وَلَقَدْ فَتَنَّا قَبْلَهُمْ قَوْمَ فِرْعَوْنَ وَجَآءَهُمْ رَسُولٌ كَرِيمٌ
The story, that is, enters not as a narrative but as a parallel. In the thirteenth verse Mecca was told "a manifest messenger came to you"; in the seventeenth the people of Pharaoh are told "a messenger came to them". The same verb, the same structure.
| Verse | Who | Expression |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | Mecca | wa qad jāʾahum rasūlun mubīn |
| 17 | The people of Pharaoh | wa jāʾahum rasūlun karīm |
The shared part of the two sentences is identical letter for letter: جَآءَهُمْ رَسُولٌ. The only thing that changes is the messenger's attribute: mubīn and karīm.
I record this as a verifiable repetition. And it has a consequence: the sūra describes two communities with the same sentence, and then tells how each of them behaved.
The concrete sense: to put gold into the fire and separate out what is pure. Fattāna — the goldsmith's crucible. From this fitna — both a testing and the disorder that the testing produces.
The logic of the root is this: fire does not destroy gold, it separates it. So too a testing: it does not make anything new, it makes what is there visible.
| Verse | Word | Root | Its place in the block |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | fatannā | ف-ت-ن | The first word of the Pharaoh block |
| 33 | balāʾun mubīn | ب-ل-و | The last word of the Pharaoh block |
A block of seventeen verses stands between two words for trial. One for the people of Pharaoh, the other for the Children of Israel.
I present this as my own reading, and its ground is the wording of the two verses: the sūra does not frame the story as a tale of victor and vanquished. It frames both sides with the same word: being tested. For those delivered too there is a balāʾ — this will be taken up separately at the thirty-third verse.
Root: ك-ر-م. It was treated at al-Wāqiʿa 56/44 and the sense the lexicographers give was recorded there:
"In Arabic karīm is also used in the sense of a thing's being the good and useful of its own kind. Nakhlun karīm — a fruitful palm."
The chain established for this word in the al-Wāqiʿa discussion was this, and it looks exactly to this place:
| al-Wāqiʿa | Verse | What |
|---|---|---|
| Negation | 44 | lā bāridin wa lā karīm — denied of a shade |
| Affirmation | 77 | la-qurʾānun karīm — given to the Qurʾān |
And the conclusion recorded in al-Wāqiʿa: "The same attribute, denied in one place and ascribed in another."
| Verse | Construct | Of whom / of what | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | rasūlun karīm | Moses | Real — the attribute of the messenger |
| 26 | maqāmin karīm | The place the house of Pharaoh left | Real but temporary — abandoned |
| 49 | anta'l-ʿazīzu'l-karīm | A man inside the punishment | Mockery — the word returned to its claimant |
In al-Wāqiʿa there were two poles: denial and affirmation. In al-Dukhān there are three positions: deserved, not held on to, and claimed without deserving.
I present this as my own reading; the wording of the three verses is verifiable, but it is I who count them a series.
And a detail: the attribute karīm is used here of Moses — one of the places in the Qurʾān where this attribute is used of a messenger. The sūra qualifies the messenger as mubīn (13, to Mecca) and karīm (17, to Pharaoh). The two attributes report two separate directions: the one the messenger's intelligibility, the other his worth.