Muḥammad 47:35

Fa-lā tahinū wa tadʿū ila's-salmi wa antumu'l-aʿlawna wa'llāhu maʿakum wa lan yatirakum aʿmālakum

"Do not grow slack and — while you are the higher — do not call for peace. God is with you and He will not diminish anything of your deeds."

This verse will be treated carefully. Per the method (Method) I have to draw a limit here too, and I shall draw it from the verse's own wording and from the Qurʾān itself.

Root: و-ه-ن. And the concrete sense of the root carries the whole weight of the verse.

The primary sense the lexicographers record: weakness, slackness — particularly a structural weakness.

And the most concrete place where the Qurʾān uses this root gives the picture of the word:

"My Lord! My bones have grown weak (wahana'l-ʿaẓmu minnī) and my head is aflame with grey." (Maryam 19/4 — the prayer of Zechariah (Zakariyyā)) "His mother carried him in weakness upon weakness (wahnan ʿalā wahn)." (Luqmān 31/14)

In both verses the word recounts the lessening of the power to carry. Wahn is not breaking; it is becoming unable to bear.

And in the first verse the object of the word is bone — the load-bearing structure of the body. This gives the picture of the word exactly: from outside nothing has changed; the load-bearing part inside has slackened.

This is of the same family as two pictures the sūra has used earlier:

All three have to do with the load-bearing structure of the body.

And there is a nearly exact counterpart of this verse in the Qurʾān:

وَلَا تَهِنُوا۟ وَلَا تَحْزَنُوا۟ وَأَنتُمُ ٱلْأَعْلَوْنَ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ "Do not grow slack and do not grieve; if you are believers you are the higher." (Āl ʿImrān 3/139)

When the two verses are compared:

The two verses share the same verb and the same circumstantial clause. And Āl ʿImrān ties the being higher to an explicit condition: in kuntum muʾminīn.

This is an indication worth noting in reading the verse before us.

And now we come to the most important question in the verse. It is a grammatical question and it determines the meaning directly.

فَلَا تَهِنُوا۟ وَتَدْعُوٓا۟ — the position of the second verb in the sentence is resolved in two ways:

The second resolution joins the two verbs inside a single prohibition: what is forbidden is growing slack and, along with it, calling for peace — that is, a call that arises from slackness.

Both parsings have been debated in the classical commentaries.

And I record this: the second reading also agrees with the spelling of the verb — in the muṣḥaf the word is written تَدْعُوٓا۟, with wāw and alif, and this suits the subjunctive reading. Had it been jussive the nūn would have dropped, giving tadʿū, which is also a possible spelling.

I make no preference. But I am obliged to show the difference of meaning the two readings give, because the difference is large.

I have to be careful here, and my ground will be the wording of the text.

The first ground: the circumstantial clause.

وَأَنتُمُ ٱلْأَعْلَوْنَ — "while you are the higher".

This is a circumstantial clause — that is, it describes the state in which the prohibition holds. A circumstantial clause is a qualification of the main clause: the act is forbidden while that state obtains.

That is, the verse does not say "do not call for peace". It says "while you are the higher, do not call for peace".

And this is a conclusion that follows from the grammatical function of the circumstantial clause, not an interpretation.

ٱلْأَعْلَوْنَ — root ع-ل-و: to rise. The plural of al-aʿlā, an elative: "those who are higher, those who are on top".

The second ground: the Qurʾān itself.

And this is the most decisive. The Qurʾān explicitly regulates the answer to be given to a call for peace:

وَإِن جَنَحُوا۟ لِلسَّلْمِ فَٱجْنَحْ لَهَا وَتَوَكَّلْ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ "And if they incline to peace, then incline to it and put your trust in God." (al-Anfāl 8/61)

This verse uses the same word as the verse before us: ٱلسَّلْم.

And it gives a command: fa'jnaḥ lahā — "then incline to it".

That is, the Qurʾān in one place commands inclining to peace. Muḥammad 47/35, therefore, cannot be read as a general prohibition of peace — because that reading would set the Qurʾān at odds with itself.

