al-Mumtaḥana 60:3

Lan tanfaʿakum arḥāmukum wa lā awlādukum, yawma'l-qiyāmati yafṣilu baynakum, wallāhu bimā taʿmalūna baṣīr

"Neither your kin nor your children will profit you. On the Day of Resurrection He will part you from one another. God sees what you do."

This verse goes down into the heart of the event of revelation.

In the event related, the man's ground was not treachery; it was to protect his family. That is, at the source of the offence there lay an anxiety about kin. After describing, in the first two verses, the act and the character of the other side, the sūra in the third verse touches the motive directly: the thing for whose sake you did this will not repay you.

This is a method the Qurʾān often uses: not to be content with forbidding a behaviour, but to break down the calculation that feeds the behaviour.

The root ر-ح-م. And the weight of this root in the Qurʾān is well known: raḥma, al-Raḥmān, al-Raḥīm come from the same root.

The concrete sense of the word رَحِم is the womb. From this arises the sense "kinship": dhawu'l-arḥām, "those who have wombs" — that is, those who come from the same womb, those bound by blood.

That the root should carry mercy and kinship at once is a strong bond established by the language: the name of mercy has been taken from the first place a human being was sheltered. The Qurʾān uses this bond positively elsewhere — the right of kin, ṣilat al-raḥim, nearness in inheritance.

What, then, is happening here? The verse does not cancel kinship; it cancels kinship's serving as a shield in the hereafter. These are two separate things. The same Qurʾān places doing good to kin within the definition of birr (al-Baqara 2/177: "who gives of his wealth, though he loves it, to kinsfolk…"). That is, kinship stands where it was as a source of obligation; what is removed is its use as a guarantee.

This verse is another face of a principle established in Sūrat al-Baqara.

At al-Baqara 2/124 Abraham had asked that the leadership given to him should continue among his descendants as well, and the answer came: "My covenant does not reach the wrongdoers." As was treated in that section, what was cut there was the line's forming a guarantee downwards: to be the child of a prophet gives rise to no status.

What is cut here is the other direction of the same bond: arḥām (upward and sideways — the blood tie) and awlād (downward — children). The two words together cover everyone to whom a person is tied by blood.

And now look at the fourth verse: there Abraham's relation with his father will come up. That is, the sūra takes up both directions of the blood tie in turn: in the third verse it lays down the principle, in the fourth it gives the example.

فَصَلَ — the root ف-ص-ل: to separate, to sever one from another, to put a distance between. From the same root come faṣl (a section — a separated part of a text), fāṣila (an interval), mafṣal (a joint — the place where two bones are separated), faṣīla (family, the nearest line — the part separated off from a whole). And al-faṣl also means to give judgement: a judgement is the separating of the one in the right from the one in the wrong. The Qurʾān calls the Day of Resurrection yawm al-faṣl (al-Ṣāffāt 37/21, al-Dukhān 44/40 and other places).

The choice of the word is especially apt in this verse. For a raḥim is a bond that joins; faṣl is to separate. In order to say that what joins in this world will separate in the hereafter, the verse chooses precisely the word that is the opposite of joining.

Variant readings are transmitted concerning the subject and the pattern of the verb — whether it is to be read active or passive, in the three-letter form or the doubled form. Because I am not sure to which imāms these differences are ascribed, I give no names. In terms of meaning the upshot of the difference is this: on the active reading the one who separates is plainly God; on the passive reading the act of separating is told without the agent being named, and the agent is in any case clear from the context. On the doubled reading the separating becomes detailed — that is, not a single cut but everyone's being separated from everyone else one by one.

A detail of word order: the position in the sentence of the adverbial yawma'l-qiyāmati has been disputed — whether it attaches to the preceding clause ("they will not profit you on the Day of Resurrection") or to the following one ("on the Day of Resurrection He will part you"). The marks of pause in the muṣḥaf carry the trace of this discussion. Both attachments bring the meaning to largely the same place; for this reason I adopt no preference here.

بَصِير — the root ب-ص-ر: to see; but in Arabic this root states not only the seeing of the eye but also apprehension, discernment. Baṣīra is seeing not with the eye but with the understanding. In the Qurʾān it is said of a person that "man is a baṣīr against his own self" (al-Qiyāma 75/14) — that is, he knows his own condition.

The link of the sentence with the first verse is plain. There it was said "I know both what you conceal and what you make known"; here the same thing is repeated in the language of seeing, with baṣīr. The block closes where it opened.

And a point of word order: bimā taʿmalūna (what you do) has been brought forward in the sentence. The normal order would be "wallāhu baṣīrun bimā taʿmalūn". Bringing a word forward states, in Arabic, specification and the drawing of attention: what is looked at is what you do. Not a declaration of belief, not a statement of intention — deed.

This emphasis is not accidental. The sūra was defining the other side too by its deeds (verse 2: what they will do if they get the upper hand). Now it lays the same measure on its own side. The principle of the eighth verse is thus prepared from both sides.