لَهُۥ مُلْكُ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ يُحْىِۦ وَيُمِيتُ ۖ وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَدِيرٌ
Lahu mulku's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ, yuḥyī wa yumīt, wa huwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr "To Him belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. He gives life and He gives death. He is powerful over everything."
Root م-ل-ك: to have the power of disposal over a thing. From the same root come malik (a king), mālik (an owner), mamlūk (a thing owned), malakūt.
The analysis of the word was made in the section on al-Mulk. Here I record only its function in this context.
The word order of the sentence is critical. The Arabic order is: lahu (to Him belongs) + mulku's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ (the dominion of the heavens and the earth). That is, the predicate has been brought forward and the subject placed last.
In Arabic this is the operation called taqdīm (fronting), and it produces a definite sense: ḥaṣr — particularisation, restriction. Not "the dominion of the heavens and the earth is His", but in a more decisive tone: "the dominion of the heavens and the earth is His alone."
This emphasis is the ground of the whole demand for spending in the sūra. To whom property belongs is settled in the second verse, before the seventh is even reached.
Both verbs are imperfect — that is, they convey continuity and repetition. The sabbaḥa of the previous verse was a perfect; here the passage is to the imperfect. The difference is functional: glorification is a completed state, whereas life and death are a working that is going on at this moment.
The order is striking: first giving life, then giving death. This is not the natural order — one might think that a living thing first dies and then is raised, or that it is first created and then dies. The Qurʾān uses this pair in other places in different orders too.
The ground of the order here may be the following, and I write this as my own reading: the sūra is one built upon giving. And life is the first of the things given to a human being. The verse begins the list with what is given; what is taken comes afterwards.
Moreover these two verbs will be repeated in verse 17 of the sūra — there the subject will again be God and the object the earth: "God gives life to the earth after its death." The principle set down abstractly in the second verse comes back fifteen verses later with a concrete example.
Root ق-د-ر: to measure, to apportion, to assign a limit and a quantity to a thing. From the same root come qadar (a measure decreed), miqdār, taqdīr, qudra.
This analysis of the root matters for the question of decree that we shall take up in verse 22 of the sūra, because at the centre of the word stands not compulsion but measure. The one who is qadīr is, before being possessed of limitless power, the one who sets a measure to everything.
Indeed the Qurʾān says so plainly: "We created everything according to a measure" (al-Qamar 54/49). And: "There is nothing whose stores are not with Us; and We send it down only in a known measure" (al-Ḥijr 15/21).
I note this second verse; I shall return to it when we come to the question of the sending down of iron in verse 25.