al-Ḥujurāt 49:17

Yamunnūna ʿalayka an aslamū, qul lā tamunnū ʿalayya islāmakum, bali'llāhu yamunnu ʿalaykum an hadākum li'l-īmāni in kuntum ṣādiqīn

"They count it a favour to you that they have submitted. Say: Do not count your submission a favour to me. Rather it is God who has bestowed a favour on you in guiding you to faith — if you are truthful."

Root: م-ن-ن. And this root carries two different senses — indeed senses that work in opposite directions:

The same verb, the same form, the same preposition (ʿalā). What determines the sense is the context.

And the concrete life of the root is interesting: al-mann, in the Qurʾān, is the name of the food sent down from the sky to the Children of Israel — al-mannu wa's-salwā (al-Baqara 2/57). The word, that is, is the name of a provision given without return.

Al-mann is also recorded by the lexicographers in the sense of to cut, to diminish; the expression ajrun ghayru mamnūn (Fuṣṣilat 41/8 and elsewhere) — "a reward without cease" — comes from this sense.

How the two senses meet in the same root can be seen: giving is a bond. The giver comes to hold a claim upon the receiver. When that claim stays silent it is a gift; when it is voiced it becomes a reproach. The root carries both these consequences of the act of giving at once.

And the Qurʾān separates the two plainly: "Do not void your alms with reproach (mann) and injury" (al-Baqara 2/264). Reproach, that is, is an operation that cancels the very thing given.

There is an escalation in the last block, and this verse is its summit:

Three steps: claim → declaration → debt.

At the last step, having become a muslim is presented as a good turn: "we joined you, this is something we did for you."

And this forms a ring with the sūra's first verse. In the first verse it was said lā tuqaddimū — do not go ahead. To count a thing a favour is exactly a form of going ahead: to place oneself as creditor and the other as debtor.

The sūra closes with the plainest instance of the positioning it forbade in its first verse. I record this as my own reading.

The answer comes in two moves.

The first move: refusal. Lā tamunnū ʿalayya islāmakum — "do not count your submission a favour to me."

And there is a subtlety in the word order: the sentence does not say lā tamunnū ʿalayya bi-islāmikum (with a preposition), but directly islāmakum (as a direct object). That is, not "do not reproach me with your islām" but "do not make your islām a reproach to me."

The difference is this: in the first, islām is an instrument; in the second, islām itself becomes the thing thrown in another's face. The grammarians explain this by saying that the verb is used transitively here in the sense of "to make a thing the subject of an obligation".

The second move: reversing the direction. Bali'llāhu yamunnu ʿalaykum — "rather it is God who has bestowed a favour on you."

بَلْ — the particle of iḍrāb: it invalidates the preceding sentence and puts a new one in its place. "No, it is not so; it is thus."

And the same verb is used in the reverse direction: yamunnūna ʿalayka → yamunnu ʿalaykum. Subject and object change places.

A question must be asked here: if counting something a favour is blameworthy, how can God's mann be?

The answer lies in the two senses of the root: God's act is in the first sense — to bestow. And why it does not fall into the second sense can be understood:

A person's throwing his giving in another's face is a claim to create a debt in the other, and that claim is not true — for no human being is an absolute creditor over another. God's recalling of a favour, on the other hand, creates no debt; it states a situation that already exists.

And further: when a person casts his giving in another's face, he puts himself in the place of the giver. The verse corrects this: you are not the giver.

I record this as my own reading; the two senses of the root are a fact the lexicographers record.

Here is the finest place in the sentence.

What did they say? An aslamū — "we have submitted". They put forward the act they had done: islām.

What does the verse count as the favour? An hadākum li'l-īmān — "in guiding you to faith".

The word has changed. They said islām; the verse says īmān.

And in the fourteenth verse it had been said that faith had not yet entered their hearts.

What this change means needs to be dwelt on, and one must be careful here.

The qualification at the end of the sentence is decisive: in kuntum ṣādiqīn — "if you are truthful."

The sentence, that is, is conditional. The favour holds if the condition is fulfilled.

Two readings are possible and both find support in the sources:

I impose no preference.

But what is common to both readings is this, and I record it as my own reading: the verse shows the rank they are said not to have reached (faith) as the subject of the favour. What it says, that is, is this: if anything is to be counted a favour, what is to be counted is not the work you did (islām); it is what has been given to you (faith) — and that is not your doing in any case.

And read together with the lammā of the fourteenth verse, one sees that the sentence still holds the door open: faith has not entered yet, but when it does it will be a favour.

The twin of this verse in the sūra is the eighth:

49/8: faḍlan mina'llāhi wa niʿmah — "as a bounty from God and a favour." 49/17: bali'llāhu yamunnu ʿalaykum — "rather it is God who has bestowed a favour on you."

The two verses say the same thing: to reach faith is not a person's own achievement.

But their addressees differ:

The sūra makes the same correction in two different places: to the one praised and to the one who claims. In both, what is done is to change the owner of the act.

I record this parallel as my own reading; the words and the positions of the two verses stand in the text.

One. Participation turning into a debt owed.

When a person joins a community, a cause or a work, the participation itself may in time come to be felt as a debt owed to him: "I am here", "I joined", "it is thanks to me". This feeling requires no ill will; it is a natural by-product of the act of giving — the two senses of the root م-ن-ن already record this.

What the verse does is to question the direction of the debt: did the one who joined give something, or was the ability to join given to him?

Two. And a note.

It is possible for this verse to be used to belittle someone's contribution, and that is the reverse of what the verse does. The verse does not deny what a person has done — the fourteenth verse had refused this openly: lā yalitkum min aʿmālikum shayʾā, "He will not diminish anything of your deeds."

The sūra does two things separately, that is: it gives what has been done its due (14), and it prevents what has been done from being turned into a debt owed (17). To confuse the two is to break the verse's word order.