al-Shūrā 42:48

Fa-in aʿraḍū fa-mā arsalnāka ʿalayhim ḥafīẓā; in ʿalayka illa'l-balāgh; wa innā idhā adhaqna'l-insāna minnā raḥmatan fariḥa bihā; wa in tuṣibhum sayyiʾatun bimā qaddamat aydīhim fa-inna'l-insāna kafūr

"If they turn away, We did not send you as a watcher over them. Upon you is only the conveying. When We let the human being taste a mercy from Us, he rejoices in it; and if an evil befalls them for what their own hands have sent ahead, then indeed the human being is ungrateful."

The verbal return recorded in the section on the structure of the sūra is completed here:

And what was said in the sixth verse with the word wakīl is repeated here with ḥafīẓ.

After a gap of forty-two verses, the sūra draws the same limit a second time. This is a verifiable fact.

Balāgh — root ب-ل-غ: to reach, to arrive at. It was treated in al-Aḥqāf. Balāgh is "conveying" — the word's arriving at the one addressed.

And the word's limit is within itself, and I record this as my own reading: balāgh is to convey, not to get accepted. The delivery of a letter does not guarantee its being read.

The structure of the sentence reinforces this too: in… illā — a pattern of restriction. "Upon you is only this."

The second half of the verse changes subject and passes to a general description of the human being. Two situations, two reactions:

And there is an asymmetry between the two sentences, which must be recorded too:

Good, that is, comes "from Us", evil "from your own hands". This is a verifiable fact of arrangement and is the same as the structure in the thirtieth verse.

Adhāqa — root ذ-و-ق: to taste. The root occurred in al-Qamar and al-Dhāriyāt. And the choice of verb is worth recording: to taste is to take a very little. The Qurʾān uses this verb both of favour and of punishment, and in both it conveys that only a portion is given.

Kafūr — root ك-ف-ر, the faʿūl intensive pattern: deeply ungrateful. The root's original sense is to cover (kāfir — the farmer who covers the seed, the darkness that covers the night), and it was treated in al-Kāfirūn and al-Insān. Ingratitude is covering over the good one has received.

And the pattern is the same measure as shakūr in the twenty-third and thirty-third verses (faʿūl).

Three words, the same pattern, in three separate places in the sūra. This is a fact that can be verified from the text and makes the opposition of shukr and kufr visible at the level of pattern.

A note must be entered.

The sentence says al-insān — with the definite article. In Arabic this pattern conveys the kind: "the being called man". Not a ruling about each individual human being, that is, but the description of a tendency.

And the sūra itself shows this: the list running from the thirty-sixth verse to the thirty-ninth described another state of the same human being. That two descriptions occur within the same sūra shows that the second is not an unqualified ruling.

This accords with the principle written in the method: what the verse describes are attributes.