al-Fatḥ 48:21

Wa ukhrā lam taqdirū ʿalayhā qad aḥāṭa'llāhu bihā; wa kāna'llāhu ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīrā

"And others, over which you have had no power — God has encompassed them. God is qadīr over all things."

The whole force of the verse lies in the repetition of a single root.

• لَمْ تَقْدِرُوا۟ — "you had no power" — root ق-د-ر
• قَدِيرًا — "having power over all things" — the same root

The same root, in the same verse, with two opposite subjects. What the sentence says is exactly this: where your qudra ends, His qudra is.

The sense of the root: to measure, to determine the extent of a thing — and from this, to have power over. Qadar (measure, determination), miqdār, taqdīr, qadr (worth, measure). The detailed analysis of the root was made at al-Qadr.

And this link is striking: the same root means both "to measure" and "to be able". For to have power over a thing is for it to lie within your measure. What exceeds your measure you have no power over.

The verse uses this exactly: lam taqdirū ʿalayhā — those things lay outside your measure.

The sense of the root: to surround, to enclose, to encompass.

From the same root:

• حَائِط (ḥāʾiṭ) — a wall; and a garden (a place walled about). The idea behind the English word enclosure.
• إِحَاطَة (iḥāṭa) — encompassing; and figuratively "a full grasp of a subject".
• مُحِيط (muḥīṭ) — the one who encompasses. It occurs in the Qurʾān as an attribute of God: "God encompasses all things" (al-Nisāʾ 4/126).

The use of the verb here is exactly right. The verse does not say "God owns them" or "He will give them to you". It says "He has encompassed them".

The image is this: a thing whose surroundings have been closed off can no longer escape. It has not yet been taken, but the ring around it has been shut. The verse states not the outcome, that is, but the inevitability of the outcome.

I record this as my own reading: this verb does the same work as the perfect tense in the sūra's first verse. There a thing not yet complete was recounted as having happened; here a thing not yet in hand is recounted as "encompassed". Both are expressions of the same stance: that the outcome is not up for debate.

The twentieth verse recounts what has been given in advance, the twenty-first what has not yet been given. The two form a pair:

And this pair sums up the whole logic of the sūra. From beginning to end the sūra works on the tension between what is in hand and what is not yet: a mosque that could not be entered, a dream not yet fulfilled, a fatḥ near but not yet come. These two verses set that tension out in its simplest form: part of it in your hand, part of it not — but both under the same hand.