al-Aḥzāb 33:33

Wa qarna fī buyūtikunna wa lā tabarrajna tabarruja'l-jāhiliyyati'l-ūlā, wa aqimna'l-ṣalāta wa ātīna'l-zakāta wa aṭiʿna'llāha wa rasūlah, innamā yurīdu'llāhu li-yudhhiba ʿankumu'l-rijsa ahla'l-bayti wa yuṭahhirakum taṭhīrā

"Stay with dignity in your houses; do not flaunt your finery as in the first age of ignorance. Perform the prayer, give the alms, obey God and His Messenger. God wishes only, O people of the house, to remove the defilement from you and to purify you utterly."

The verse consists of two parts, and the two parts speak different languages.

This change of grammatical gender stands at the centre of the whole debate about the verse, and it will be treated separately below.

Which root this word comes from depends on a difference of variant reading, and it changes the meaning.

Both readings are found among the readers, and both are well known.

The concrete sense of the root ق-ر-ر: qarra — to remain fixed in a place, to settle. From the same root qarār (settledness, fixity), mustaqarr (a place of settlement), qurratu ʿayn (the settling of the eye — joy).

The sense of the root و-ق-ر: to be heavy. Waqār — dignity. And at Fuṣṣilat this root occurred as waqr (a heaviness in the ear).

The two readings complete one another: one conveys fixity in a place, the other weight in bearing. Both are accepted in classical exegesis, and no preference is adopted in this commentary.

And a note is needed: this command stands within a block addressed to the Prophet's wives (28-34). The extent of the command — whether it is for them alone or a general measure — has been debated in classical exegesis, and the schools have reached different conclusions. No legal ruling is issued in this commentary; the existence of the debate is recorded.

I record two data that emerge from the text:

One. The addressee of the block is stated explicitly: yā nisāʾa'l-nabiyy (30, 32). The commands stand inside that address.

Two. In verse 59 of the same sūra the address will be widened: "to your wives, your daughters and the believing women". That is, when the sūra wishes to generalise, it does so explicitly. This is an observation; it is not a ruling and does not by itself settle the debate.

تَبَرُّج — root ب-ر-ج. And the concrete sense of the root is visibility: burj — a tower, a bastion; a structure seen from afar because it is high. Tabarrajat — the woman displayed her adornment.

This root was treated as the name of a sūra at al-Burūj, and this verse was already given there as an example: "tabarruj — a woman's displaying her adornment and her beauty, bringing it out into the open." I rely on that treatment.

ٱلْجَٰهِلِيَّة — root ج-ه-ل. Ignorance; and in the Qurʾān it is used as the name of a period.

At al-Fatḥ the four uses of this word in the Qurʾān were given in a table and this verse was included there. What was recorded there: the word is used for surmise (Āl ʿImrān 3/154), ḥamiyya (al-Fatḥ 48/26), judgement (al-Māʾida 5/50) and tabarruj (al-Aḥzāb 33/33).

And what the four uses have in common is worth recording: in the Qurʾān jāhiliyya is used not as a stretch of history but as an attitude. All four name a form of behaviour.

ٱلْأُولَىٰ — "the first" / "the former". Classical exegesis has dwelt on this adjective:

I do not impose a preference. And I do not enter into applying the third explanation to contemporary events — the note in Method that "no side is taken in current politics" holds here.

The placing of these two commands here is worth recording from the point of view of word order.

The first two commands of the verse (qarna, lā tabarrajna) are particular to this block. The third and fourth commands, by contrast, are the Qurʾān's most frequent pair of commands and are required of every believer.

That is, the verse places a general obligation inside a particular address. And this has a function: it says once again that the standing does not produce privilege. In the thirtieth and thirty-first verses responsibility was doubled; here it is stated that the basic obligations continue unchanged.

I record this as my own reading.

The root ص-ل-و will be treated in detail at the fifty-sixth verse; I leave it to there. The root ز-ك-و: to be purified, to grow, to be blessed with increase — in the root of the word there is both purification and growth.

This sentence is one of the most debated sentences of this sūra and perhaps of the Qurʾān. Per the method (Method), a particular care is needed here, and I state the method in advance:

One. The words will be analysed one by one. Two. The data the text gives (grammatical gender, context, construction) will be recorded. Three. The disagreement will be given in a table, with its grounds and impartially. Four. No preference will be imposed, no insinuation will be made against any group, no polemic will be entered. Five. It will be recorded explicitly that a datum of the text does not by itself settle the debate.

إِنَّمَا — the particle of restriction (ḥaṣr): "only, nothing but". It adds a certainty and an exclusivity to the sentence.

