Muḥammad 47:7

Yā ayyuha'lladhīna āmanū in tanṣuru'llāha yanṣurkum wa yuthabbit aqdāmakum

"O you who believe! If you help God, He will help you and make your feet firm."

For six verses the sūra spoke in the third person. "Those who deny", "those who believe", "they". There is no one addressed; there is a situation recounted.

And in the seventh verse direct address comes for the first time: yā ayyuha'lladhīna āmanū.

This will happen twice in the sūra: 7 and 33. Both come with a command, and both are points where the sūra changes direction.

The first call brings an offer, the second a warning. And the twenty-six verses between them recount why the warning is needed.

The sentence is a conditional and it has three parts:

إِن (the particle of condition) + تَنصُرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ (the verb of the condition, jussive) + يَنصُرْكُمْ وَيُثَبِّتْ (the answer, jussive)

All three verbs are jussive (ending in sukūn): tanṣurū (the nūn dropped), yanṣur (the vowel of the rāʾ dropped), yuthabbit (the vowel of the tāʾ dropped).

This shows the grammatical tightness of the sentence: three verbs locked to one another by the same grammatical bond. If the condition is broken the answer is broken too; the two are a single structure.

And note the choice of particle: إِنْ, not إِذَا.

• إِذَا — for conditions whose occurrence is expected, close to certain (in the preceding verse there was fa-idhā laqītum).
• إِنْ — for conditions whose occurrence is not certain, conditions of possibility.

That is, "helping God" is not, in the verse's own language, a certain thing; it is a possible thing. The one addressed is a community that has believed, and even so the condition is built with in.

This is an observation about word order. In Arabic this distinction is not applied rigidly everywhere; but when two verses in succession use two different particles it is worth noticing.

On a first reading the expression raises a question: does God need help?

And the verse itself had already closed this question in the preceding verse. The fourth verse had said: "Had God willed, He would Himself have taken retribution from them." That is, that it is not a question of power was written explicitly three verses earlier.

In the classical commentaries the explanation of this expression is given thus: "helping God" is helping His religion, His messenger and His command — the governed term has been elided (in tanṣurū dīna'llāh). This explanation is widespread and reasonable.

I add an observation to it — it is my own reading: the verse chooses to elide the governed term and say directly "if you help God". This does a piece of work: it says where the work done goes. When a person does a work as "service to religion", what he serves may be an institution, a community or an opinion. By naming the recipient of the service directly, the verse closes off that drift.

This is a reading and it is not binding.

Root: ن-ص-ر. This root has been treated in many places in this commentary: al-Ḥashr, al-Ṣaff, al-Qamar, al-Mulk, Nūḥ, al-Jinn, al-Ṭāriq, and al-Naṣr. I do not repeat it here.

Two of the things recorded there are decisive here:

al-Mulk: "Nuṣra is standing by someone in the face of an enemy. The English word 'help' is broader; naṣr is narrower and carries the smell of war." al-Ḥashr and al-Ṣaff: "The root has another sense as well: naṣara'l-ghaythu'l-arḍ — the rain helped the earth, that is, it brought it to life."

What is to be added here is that the word occurs twice in this verse — the same root, the same form, one in the second person and one in the third:

The same verb, in two directions. And note: the verse does not give the requital with a different word. It does not say "if you help you will receive a reward"; it says "if you help you will be helped".

This is the plainest form of the figure of reciprocity (muqābala): the subject and the object of the same verb change places.

And the second part of the requital is far more concrete than the first.

ثَبَّتَ — root ث-ب-ت, Form tafʿīl. The primary sense of the root: to stand in place, to remain fixed, not to be dislodged. Thabata'sh-shayʾ — the thing stood in place.

And the root has a concrete use for plants too: a tree's root holding in the soil. The Qurʾān uses this picture at Ibrāhīm 14/24: "a good tree whose root is firm (thābit) and whose branch is in the sky."

أَقْدَام — the plural of qadam: feet. The root is ق-د-م, and from the same root taqdīm (to put forward), qadīm (that which comes before), muqaddima. The foot is what is put forward — what goes first in walking.

Now let us look at the picture itself.

What is the physical form of defeat on a battlefield? The slipping of the feet. A rank breaks when it leaves its place; and leaving its place is the feet going backwards. In Arabic the idiom zallat qadamuh — "his foot slipped" — describes both a physical and a moral fall.

The verse takes an abstract promise of "help" and brings it down under the feet.

• yanṣurkum — abstract, wide, hard to measure.
• yuthabbit aqdāmakum — concrete, narrow, seen at once.

The second says how the first comes about. Help is described not as something coming down from the sky but as the foot's holding on the ground.

And this must be read together with the next verse of the sūra — because the eighth verse will give exactly the opposite of this picture.

This pair occurs together in several places in the Qurʾān, and all of them are in the context of war:

• al-Baqara 2/250 — "Our Lord! Pour patience upon us, make our feet firm and help us against the denying people" (wa thabbit aqdāmanā wa'nṣurnā). Note: in this prayer too thabāt and nuṣra stand side by side.
• Āl ʿImrān 3/147 — "…and make our feet firm" (the same expression, again inside a prayer).
• al-Anfāl 8/11 — "…to strengthen your hearts and with it to make the feet firm" (wa yuthabbita bihi'l-aqdām).

al-Anfāl 8/11 is particularly striking: there what makes the feet firm is the rain — the water that came down hardened the sand beneath the foot.

And when this comes side by side with the rain-related sense of the root ن-ص-ر (naṣara'l-ghaythu'l-arḍ), an interesting weave is formed: help too is rain, and what makes the foot firm is also rain.

I record this weave as my own reading; both data have their counterpart in the lexicon and in the text, but the connection between them is one I am making, and it carries no claim of a play on words.

The concrete picture of the verse works outside the field of battle as well.

The real difficulty in sustaining something is not beginning but staying in place. To set out on a work is a decision made once; to stay in that work is a decision made anew every day. And most of the time people do not abandon the work — they withdraw slowly. The foot slips.

The promise of the verse looks exactly here: the form of the help is not a miracle but being able to keep a footing on the ground.

I record this as an application drawn from the verse; the wording of the verse is in the context of war, and the extension here is my own reading.