al-Ṭūr 52:7-8

Inna ʿadhāba rabbika la-wāqiʿ · Mā lahu min dāfiʿ "The punishment of your Lord will surely come to pass. There is nothing that can turn it back."

Root: و-ق-ع. This root was treated in the discussion of al-Mursalāt 77/7; I do not repeat it here. Its summary: in Arabic the concrete sense of the verb "to come to pass" is to fall; a thing's happening is its falling upon you.

And the word occurs three times in three sūras, with three different subjects:

The three sentences are in the same pattern: inna + subject + the reinforcing lām + wāqiʿ.

And the subjects narrow steadily:

• al-Mursalāt: what is promised — its content is not stated, the widest.
• al-Dhāriyāt: the reckoning — the name of an event.
• al-Ṭūr: the punishment of your Lord — one face of the reckoning, and the most concrete.

I record this as a reading drawn from a comparison of the three texts. The identity of pattern among the three sentences is plain in the text.

And the construct "of your Lord" is striking. The verse does not say ʿadhāba'llāh (the punishment of God); it says رَبِّكَ — "your Lord". That is, the Prophet is being addressed and the punishment is ascribed to his Lord.

As was recorded in the sections on al-Fātiḥa and al-ʿĀdiyāt: Rabb is the name that carries ownership and nurture together. The ascription of punishment to this name says that punishment is not an arbitrary display of power but part of an order.

I record this as an observation about a name.

Root: د-ف-ع. Its concrete sense: to push, to push back, to drive away.

And this root is used in the Qurʾān in the sense of defence as well: "Had God not driven back some people by means of others…" (al-Baqara 2/251; al-Ḥajj 22/40) — wa lawlā dafʿu'llāhi.

The structure of the sentence sets up a restriction: mā lahu min dāfiʿ — and the min is redundant, present in a negative sentence for the sake of generalisation. In English it is met with "not any".

That is, the sentence leaves no exception.

And the presence of the second verse is interesting. The seventh verse had already said la-wāqiʿ — certainty had been stated. The eighth does not repeat this; it says something else.

Two verses close two separate objections. And this is the same technique seen at al-Dhāriyāt 51/5-6: there too a single judgement had been split in two, and the truth of the word and the occurrence of the event had each been guaranteed separately.

Two neighbouring sūras split their answers in the same way. I record this as a comparison.

And the second objection has a concrete counterpart. The ways people know for having a penalty prevented are well known: finding an intermediary, paying a ransom, escaping, taking shelter with someone powerful. The sūra will close all of these one by one in the verses that follow — particularly in the series of questions running from the thirty-fifth to the forty-third.