al-Najm 53:2

Mā ḍalla ṣāḥibukum wa mā ghawā "Your companion has not gone astray, nor has he been led away."

The first ruling of the sūra. And all three of its words are seen to be separately chosen.

Root: ص-ح-ب. This root was treated in the section ʿAbasa; what was recorded there holds here unchanged:

To be together, to keep company, to accompany. Ṣāḥib — a companion, a fellow traveller; ṣuḥba — being together; aṣḥāb — those who are together. Zawja relates a legal bond; ṣāḥiba relates companionship.

The section on ʿAbasa also pointed to the same usage at al-Takwīr 81/22: "Your companion (صَاحِبُكُم) is not possessed." The finding recorded there was: "the word rests on the acquaintance built by many years of living together: you know him."

In this verse the same word does the same work — and read together, the two sūras yield a system.

Both sūras use the same proof: you know this man.

And this is a very practical piece of reasoning. The verse displays no miracle and advances no transmitted proof. It appeals to the memory of the one addressed. The people of a town have an opinion about the character of a man who has lived among them for forty years, and that opinion is not easily changed by propaganda.

The verse does not say "my companion" or "the messenger of God"; it says "your companion". The pronoun belongs to those addressed. The relationship is theirs. And the most reliable testimony about a person is the testimony of the one who has lived with him.

What this says to the present: in weighing claims about a person, the first question to be asked is not the source of the claim but the known past of the person the claim is about. The verse sets that order: first acquaintance, then claim.

And the pairing here is one of the sūra's finest distinctions.

ضَلَّ — Root: ض-ل-ل. This root was analysed in full in the section al-Ḍuḥā; I do not repeat it. The summary of what was recorded there:

The root's proper sense is to be lost inside something and become invisible, to fail to find the way, to lose one's track. The heavy moral load carried by the usual renderings ("misguidance", "error") is not carried by the Arabic root. The evidence is the Qurʾān's own usage: "When we are lost in the earth…" (al-Sajda 32/10); "My Lord neither errs nor forgets" (Ṭāhā 20/52) — here the verb is used of God and negates a lack of knowledge.

Ḍalāl, by its root, is thus a failure to find the way; it is a defect of knowledge.

غَوَىٰ — Root: غ-و-ي. This root is analysed here for the first time in this commentary.

The concrete sense of the root: to go after a thing and come to harm, to plunge insatiably into something and be spoiled by it.

The most concrete usage the lexicographers record is worth noting: غَوِيَ ٱلْفَصِيل — the camel calf sucked too much milk, its stomach was upset and it fell ill. The calf is not deprived of milk; it takes too much and is spoiled by it.

The other derivatives:

• غَىّ (ghayy) — waywardness, going wrong; and in the Qurʾān it occurs as the name of a place in Hell as well (Maryam 19/59: fa-sawfa yalqawna ghayyā).
• غَاوِي (ghāwī), plural غَاوُون — the Qurʾān uses this word of those who follow the poets (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/224).
• أَغْوَىٰ — to lead astray. It occurs in the words of Iblīs: "Because You led me astray…" (al-Aʿrāf 7/16).

Now set the two words side by side:

The oppositions in the last row are the Qurʾān's own data:

"There is no compulsion in religion; rushd has become distinct from ghayy." (al-Baqara 2/256)

In this verse it is not hudā but rushd that is set over against ghayy. And rushd in Arabic conveys not knowledge but maturity: a person's becoming able to manage his own affairs. Ghayy, then, is the name not of a lack of knowledge but of an inability to govern oneself.

Against that, the Qurʾān regularly sets hudā over against ḍalāl — and indeed the thirtieth verse of this sūra does exactly that: "who has strayed (ḍalla) from His way… who has found the guidance (ihtadā)."

What the second verse says, then, is this:

This man neither lost his way (the side of knowledge) nor departed from the way he knew out of desire (the side of will).

Both doors are closed. For a person's speech can be corrupted in two ways: either he does not know the truth, or he knows it and says otherwise. The verse refuses both at once, and does so with two separate verbs.

مَا + a perfect verb. In Arabic the negation of a perfect verb with mā conveys that a completed past act definitely did not occur. Had it said lā yaḍillu (he does not stray), the claim would have been that he will not stray in the future either — a sentence that cannot be said of a human being. With mā ḍalla the claim concerns a record of the past: this man has not strayed up to now.

And this is a claim the one addressed can verify. A claim about the future cannot be verified; a claim about the past is put to those who shared that past.

And the particle of negation is repeated twice: mā ḍalla… wa mā ghawā. It could have been said with a single mā, "he neither strayed nor was led away". The repetition shows that the two verbs are refused separately — that is, they are not counted synonymous.