al-Ṭūr 52:29

Fa-dhakkir fa-mā anta bi-niʿmati rabbika bi-kāhinin wa lā majnūn "So remind! By the favour of your Lord you are neither a soothsayer nor one possessed."

The turning point of the sūra. The single verse standing between the two great sections.

And this verse must be compared word by word with al-Qalam 68/2.

The construct in the middle is word for word the same. And in the section on al-Qalam the point of word order in this construct was treated; I do not repeat it here. What was recorded there: the sentence could have been framed as "mā anta bi-majnūn" and that would have sufficed; the entry of bi-niʿmati rabbika in between is an addition.

And the root of majnūn was analysed there too: ج-ن-ن — to cover; and "the majnūn is a person whose speech does not come from himself — he is the mouth of a jinn."

What is to be added here is the addition of the second accusation.

This accusation was treated in the discussion of al-Ḥāqqa 69/41-43; I do not repeat it here. The summary of the findings there:

"It was accepted that the soothsayer of the age of ignorance had a jinn or a satan as helper, that he brought what he had heard from the sky, and that the soothsayer conveyed this in a rhymed, cadenced, closed language… the one addressed had a ready category to hand in which he could place the Qurʾān. Someone who speaks in rhyme and gives news of the unseen — that is a soothsayer."

And it was recorded there that al-Ḥāqqa took up the accusations of poet and soothsayer, that is, that it rejected human sources.

And this verse was already cited in the section on al-Inshirāḥ: when the inventory of the epithets attributed to the Prophet was given, al-Ṭūr 52/29 and al-Dhāriyāt 51/52 were shown for sāḥir and kāhin.

What is to be added here is why the two accusations stand together.

And the answer stands in the finding recorded in the section on al-Qalam: "The majnūn is a person whose speech does not come from himself — he is the mouth of a jinn."

That is, the two accusations look to the same place: both tie the source of the speech to a jinn.

And the two accusations are two degrees of the same claim: one counts the person an expert, the other a victim. What they share is that the speech is not his.

And a comparison with the pair seen at al-Dhāriyāt 51/39 and 51/52 (sāḥir / majnūn) is instructive:

And al-Dhāriyāt's pair was contradictory — I showed this in the section on al-Dhāriyāt in the discussions of 51/8 and 51/39. Al-Ṭūr's pair is consistent.

That is, two sūras take two different pairs of accusations, and the two are rejected in different ways.

I record this as a reading drawn from a comparison of the two sūras.

Root: ذ-ك-ر. And the place of the command within the sūra is decisive.

The verse comes immediately after the tableau of the god-fearing and stands immediately before the series of questions. That is, what separates the two sections is a command.

And the same command was at al-Dhāriyāt 51/55: wa dhakkir fa-inna'dh-dhikrā tanfaʿu'l-muʾminīn.

The two sūras give the same command and support it with two different things. Al-Dhāriyāt states the benefit of the command; al-Ṭūr defends who it is that gives it.

And al-Ṭūr's order is meaningful: first the command (fa-dhakkir), then the defence. That is, the reminding is commanded not after the accusations have been cleared away but while the accusations continue.

I record this as an observation about word order.

And the link with al-Aʿlā 87/9: there it is fa-dhakkir in nafaʿati'dh-dhikrā — with a condition attached. This comparison was made in the section on al-Dhāriyāt; I do not repeat it here.