ٱللَّهُ لَطِيفٌۢ بِعِبَادِهِۦ يَرْزُقُ مَن يَشَآءُ ۖ وَهُوَ ٱلْقَوِىُّ ٱلْعَزِيزُ
The root was treated in al-Mulk (wa huwa'l-laṭīfu'l-khabīr). The note there: the concrete sense of the root is fineness and hiddenness — laṭīf is what is too fine to be told apart by the eye; and from there, what can penetrate the narrowest place.
| Branch | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fineness / hiddenness | Too fine to be seen; working too hiddenly to be known |
| Kindness / gentleness | One who does good, who does not show harshness. Luṭf is from the same root |
The two branches are bound to one another, and what binds them is this: what is fine does its work without being noticed. Kindness too most often comes unseen.
| The beginning of the verse | The end of the verse |
|---|---|
| Allāhu laṭīfun bi-ʿibādih | wa huwa'l-qawiyyu'l-ʿazīz |
| Fineness, nearness, imperceptibility | Strength, unassailability |
And this is a repetition of the pattern recorded at the eleventh verse — there the transcendence and the hearing-and-seeing came in the same verse. Here too what puts at a distance and what draws near stand in the same verse, but the order is reversed: first nearness, then strength.
I record this as my own reading: the work of this sequence is to prevent the word laṭīf from being understood as weakness. What is fine is taken to be fragile; the verse places strength immediately after the fineness.
قَوِىّ — root ق-و-ي: power, strength; the root holds the idea of ropes being twisted and made firm (quwā — the strands of a rope). In al-Ḥadīd at 57/25 the pair qawiyyun ʿazīz occurred in the same order.
The twelfth verse said yabsuṭu'r-rizqa li-man yashāʾu wa yaqdir. The nineteenth says the same thing more briefly: yarzuqu man yashāʾ.
The difference: in the twelfth verse there were two verbs (spreads out / restricts), here there is one (provides). And in the nineteenth a laṭīf has been placed at the head of the sentence.
I record this as an observation about the arrangement: the same information is given twice, and at the second giving a quality is added at its head. The twelfth verse stated the distribution; the nineteenth says what kind of one the distributor is.