al-Zukhruf 43:51-52

Wa nādā Firʿawnu fī qawmihi qāla yā qawmi a-laysa lī mulku Miṣra wa hādhihi'l-anhāru tajrī min taḥtī · A-fa-lā tubṣirūn · Am anā khayrun min hādha'lladhī huwa mahīnun wa lā yakādu yubīn

"And Pharaoh proclaimed among his people: 'My people! Is the kingdom of Egypt not mine, and these rivers flowing beneath me? Do you not see? Or am I not better than this contemptible man who can scarcely make his meaning plain?'"

Pharaoh's speech consists of three steps, and all three are operations of weighing:

And the other side's weight is also enumerated under two heads: mahīn and lā yakādu yubīn.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the structure of the speech itself: Pharaoh is not answering a claim. He does not touch on anything Moses said. The only thing he does is to put two men on the scale.

And its link with the thirty-first verse of the sūra is direct:

The same measure, in two different ages, in two different mouths. I record this as a datum of the text.

The expression should be dwelt on, because it sets up an interesting relation with the Qurʾān's own language.

Tajrī min taḥtī — "flowing beneath me".

And the expression that occurs most often in the Qurʾān's descriptions of the Garden is this: tajrī min taḥtiha'l-anhār — "beneath which rivers flow".

The difference between the two expressions is one letter: taḥtihā / taḥtī.

I record this as an observation and leave it there, without forcing a link: Pharaoh's sentence is the expression used of the Garden turned into the first person singular. I do not claim that the text makes such a link; what I record is the closeness of wording between the two expressions.

The exegetes transmit two readings for the expression min taḥtī:

The first is closer to the wording; the second is a figure. I do not impose a preference.

The sense of the root: held in contempt, counted worthless; and menial service. Mahna — service, heavy work. Māhin — a servant.

The word occurs elsewhere in the Qurʾān in a very different position, and the comparison is fruitful:

"Did We not create you from a contemptible fluid (min māʾin mahīn)?" (al-Mursalāt 77/20 — treated in al-Mursalāt) "Then He made his progeny from the essence of a fluid of no account." (The same word occurs in al-Sajda 32/8 as well.)

The same word, then, is used in one place for the beginning of every human being, and in another to make a prophet small.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the two uses of the word in the Qurʾān: the word Pharaoh uses as an insult is the word the Qurʾān uses of everyone. The difference lies not in whom the word is stuck on, but in who counts himself outside it.

The verb kāda conveys approaching: "almost". Its negative (lā yakādu) gives, in Arabic, a strong negation: "he almost cannot do it" — that is, he does it only with great difficulty, or not at all.

And the root ب-ي-ن comes for the sixth time in the sūra. I complete here the table I set out above (in the discussion of 43/18):

The root occurs seven times in the sūra. This is a datum of the text.

And what the two occurrences (18 and 52) have in common must be recorded, and it is one of the most striking findings of the sūra:

In both places the same measure is used to make a human being small. In the eighteenth verse, "one who cannot bring her meaning to light in a dispute"; in the fifty-second, "one who can scarcely make his meaning plain".

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is that the two expressions are from the same root and in the same function: the sūra shows in two separate scenes how the capacity to express is used as a measure of value — one in a society's verdict about a daughter, the other in a king's verdict about a prophet.

And the sūra uses this measure itself — but elsewhere: of the Book (2), of the messenger (29). The issue, that is, is not the existence of the measure but to whom it is applied.

One further note: the difficulty in Moses's speech is mentioned elsewhere in the Qurʾān — it occurs in his own prayer in Ṭāhā 20/27: wa'ḥlul ʿuqdatan min lisānī · yafqahū qawlī ("and loosen the knot in my tongue, that they may understand my speech"). What Pharaoh says, then, is not an entirely baseless slander; the detail of it is recorded elsewhere in the Qurʾān.

This needs recording, because it makes the verse's work still clearer: Pharaoh is not lying. He is using a correct observation on a wrong measure.