يُرِيدُ … لِيُذْهِبَ — the verb irāda is attached by a lām to a clause of purpose. The lexicographers count the lām in this structure either as emphatic or as causal (giving the ground).

ٱلرِّجْس — root ر-ج-س. And the semantic field of the root is wide: filth, uncleanness; and in the Qurʾān it is used for material dirt, for moral uncleanness and for punishment alike.

In this verse the word comes with the definite article (al-rijs) — that is, something definite and known. What is meant is not explained in the verse.

طَهَّرَ — root ط-ه-ر. Purity. This root was treated at al-Mujādala, al-Insān and al-Muddaththir. The concrete sense of the root is material cleanliness; the Qurʾān uses it for moral purification as well.

تَطْهِيرًا — a cognate accusative. Again a reinforcement (as in verses 11 and 23). This is the third cognate accusative in the sūra:

And the same pattern will come again in verse 56 (sallimū taslīmā).

أَهْل — root أ-ه-ل. Those who live in a place, the possessors of a thing, a person's close kin. It occurred at al-Fatḥ 48/11 as ahlūnā (our families).

بَيْت — root ب-ي-ت. A house; and the primary sense of the root is to pass the night (bāta — he passed the night). That is, in the root of the word a house is "the place where one passes the night".

The construction occurs in two places in the Qurʾān:

Hūd 11/73 is a parallel worth recording and is a neutral datum of the text: there the address is directed to Abraham's wife (in the preceding verse imraʾatuhu — his wife — is named) and the construction is used as ahla'l-bayt, with a masculine plural pronoun (ʿalaykum).

I record this datum but frame no ruling upon it.

There is a change of grammatical gender in the verse, and this stands at the centre of the debate.

This is an undisputed fact of the text and both sides accept it. The divergence is over how the fact is to be interpreted.

The table below conveys impartially the principal views found in the classical exegetical literature and their grounds. No view is preferred, and no insinuation is made against any group.

After this table I enter five notes:

One. No view is preferred in this commentary. Per the principle of Method that "if a preference is adopted its ground is written and the note that it is not binding is entered": no preference has been adopted here, because the question stands at the centre of a disagreement between the schools, and to prefer would be to insinuate something against one side.

Two. That the context concerns the wives is a datum of the text. The whole of verses 28-34 addresses the wives; so does what precedes and what follows verse 33. I record this as a datum.

Three. And this datum does not by itself settle the debate. The reasons: (a) the lexicographers have recorded that there are rulings in the Qurʾān which extend beyond the context of a sentence; (b) the change of gender is a fact that itself requires explanation; (c) the question rests not on language alone but on transmitted material too.

Four. The material of the reports is not entered into in this commentary. Reports are transmitted in both directions; the evaluation of those reports is the business of the science of ḥadīth and cannot be done here. Per the note in Method that "you are not to ascribe a saying of which you are not sure", no name, wording or source is given.

Five. This verse cannot be used to exalt one group or to exclude another — on any reading. The wording of the verse states a will: yurīdu'llāhu li-yudhhiba. A statement of will is not a claim of superiority.

Setting the debate aside, I record three things that emerge from the wording of the sentence. These are offered as evidence for no view.

One. The sentence is a sentence of purification, not a sentence of privilege. There are two verbs: to remove the defilement and to purify. Both convey an operation, not a status.

Two. The sentence stands in the middle of the commands around it. Before it there are five commands, after it one more (34: wa'dhkurna). That is, the statement of purification has been placed in the middle of the obligations — not after them.

This is a fact of word order worth recording, and I give it as my own reading: purification has been positioned not as something that takes the place of the obligations but as something standing inside them.

Three. What al-rijs is is not explained in the verse. In classical exegesis explanations such as sin, doubt and filth are given; the verse gives no definition.

In speaking about this verse the place where the greatest care must be taken is what the verse can be used for.

Because it stands at the centre of a dispute, the verse is often read less for its own content than as a position. And this is the most harmful thing that can be done to any text: the text becomes unable to say what it says.

What the sentence says on its own is plain: a will to purify is stated, and this statement is placed in the middle of a series of obligations.

And a measure emerges that agrees with the sūra as a whole: from the beginning the sūra says that a name does not change reality. The name of a standing — being a wife, being of the people of the house — does not of itself bring with it what that standing requires. Indeed the thirty-second verse had made this explicitly conditional: lastunna ka-aḥadin mina'l-nisāʾi ini'ttaqaytunna.

I record this as my own reading, and I draw no conclusion for or against any side.