al-Munāfiqūn 63:5

Wa idhā qīla lahum taʿālaw yastaghfir lakum rasūlu'llāhi lawwaw ruʾūsahum wa raʾaytahum yaṣuddūna wa hum mustakbirūn

"When they are told, 'Come, and the Messenger of God will ask forgiveness for you', they twist their heads away; and you see them turning aside in arrogance."

Here the sūra does something not often met with in the Qurʾān: it puts a movement of the body on record.

In the preceding verse there was an appearance (bodies, timbers). Here there is a movement: the turning of the head.

And the way the movement is recorded is striking. The verse does not say "they refused", does not say "they did not accept", does not say "they did not want it". It says they twisted their heads away.

That is, the refusal is given not with a word but with the body. This accords with the sūra's general method: in the first verse speech was taken out of being a measure; here the only meaningful thing is what the body does.

Root ع-ل-و: to rise, to be high. From the same root come aʿlā (the most high), ʿuluww (height) and taʿālā (He is exalted).

The verb has an interesting history. The command taʿāla (come) means, by the root of the word, "come up". According to what the lexicographers transmit, this use comes from a person standing in a high place calling to someone below: "come up". Later it became fixed and gained the general sense of "come".

This past of the word says something fine here: the call is a call upward. And the attitude described at the end of the verse is mustakbirūn — those who make themselves great. That is, the people called up refuse by counting themselves already up there.

I record this link as a nicety of language; it carries no value as a ruling, but it shows the picture behind the word.

The root غ-ف-ر: to cover. Mighfar is the war-helmet that covers the head. Maghfira is the covering of a sin — not its erasure but the closing over of it.

In Form X (istaghfara): "to ask that it be covered".

And now note what the offer is: what is asked of them is not to repent, not to confess, not to apologise. They are only asked to come. Someone else will do the asking for forgiveness.

So the threshold has been lowered as far as it will go. The same technique recorded at al-Māʿūn 107/3: "the threshold has been pulled down as far as it will go." There what was asked was not the giving but the urging; here it is not the doing of something but only the coming to a place.

And precisely for this reason the meaning of the refusal grows heavier. If an offer whose cost is almost nothing is refused, the reason for the refusal cannot be cost. One reason alone remains: accepting must mean giving up a position.

And indeed the end of the verse says this: wa hum mustakbirūn.

The root ل-و-ي: to bend, to twist, to turn. To twist a rope, to turn a thing about its own axis.

The derivatives of the root show its centre:

• liwāʾ — a banner (a cloth twisted and wound)
• ilwiyya — a thing twisted and coiled
• layy — bending, and the putting off of a debt (in Arabic layyu'l-wājid — a rich man's delaying of his debt)

The last sense is interesting: postponement is, in the word's logic, a bending. The warping of something that ought to go straight.

A note on the variant reading: the word has been read as lawwaw (with shadda on the wāw, Form II) and as lawaw (without shadda, Form I). The reading with shadda denotes repetition and multiplicity: turning not once but again and again; or the turning not of one person but of many. The reading without shadda gives the plain verb. The direction of the meaning does not change. I make no attribution to particular imāms of the variant readings.

This root occurs in several other places in the Qurʾān, and in all of them it does the same work: the bending of what ought to go straight.

Āl ʿImrān 3/78: "And among them there is a group who twist their tongues with the Book (yalwūna alsinatahum bi'l-kitāb), so that you may suppose it to be from the Book. But it is not from the Book."

al-Nisāʾ 4/135: "…If you bend and twist (talwū) or turn away, know that God is aware of what you do." — This verse is in the context of bearing witness.

Now set the three uses side by side:

All three make the same movement: the bending of what ought to be straight.

And from here there is a bridge to al-Baqara 2/75. There تَحْرِيف (taḥrīf) was taken up, and what was recorded was this: the root ح-ر-ف means "edge, tip, boundary"; taḥrīf, in the word's own logic, is "to bend a thing from its edge". "Not to tear the text down the middle; to pull it slightly from its margin, to shift its direction. A small crookedness produces a large deviation at a distance."

ل-و-ي and ح-ر-ف are two names for the same work. One relates the bending, the other the pulling from the edge. Neither breaks; both bend.

And there is an order of intensity between the two concepts:

1. Taḥrīf (2/75) — the text is bent. 2. Layy al-lisān (3/78) — the tongue is bent; the text stays as it is, but its recitation is twisted. 3. Layy al-raʾs (63/5) — the body is bent. There is no longer even a need to deal with the text; the direction is changed directly.

The third is the plainest, and precisely for that reason the most honest: to turn one's head away is not an interpretation but an answer.

And another link: in Sūrat al-Mujādala (58/8) the hypocrites' corrupting of the greeting when they come to the Prophet is spoken of — "When they come to you they greet you with a greeting with which God has not greeted you." The same structure: wa idhā jāʾūka. Al-Munāfiqūn 63/1 also opens with the same pattern: idhā jāʾaka'l-munāfiqūn.

In both sūras what is related is the bending of a gesture: in one the greeting, in the other the movement of the head. This is taken up in detail in al-Mujādala; it may be consulted there.

The root ص-د-د occurred in the second verse. There its object had been dropped and two readings were possible. Here the verb is used intransitively: they themselves are turning aside.

رَأَيْتَهُمْ — "you see them". The verb is perfect but the sense is continuous. And note: the address is again in the second person singular — the same as the raʾaytahum of the fourth verse.

In these two verses the sūra gives the one addressed the role of an observer: when you see them, this is what you see, and this. That is, the verses do not merely give information; they teach a way of looking.

This does the same work as the first verse of Sūrat al-Māʿūn: a-raʾayta — "have you seen?" As was recorded there: "the matter is not to make a list but to gain a way of looking."

The root ك-ب-ر: to be great. In Form X (istakbara) it can take two senses:

1. To seek: to want greatness, to arrogate greatness to oneself. 2. To count: to see a thing as great.

Here the first. A mustakbir is a person who appropriates to himself a greatness he does not deserve.

At al-Muddaththir 74/23 this root was taken up, and what was recorded there was this: in that sūra ك-ب-ر occurs in three positions — greatness that is commanded (kabbir), greatness that is usurped (istakbara), greatness that comes as recompense. That is, the root turns around the question of who is great.

A nicety of word order: wa hum mustakbirūn is a circumstantial clause: it states how the act of turning aside is performed. That is, arrogance is recorded not as the cause of the turning aside but as its manner.

The difference is fine but important. The verse does not say "they turned aside because of their arrogance"; it says "they turned aside in a state of arrogance". That is, the arrogance shows within the movement. The very act of turning the head away is a display of arrogance.

This accords with everyday observation: how a refusal is made most often says more than what is refused.

At al-Baqara 2/34 Iblīs's not prostrating was explained by istikbār, and at al-Baqara 2/90 it was recorded: "The same structure as Iblīs's ground: there too the matter was not the command itself but whose favour it was in. Envy, like arrogance, is born of a comparison."

The same structure works here too. What is offered (forgiveness) is not in itself something to be refused. What is refused is whom the offer comes from and what accepting it would mean. To accept that forgiveness be asked for you is to accept that you need forgiveness.

Arrogance blocks exactly this: the admission of a need.