al-Fatḥ 48:25

Humu'lladhīna kafarū wa ṣaddūkum ʿani'l-masjidi'l-ḥarāmi wa'l-hadya maʿkūfan an yablugha maḥillah; wa lawlā rijālun muʾminūna wa nisāʾun muʾminātun lam taʿlamūhum an taṭaʾūhum fa-tuṣībakum minhum maʿarratun bi-ghayri ʿilm; li-yudkhila'llāhu fī raḥmatihī man yashāʾ; law tazayyalū la-ʿadhdhabnā'lladhīna kafarū minhum ʿadhāban alīmā

"They are the ones who disbelieved and barred you from the Sacred Mosque, and kept the sacrificial animals from reaching their place of offering. Had it not been for believing men and believing women whom you did not know, whom you might have trampled underfoot, so that harm might have come upon you from them without your knowing… so that God might bring into His mercy whom He wills. Had they been separated from one another, We would surely have punished those of them who disbelieved with a painful punishment."

The most striking grammatical feature of the verse is this: the answer to the conditional clause is not stated.

The answer to the clause beginning lawlā… ("…We would have done such and such") is not in the text. In Arabic this is called the suppression of the apodosis, and it is a deliberate technique: what is left unsaid is already clear from the context, and leaving it unsaid makes it stronger.

The missing sentence here is understood from what precedes the verse: "…permission to fight would have been given", "…the hands would not have been held back".

The ground of the withholding of hands recounted in the twenty-fourth verse, that is, is here. And the ground is astonishing.

The sense of the root: to prevent, to turn aside, to turn away. Ṣudūd (turning away), ṣadad (direction, intent — it lives on in Turkish in the phrase bu sadette).

The Qurʾān uses this verb particularly in the context of the Sacred Mosque: "Those who disbelieved and barred others from the way of God and from the Sacred Mosque…" (al-Ḥajj 22/25).

And here is one of the finest verbal connections in the sūra.

هَدْي (hady) — the sacrificial animal. And the root of the word is ه-د-ي — that is, the same root as hidāya, guidance.

The sense of the root: to show the way, to direct a thing towards a place, to send it on. And a hady is in the fullest sense the animal that is sent to its place: sent on ahead by its owner, and having a particular place to reach.

From the same root comes هَدِيَّة (hadiyya): a thing directed towards someone. The word lives on in Turkish as hediye, and it still carries the idea of "sending" that is in its root.

And now let us see the link with the second verse. In the second verse one of the four verbs was this: wa يَهْدِيَكَ ṣirāṭan mustaqīmā — "and guide you on a straight path". The same root.

I record this as my own reading, not as a transmitted report: the sūra uses the same root at two ends. In one place a human being is shown the way; in the other the way of an animal already sent out is cut off. The shared idea of the word is the same in both: having been directed towards a place. This is a weave of words; I do not claim there is a deliberate allusion.

The sense of the root: to stay put in a place, to attach oneself to a thing and not leave it, to be held back.

From the same root comes اِعْتِكَاف (iʿtikāf): staying in a mosque without leaving it. The Qurʾān uses the verb in the context of idolatry too: "They came upon a people devoting themselves to idols of theirs" (al-Aʿrāf 7/138 — yaʿkufūna ʿalā aṣnāmin lahum) — at the centre of the word lies not leaving the side of something.

Here the word is a passive participle: maʿkūf — held back, kept waiting.

The image is extremely concrete: the sacrificial animals were set on the road, but they were stopped in the middle of it. They can neither go back nor go forward. A state of waiting.

مَحِلّ — root ح-ل-ل: to come down in a place, to halt; the untying of a knot; and to become lawful.

These three senses of the root are bound to one another, and the word here carries all of them at once:

• The halting place: the place the sacrificial animal must reach.
• The untying: the loosing of a bond — the untying of the bond of consecration by the animal's being sacrificed.
• Becoming lawful: the moment at which sacrificing it becomes permitted.

The Qurʾān uses the same expression in another place, and that verse lights this one directly:

"…If you are prevented, then send whatever sacrificial animal is within your means. And do not shave your heads until the sacrificial animal reaches its place of offering." (al-Baqara 2/196)

The two verses use the same words: uḥṣirtum (being prevented), hady (sacrificial animal), yablugha'l-hadyu maḥillah (the animal's reaching its place), taḥliqū ruʾūsakum (shaving the head).