And this bears directly on the measure set by al-Nisāʾ 4/82 (which I mentioned at verse 24): "Had it been from other than God they would have found much contradiction in it." That is, the Qurʾān itself lays down the principle that its texts do not contradict one another; and this principle requires that in reading one verse another be taken into account.

The third ground: the verb itself.

The first thing the verse forbids is not peace but وَهَن — growing slack. The sentence begins with lā tahinū; tadʿū is attached to it.

That is, the subject of the sentence, grammatically and in its word order alike, is slackness.

The conclusion that follows from the wording of the verse is this:

The verse does not reject peace. What it is concerned with is a call for peace arising from slackness while one is in the higher position.

And all three grounds are in the text:

And this shows that the verse cannot be presented as a general "opposition to peace".

I record one further reading — it is mine and it is not binding: what the verse distinguishes is two different sources of the same behaviour. A call for peace may be the choice of one of the parties; or it may be the result of the exhaustion of the power to carry. Seen from outside the two look the same. The verse separates the two at their source — and it does so with the word wahn.

I present this as my own inference; the verse does not write out such a distinction explicitly, but that the word wahn stands at the head of the sentence stands in the text.

Root: س-ل-م. This root has been treated in many places in this commentary — al-Ḥashr (the name al-Salām and two readings), al-Wāqiʿa, al-Baqara, Qāf, al-Ṣaff, al-Ḥujurāt, al-Dhāriyāt. I do not repeat it here.

The note to be carried over from there: the primary sense of the root is completeness, freedom from defect, a thing's being unspoiled; and the senses "well-being", "peace", "to surrender" come from here.

And a variant reading is transmitted for the form of the word in this verse:

There is no difference of meaning; I content myself with recording it.

And an observation — it is my own reading: salm and islām are from the same root. That is, the object of the call forbidden in the verse belongs, in its root, to the same family of words as "to surrender". This shows the double direction the word carries: to surrender and to make peace are both a letting go; the difference lies in what is let go.

I record this as a lexical observation; I do not claim that the verse sets up this relation.

"God is with you."

This is an expression that occurs in several places in the Qurʾān and is classically called a particular accompaniment (maʿiyya khāṣṣa): an accompaniment stated for a group, in a particular situation.

And note: the clause is a nominal sentence. It announces fixity.

And its place in the word order is worth noting: the verse says three things, and the order is this:

1. Do not grow slack — a prohibition. 2. God is with you — a ground. 3. Your deeds will not be diminished — a guarantee.

That is, the prohibition is not left alone; two clauses are placed behind it.

And now we come to one of the most noteworthy sentences of the sūra.

يَتِرَ — root و-ت-ر. And the family of meanings in the root is wide:

And the common core the lexicographers record: oddness, and from there deficiency. If one of a pair is taken away, an odd one remains; and what remains odd is deficient.

That is, the verb watr is to diminish a thing by separating it from its pair.

And its use in this verse takes two objects: يَتِرَكُمْ أَعْمَٰلَكُمْ — "[He will not diminish] you of your deeds".

The word occurs in this sense only here in the Qurʾān.

And now let us look at the place of this sentence within the sūra.

Throughout the sūra the coming to nothing of deeds has been recounted: aḍalla (1, 8), aḥbaṭa (9, 28), sa-yuḥbiṭu (32), lā tubṭilū (33). Six times.

And the thirty-fifth verse sets the counterweight:

وَلَن يَتِرَكُمْ أَعْمَٰلَكُمْ — "He will not diminish anything of your deeds."

This is the closing sentence of the sūra's whole treatment of deeds.

And the standing of the two sentences side by side is the completion of the structure I recorded at the beginning of this commentary:

Two verses apart, two sentences: one says what a person can do, the other what God will not do.

And the whole tension of the sūra lies here: a God who does not diminish a deed, and a person who can annul his own.

I recorded this finding at the beginning of this commentary and complete it here. It is my own reading; the places of the two sentences in the text are fixed, the opposition between them is a frame I am setting up.