al-Shūrā 42:3

Kadhālika yūḥī ilayka wa ila'lladhīna min qablika'llāhu'l-ʿazīzu'l-ḥakīm

"Thus does He reveal to you and to those before you — God, the Mighty, the Wise."

The sentence begins with a demonstrative, and what it points to is not stated. Kadhālika — "like this", "thus". Like what?

The chief answers the exegetes give:

The third reading is striking in point of arrangement, and I record it: by saying kadhālika the sūra sets up a "thus", but does not say what the "thus" is until the fifty-first verse. In the fifty-first verse the three ways of revelation will be enumerated. The sūra, that is, closes in the fifty-second verse the question it opened in the third — and the fifty-second verse begins with the same word: wa kadhālika awḥaynā ilayka.

I give this as my own reading; its ground is that the two verses open with the same word and that verse 51 comes between them.

The root و-ح-ي was treated in detail in al-Najm; I do not repeat it. The finding there was this: the concrete sense of the root is swift and hidden communication — speed and concealment. And the word is not used only of the communication that comes to prophets; Zechariah's (Zakariyyā's) sign, what the bee knows, and the whispering of the satans are named with the same root.

What belongs here is the form of the verb. Yūḥī is imperfect — it conveys continuity and present time. Had it been perfect (awḥā) it would have described a finished act.

And this takes on meaning when compared with the sūra's other two sentences about revelation:

The third verse describes the process, the seventh and fifty-second the event. And in the first the agent comes with its explicit name, in the other two with a pronoun. I record this observation about the arrangement: the sūra first sets down the owner of the act by name, then passes to a pronoun.

This is the most important part of the sentence, and it prepares the whole argument of the sūra.

The objection of those addressed — the objection this sūra addresses — is the objection that the revelation is new and strange. The answer is given in a few words: wa ila'lladhīna min qablik.

What has come, that is, is not an exception but the continuation of a series.

This is the place where the same matter is said in a different word in al-Aḥqāf at 46/9: mā kuntu bidʿan mina'r-rusul — "I am no novelty among the messengers." There the word was bidʿ (that which has no precedent); here the pattern is a conjunction: wa ilā.

And in the thirteenth verse this chain will be named: Noah (Nūḥ), Abraham (Ibrāhīm), Moses (Mūsā), Jesus (ʿĪsā). The third verse prepares that list.

The agent of the sentence has been left to the end. In an Arabic verbal sentence the ordinary order is verb-then-agent; here ilayka wa ila'lladhīna min qablik has come in between, and the agent comes last of all. And when it comes it does not come alone: it comes with two names.

ٱلْعَزِيز — root ع-ز-ز: to be firm, unassailable, superior. ٱلْحَكِيم — root ح-ك-م: to restrain and hold in place. Both were treated in al-Aḥqāf at 46/2; the note there was this: one conveys power, the other rightness of placement; power is not named on its own.

What belongs here is this addition, and I give it as my own reading: compared with the pair of names at the end of the sūra, these two names form a line. The fifty-first verse ends with innahu ʿaliyyun ḥakīm. In both sentences the second name is the same (ḥakīm), the first has changed: ʿazīz → ʿaliyy. In describing the source of revelation, then, the quality that stays constant is "rightness of placement", while the quality that changes shifts from "unassailability" to "height".

This is an observation; I make no claim of a deliberate choice.