al-Ḥujurāt 49:18

Inna'llāha yaʿlamu ghayba's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ, wa'llāhu baṣīrun bimā taʿmalūn

"God knows the unseen of the heavens and the earth. And God sees what you do."

For eighteen verses the sūra has recorded conduct: lower your voice, wait at the door, verify the report, set matters right, do not mock, do not find fault, do not fix nicknames, do not conjecture, do not pry, do not speak behind another's back, do not boast of your lineage, do not throw your claim in another's face.

And the ground of all these notes is gathered into a single sentence: being seen.

Root: غ-ي-ب. It was treated in the twelfth verse on the occasion of ghība: to disappear from sight, not to be present, to remain covered.

And now the word comes back with the root's original sense: ghayb — what is unknown, what is covered.

The link between the two occurrences is the sūra's tightest weave:

49/12: wa lā tajassasū wa lā yaghtab baʿḍukum baʿḍā — do not pry into what is hidden, do not speak in another's absence. 49/18: inna'llāha yaʿlamu ghayba's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ — God knows the unseen of the heavens and the earth.

The sūra, that is, after forbidding the searching out of what is covered, closes by saying who it is that knows what is covered.

And this completes the ground of the prohibition. The prohibition of prying is not a prohibition of knowledge — the knowledge exists already and is known. The prohibition is about whose that knowledge is.

The consequence of this is the following, and I record it as my own reading: a person's searching out another person's hidden things is not idle curiosity; it is an attempt to take upon oneself a work that belongs to another. The verse makes the attempt meaningless by showing whose work it is.

The same principle was recorded in the section on al-Mumtaḥina: "the authority given to you is not the authority to know the heart."

بَصِير — root ب-ص-ر. To see; and not the eye only, but baṣīra — the sight that grasps the inner side of a thing.

And a ring is formed with the sūra's first verse:

49/1: inna'llāha samīʿun ʿalīm — God is Hearing, Knowing. 49/18: wa'llāhu baṣīrun bimā taʿmalūn — God sees what you do.

The sūra opens with hearing and closes with seeing.

And this agrees exactly with the sūra's own subject:

• The sūra's first block was about voice: do not raise your voices, those who lower their voices, those who call from behind the chambers. And at the door of that block the name the Hearing was placed.
• The sūra's last block is about claim and deed: what you say and what you do. And at the close of that block the name the Seeing is placed.

Hearing looks to the word, seeing looks to the act. The sūra began with commands about the word and ends with a note about the act.

I record this ring as my own reading; but the words and the positions of the two verse-endings are the text's own structure.

Root: ع-م-ل. To do, to work. ʿAmal — the work done.

And that the sūra's last word is a verb is worth recording.

Throughout the sūra a great deal has been spoken of: voice, report, conjecture, identity, claim, lineage, faith. Most of these are things that are inward and invisible.

The last word comes out into the open: taʿmalūn — you do.

And a link is formed with the second verse: there it was said an taḥbaṭa aʿmālukum — "lest your deeds come to nothing". The same root at the beginning and at the end of the sūra: at the start the coming to nothing of deeds, at the close the seeing of deeds.

I record this as an observation about the wording.

The block is the taking up of a single sentence — "we have believed" — in four different ways: as a thing done, as a thing measured, as information, as a debt owed. And at the end it is said where the measure is.