إِنَّ ٱلْمُجْرِمِينَ فِى عَذَابِ جَهَنَّمَ خَٰلِدُونَ · لَا يُفَتَّرُ عَنْهُمْ وَهُمْ فِيهِ مُبْلِسُونَ · وَمَا ظَلَمْنَٰهُمْ وَلَٰكِن كَانُوا۟ هُمُ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
Inna'l-mujrimīna fī ʿadhābi jahannama khālidūn · Lā yufattaru ʿanhum wa hum fīhi mublisūn · Wa mā ẓalamnāhum wa lākin kānū humu'ẓ-ẓālimīn
"The guilty abide in the punishment of Hell. It is not slackened for them, and in it they are without hope. We did not wrong them; it was they themselves who did the wrong."
The seventy-first verse ended with wa antum fīhā khālidūn. The seventy-fourth begins with fī ʿadhābi jahannama khālidūn.
The same word, at the end of one scene and the beginning of the other. This is a verifiable datum of arrangement.
The root خ-ل-د: to remain long in a state, to go on and on. The lexicographers also record the root's sense of "not ageing, not changing".
م-ج-ر-م — from the root jurm (ج-ر-م). The concrete sense of the root: to pluck fruit from a tree, to cut it off. Jarama'n-nakhla — he harvested the palm. And from there: to earn, and to earn something evil — a crime.
The picture of the word is worth recording: mujrim, in the picture of the root, is one who plucks something off and takes it for himself. Crime, that is, is named as something "earned".
The concrete sense of the root: to slacken, to lose one's force, to let up. Fatara'l-ḥarru — the heat abated. Futūr — slackness, a let-up.
And the lexicographers record the root's sense of "tepidness" as well: māʾun fātir — water neither hot nor cold.
And that the verb comes with the preposition ʿan must be recorded: lā yufattaru ʿanhum — "it is not lightened from off them". What is at issue, that is, is not the punishment itself but the pressure upon them.
The sense of the root: to be cut off from hope, to be at a loss and fall silent, not to know what to say. Ablasa — he fell into despair and was silent.
The lexicographers record these two aspects of the word together, and this is worth recording: iblās is not despair alone but the silence that comes of despair.
And the lexicographers also record the relation of the name Iblīs to this root: "the one who has despaired of mercy". I transmit this derivation as it has been transmitted; on the origin of the name (whether it is Arabic, or a foreign word arabicised) there is disagreement among the lexicographers, and I issue no ruling in that disagreement.
And the word must be read together with the seventy-seventh verse: there the same people will speak — wa nādaw yā Mālik.
I record this as an observation: the seventy-fifth verse describes silence, the seventy-seventh a call. The two verses between them prepare the transition.
The arrangement in the second half of the sentence must be recorded, and it is one of the strongest patterns of restriction in Arabic:
The pronoun hum (the pronoun of separation, ḍamīr al-faṣl) together with the definiteness of al-ẓālimīn (with al-) produces a restriction: "it was they who did the wrong" — no one else.
The root ظ-ل-م comes for the third time in the sūra and completes the table I set out above (in the discussion of 43/65).
And the core of the root is meaningful here: the lexicographers describe ẓulm as "putting a thing somewhere other than where it belongs".
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is this description of the root: the whole subject of the sūra is things being put in the wrong place — a daughter placed low, angels placed as females, wealth placed as evidence, gold placed as proof. And the word the sūra uses in naming this condition says exactly that in its root.