al-Mumtaḥana 60:7

ʿAsallāhu an yajʿala baynakum wa bayna'lladhīna ʿādaytum minhum mawaddah, wallāhu Qadīr, wallāhu Ghafūrun Raḥīm

"Perhaps God will put an affection between you and those of them with whom you are at enmity. God is powerful. God is forgiving, merciful."

This verse is the most important structural move of the sūra, and without reading it the sūra is taken for a "text of enmity".

Recall the sequence:

• Verse 1: Do not take the enemy as allies — you are conveying mawadda to them.
• Verse 2: If they get the upper hand they will harm you; they wish you to return to unbelief.
• Verse 4: Abraham's word to his people: between us there has begun an everlasting enmity and hatred.
• Verse 7: Perhaps God will put a mawadda between you.

That is, three verses after setting up its hardest sentence the sūra brings back the word that sentence forbade — and this time positively, indeed ascribed to God.

This cannot be explained by coincidence. That the same word (mawadda) should occur only twice in the sūra, and that the two occurrences should be in positions as opposed as this, is a deliberate choice of the text.

And this verse settles the reading of the first verse. The distinction set out at length above — that what is forbidden is walāya, not mawadda — would without this verse have been an interpretation. With this verse it becomes an in-text proof. For a text does not present as something God promises what it forbade three verses earlier.

The root ع-س-ي. ʿAsā is in Arabic a defective verb stating hope and drawing near: "it may be, it is to be hoped, almost".

And here there is a question: what does this word mean when it is ascribed to God? Can God's saying "perhaps" be conceived?

In the classical exegesis there is a widespread approach: "an 'ʿasā' coming from God is obligatory/certain" — that is, in divine speech this word arises not from a want of knowledge but from a choice of manner towards the addressee; what is promised comes about. I record this approach as a transmitted report; let me state my own preference separately:

In my view the function of the word here is not so much to state a degree of certainty as to say in whose hand the door lies. Had it said "I shall put affection between you", this would have been a promise with a timetable. When it says ʿasā, what falls to the one addressed is not to wait but not to shut the door. That is, the verse does not give a date; it asks for an attitude.

This is a reading, and it is not binding.

بَيْنَ ٱلَّذِينَ عَادَيْتُم مِّنْهُم "(with) those of them with whom you are at enmity"

The particle مِنْ here states the partitive: a part of a whole. That is, not "with all of them" but "with some of them".

This caveat is important in both directions. On the one hand it makes the promise realistic: the text does not say that all enmity will end. On the other hand it recalls the function of the particle min discussed at length in the section on al-Bayyina: when the Qurʾān speaks about a community it frequently uses a particle of division and avoids establishing a wholesale ruling.

Per the method (Method), no wholesale ruling is issued about a group in this commentary; and here the text itself applies that principle.

قَدِير — the root ق-د-ر: to measure, to assign a quantity, to have power over. From the same root come qadar (measure, determination), miqdār, qudra. At the centre of the root there is not sheer power but power used with measure.

That this name should come at the end of the verse has a direct bearing on the content of the sentence. What is promised is not an event in the outer world but a change within people. The passage from enmity to affection is something no one can produce by planning. This is why the verse closes with a name of power: this is not a piece of work you can do.

The Qurʾān says the same thought plainly in another place: "He knit their hearts together. Had you spent everything on earth you could not have knit their hearts together; but God knit them together" (al-Anfāl 8/63). There too the matter is the inner world, and there too the insufficiency of wealth is emphasised.

These two names at the close are attached in the commentaries to two different addresses, and both agree with the text:

The two do not exclude one another. And read together, the verse establishes this: the door is open both inside and outside.

That a short while after the period in which the sūra came down, with the conquest of Mecca, the enmity that is the subject of this verse largely came to an end is a matter of historical record. As was stated in the section on al-Kāfirūn too, a significant portion of the addressees of that sūra passed a short while later outside the scope of the address.

I record this not as a claim that "the verse was fulfilled" but as a caution about how the sūra is to be read: for the addressees of the verse the description "enemy" was not a permanent identity, and in fact it did not turn out to be permanent.

The idea that enmity is not ontological. The most important thing this verse carries is this: a conflict does not arise from something present in the essence of one of the parties. Enmity is a position, not a nature. Positions can change.

This distinction is decisive in practice. A community that defines the other side as a nature makes peace conceptually impossible, because a nature does not change. A community that defines it as a position, on the other hand, leaves a way out even while the conflict continues.

And there is a balance that must be noticed: the verse does not deny that the enmity exists at present. The first and second verses stand where they were. That is, the text builds hope not by belittling the threat but by limiting the threat's duration. This is a third attitude, different both from pure optimism and from pure enmity.