al-Shūrā 42:30

Wa mā aṣābakum min muṣībatin fa-bimā kasabat aydīkum wa yaʿfū ʿan kathīr

"Whatever affliction strikes you is for what your own hands have earned. And He pardons much."

This verse must be treated carefully, because misread it turns into a sentence that accuses people — and the verse itself does not do that.

The root was treated in al-Baqara at 2/155. The note there was this:

"Root ص-و-ب: to strike, to find its mark. From the same root come iṣāba and ṣawāb (correct). A muṣība, then, in the word's own logic, is 'what strikes home' — not what falls at random but what finds its mark. The word says in advance that there is a direction inside the event."

This note holds here too and I do not repeat it.

Kasabat aydīkum — "what your hands have earned". The use of the word "hand" is a figure: it stresses that the act was done, that it came out into the open.

The pattern occurs three times in the sūra:

The same structure in all three, with the word "hand" in two. This is a verifiable fact.

This is the half of the verse most often dropped, and when it is dropped the sense of the verse changes.

The sentence is: wa yaʿfū ʿan kathīr — "and He pardons much".

This says three things:

I stress this separately because when the first half of the sentence is read alone something else is understood. The first half sets up a connection; the second says that the connection is not proportional: what is earned is much, what comes is little.

And the root's distribution in the sūra was tabulated at the twenty-fifth verse: the verb yaʿfū occurs four times in the sūra and three of them are God's pardon. This verse is the second of those three.

The following generalisation cannot be drawn from the verse: "every affliction is the return for a sin; therefore a person to whom something happens is in that state on account of his sin."

This generalisation is not supported by the text, and I set out the grounds:

First: the verse itself sets a proportion. The sentence wa yaʿfū ʿan kathīr says that there is no one-to-one correspondence between what comes and what is earned. Were the correspondence one-to-one, the sentence about pardon would be meaningless.

Second: the Qurʾān names the same fact elsewhere as a trial. It was treated in al-Baqara at 2/155:

"We shall surely test you with something of fear and hunger, and with loss of wealth, lives and fruits. Give good news to those who are patient."

And what was recorded there was this: the root is b-l-w — to test by wearing down; and the Qurʾān says this is not one-directional: "We test you with evil and with good" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/35). The five things enumerated in the list in al-Baqara — fear, hunger, loss of wealth, of lives, of fruits — are named outright as balāʾ (a testing), not as punishment.

Third: in al-Baqara at 2/214 it is said plainly whom the hardship strikes. What was recorded there was this:

"Who says these words is stated plainly in the verse: al-rasūlu wa'lladhīna āmanū maʿahu — the messenger and those who believed with him… The verse reports these words not as an instance of weakness but as the measure of the point to which the hardship reached."

By the Qurʾān's own data, that is, among those who suffer hardship to the point of being shaken are prophets. A generalisation cannot leave this datum out.

Fourth: whom the address is to. The verse says aṣābakum — second person plural. Those addressed, that is, are a particular community, and the sentence is said to them. It is not a structure that can be used for one person to pass a verdict about another.

I record what the verse does as my own reading, and its ground is the two halves of the sentence:

The first half of the sentence states a responsibility: it says that what befalls one is not from outside, causeless, arbitrary. This takes a person out of passivity — what is done has a consequence.

The second half of the sentence states a consolation: what comes is not the whole of what is deserved. This keeps a person from being crushed.

When the two are not read together the balance is broken: read the first half alone and an accusing sentence comes out; read the second alone and responsibility disappears.

And this is the balance repeated throughout the sūra — in the eleventh verse transcendence and relation, in the fifth tension and forgiveness, in the fortieth right and pardon all stood in the same sentence.

A note must be entered, and it concerns the use of the verse.

The verse opens a door for a person to take account of his own condition. But this door is one-way: for a person to ask, about what has befallen him, "what did I do that this came?" accords with the wording of the verse.

To ask the same question about someone else does not follow from the wording of the verse and plainly conflicts with its second half: one who knows that what comes is a small part of what is earned cannot compute what was earned by looking at what came.

And this too must be recorded: to say to a person in pain "this is from what you did" is not consolation but the adding of a burden. When the sūra has brought pardon forward even in this verse, turning the verse into an instrument of accusation breaks the text's own balance.