And the shaving of the head will occur again in verse 27 of this sūra: muḥalliqīna ruʾūsakum. Two verses — al-Baqara 2/196 and al-Fatḥ 48/25-27 — thus share the same cluster of words.

I record this as an observation: this section of the sūra speaks in the language of the rulings of pilgrimage and ʿumra. What is recounted is not a military event but an act of worship left unfinished.

This is the most astonishing sentence in the sūra.

What is shown as the ground for stopping a fight is neither a strategy, nor a balance of forces, nor a political calculation. What is shown is this: inside the other side there are believers whose identity is not known.

لَّمْ تَعْلَمُوهُمْ — "you did not know them."

And this expression is the first half of the sūra's central sentence. Two verses later will come:

"He knew what you did not know." (48/27 — fa-ʿalima mā lam taʿlamū)

Here what is unknown is given concretely: people inside the other side. In the twenty-seventh verse this will turn into a general principle.

The sūra, that is, does not content itself with saying "there was something you did not know"; it also says what that something was. And what it says bears directly on the way people sort one another into categories: when a body of people is looked at as a whole, the single human beings inside it become invisible.

The sense of the root: to tread with the foot, to trample, to set one's foot upon. It is said that waṭan (the place one settles upon) comes from the same root; and muwāṭaʾa (agreement — setting foot in the same place).

The choice of word is mercilessly concrete. It does not say "that you might harm them" or "that you might kill them"; it says "that you might trample them".

And this is a word that describes how trampling happens: the one who sets his foot down does not see what he treads on. He does not look, does not pick out, does not distinguish. Trampling is something done without awareness — and indeed the sentence says so separately: bi-ghayri ʿilm, "without knowing".

مَعَرَّة — root ع-ر-ر. The senses the lexicographers record: a harm that clings, a defect, a disgrace, a blameworthy condition. As the concrete sense of the root the dictionaries mention a disease that clings to the skin (ʿurr); I do not present this connection as a settled etymology.

The shared idea of the word: contamination. A stain that passes onto one without one's wanting it.

بِغَيْرِ عِلْمٍ — "without knowing".

And now attend to the moral structure of the verse. What is at issue is not a deliberate wrong. The verse speaks of something that would be done unknowingly, and says that it would give rise to a maʿarra.

I record this as my own reading: the measure the verse sets is this — not knowing does not undo the outcome. A person trampled unknowingly has still been trampled; and the stain that clings has still clung. For this reason the remedy is not to say "we did not know" but that the act should not be done at all. This is exactly the ground for the withholding of hands.

This reading is supported by the word order of the verse: the expression bi-ghayri ʿilm is set down not as an excuse but as the character of the outcome.

A parenthetical sentence. The purpose behind the preceding ground is stated: so that God might bring into His mercy whom He wills.

The verb is once again a verb of "bringing in": yudkhila — for the third time in the sūra (5, 17, 25). And here the place into which they are brought is not a garden but mercy.

The function of the sentence, as my own reading, is this: the withholding of hands is not only for the protection of the believers already known but to leave open a possibility for people about whom it is not yet known who will be included. A fight turns everything not yet settled into something settled. Stopping it preserves what is unsettled.

And the sūra has a continuation that supports this reading: Sūrat al-Naṣr recounts people entering in throngs. It is transmitted in the reports that this entering quickened in the period after the treaty. But this is a historical assessment; I do not present it as a claim of the verse.

The sense of the root: to part, to be separated from one another, to withdraw from between. Zāla (it departed, it passed away), tazayyul (separating from one another), izāla (removal).

Law tazayyalū — "had they been separated from one another".

What the sentence says is plain, and it completes this whole section of the sūra: the two groups were mixed in together. Those who believed and those who did not were in the same city, in the same houses, in the same families. They were not separated out.

And the verse makes their not being separated a variable of the outcome: had they been separated, the outcome would have been different.

I record this as my own reading: this is one of the most practical measures in the sūra. What stands in the way of applying a collective treatment to a body of people is that the body is not homogeneous. And real communities never are. The verse uses this fact as a ground and draws a consequence from it: intermixture makes collective treatment impossible.

A note: this verse is one of the clearest supports within the Qurʾān for the principle in Method that no wholesale ruling is issued about any group. The text itself sets, in the way of taking a community as a whole, the unknown people inside that community.