al-Fatḥ 48:13

Wa man lam yuʾmin bi'llāhi wa rasūlihī fa-innā aʿtadnā li'l-kāfirīna saʿīrā

"And whoever does not believe in God and His Messenger — We have prepared for the disbelievers a blazing fire."

The verse opens with a conditional clause: "Whoever does not believe…" And in the answering clause, in place of the expected pronoun, comes an explicit noun: "…We have prepared a fire for the disbelievers."

The sentence does not say "We have prepared a fire for him"; it says "for the disbelievers".

In Arabic rhetoric this is called putting an explicit noun in place of a pronoun, and it does two things:

One. It states the ground of the ruling. The punishment is attached to a person not because of who he is but because of the attribute he carries. The reason has been set inside the sentence.

Two. It leaves the door open. The sentence does not say "to these people", it says "to those who carry this attribute". If the attribute changes, the ruling changes too.

This is one of the clearest examples in the text of the distinction between name and attribute set out in Method. The verse does not place the group named in the eleventh verse directly inside this ruling; it describes an attribute and attaches the ruling to that. Indeed, two verses later a new call will be made to the same group (16) — which is the proof that the ruling is attached to the attribute and not to persons.

The sense of the root: to make blaze, to kindle, to make hot. Saʿara'n-nāra — he made the fire blaze up.

سَعِير — the faʿīl pattern: a fire made to blaze, a fire in flames.

An interesting word from the same root: سِعْر (siʿr) — price. In Turkish it is one of the Arabic-derived words used for "price". The link the lexicographers give: prices too grow hot, rise, flare up. The same image is at work today when a market is said to be heating up.

This word occurs in sūras that carry descriptions of Hell, such as al-Mulk and al-Muddaththir; the detailed analysis of the root belongs there.

Root: ع-ت-د. ʿAtīd — ready, made ready. The Qurʾān uses it: "beside him is a watcher ready at hand" (Qāf 50/18 — raqībun ʿatīd).

The verb is in the perfect: prepared, beforehand. This answers to the verb aʿadda in the sixth verse — two verses saying the same thing with two different roots: the recompense is not a reaction of the moment but an order already established.