own reading, and it is not binding: the same construction describes three separate relations three times in the sūra — the chain of descent, hierarchy among people, and sex. And in all three what it does is the same: to bind the two sides to one another and to prevent a step being set between them.

And I record its link with verse 64 separately: there the construction stood inside the item forbidding people to take one another as lords. Here it is the ground of the sentence saying that the work of man and of woman is weighed by the same measure. The same construction, against two different inequalities.

And in the continuation of the verse five verbs are counted, and three of them are passive:

And the word order must be recorded: active and passive verbs run into one another.

I record this as an observation about the word order: the list counts both what was done and what was suffered. And no distinction is made between the two — all five are tied to the subject of the same sentence.

And the note fī sabīlī: a first-person construct — "in My way". This is its only occurrence in the verse; elsewhere in the sūra the construction is fī sabīli'llāh.