al-Taghābun 64:15

Innamā amwālukum wa awlādukum fitna, wa'llāhu ʿindahu ajrun ʿaẓīm

"Your properties and your children are only a trial. And with God is a great reward."

The two verses come one after the other but they do not say the same thing. The difference needs seeing:

This is the most important difference: in the fourteenth verse there was a restricting letter, here there is none.

And this shows that the verses say different things. The fourteenth verse reported a possibility: some of them may be enemies. The fifteenth verse reports a state: property and offspring, all of them, are a trial.

The two do not contradict each other. "Enemy" is a qualification of behaviour and does not apply to everyone; "trial" is a qualification of position and admits no exception. That a thing is a test does not require that thing to be bad.

The sentence begins with innamā: "only, nothing but". This particle locks the ruling onto a single thing.

But note: what does it lock? Two readings are possible:

• "Your properties and your children are nothing but a trial" — that is, they are nothing else. This reading looks severe.
• "Your properties and your children are indeed a trial" — here innamā is for emphasis, and the force of restriction is weak.

In classical grammar it is recorded that innamā does not everywhere convey full restriction and that it sometimes only emphasises. Which it is here I cannot say with certainty. The second reading seems better suited to the context — because the Qurʾān names property and offspring elsewhere as adornment and as blessing as well, so that the reading "they are nothing else" would come into tension with the Qurʾān's own usage.

This is a preference and it is not binding.

Root: ف ت ن. This root was fully analysed in al-Burūj; I do not repeat that analysis. I recall only two items, because the verse can be understood only with them:

1. The proper sense of the root: to put gold into the fire and melt it, thereby separating out the alloy inside it and bringing its purity to light. The one who does this work is called fattān. At the centre of the root stand three elements: fire, testing, separating out. 2. The usual English renderings of fitna — "sedition", "strife" — hold only one end of this range. The centre of the field the Qurʾān uses is testing.

And in the table of usages in al-Burūj there was this item: being tested by blessing — "Your properties and your children are only a trial" (al-Anfāl 8/28).

Al-Anfāl 8/28 and al-Taghābun 64/15 are almost the same sentence. The only difference is that al-Anfāl, after saying amwālukum wa awlādukum, ends with a different verse-ending. That the same sentence occurs in two places shows that the expression is a settled formula.

This verse completes two links already set up in the corpus. The three must be seen together.

The first link — al-Burūj: what the root is. Fitna is the operation of testing by fire and bringing purity to light. Testing stands at the centre of the word.

The second link — al-Jinn 72/17: the explicit statement that abundance is a trial. There, the sentence li-naftinahum fīh, which comes immediately after the promise of abundant water, was treated and the following was recorded: "In the preceding verse a promise was given — abundant water, blessing, ease. And immediately afterwards what that promise is is stated: an instrument of testing."

And of the letter fī the following was established there: "The testing is not something added to the abundance; it is something inside the abundance. Blessing and testing are not two separate operations but two names of a single one."

The third link — al-Fajr 89/15-16: taking abundance for honouring. There two inferences of the human being were recorded — when given abundance, "My Lord has honoured me", when given straitness, "My Lord has humiliated me" — and both were cut off with kallā. In al-Jinn these two texts were joined thus:

Al-Taghābun 64/15 is the third of these links — and it specifies the object.

In Sūrat al-Jinn the instrument of testing was water; a general abundance. In al-Fajr it was provision; a general ease. Here the object is named: property and offspring. That is, the descent has been made from the most abstract to the most concrete.

And the four together frame this sentence: abundance is neither an honouring nor a humiliation — it is a testing; and among the things tested are the ones a person loves most.

And that obligatory reservation entered in al-Fajr holds here too, and I repeat it: "it is not being said that abundance is not an honouring." A blessing is a blessing; the verse does not reject the blessing. What it says is what the blessing is for.

In the same way: this verse does not blame having children or having property. The Qurʾān counts both as blessings; it records prayers being made for a child (the prayers of Abraham and of Zechariah), and it says that property is a good. The only thing the verse says is the position of these two blessings: not a possession held in the hand but an instrument by which a measurement is taken.

Reading the two verses together brings out a distinction, and this distinction clarifies the sūra's attitude on the subject of the family. The table below is my own reading:

The meaning of the difference is this: the fourteenth verse describes something the other party may do. The fifteenth verse describes a situation in which the other party need do nothing at all. A child, doing nothing, merely by existing, can be a test for his father — because the testing is set up not in the child's act but in the place the father gives him.

This is the most delicate side of the verse: a trial is not the fault of the one loved; it is the measure of the one who loves.

The verse does not end with a statement of fact; it puts down an alternative.

And this belongs inside the sūra's vocabulary of trade: أَجْر — wage. Root أ ج ر: the return for a piece of work, rent, wage. Ijāra, ajīr, mustaʾjir are from the same root.

Ajr, as was recorded in al-Bayyina, is a calculable return: the price of the work done. This is its difference from fawz (winning) in the ninth verse — fawz is out of all proportion, ajr is reckoned.

The word order of the sentence sets up a comparison:

• What is in your hands: amwālukum wa awlādukum — yours, beside you, visible.
• What is with Him: ajrun ʿaẓīm — with Him, far off, unseen.

عِندَهُ — "with Him". This adverbial conveys not so much place as ownership and safekeeping: standing somewhere, being kept.

And its link with the sūra's central notion is direct. Taghābun was coming off worse; coming off worse comes from valuing what is in hand too high and what is not in hand too low. This verse sets two things side by side and leaves the comparison of prices to the reader.

The verse does not say which is the more valuable. It only calls one of them ʿaẓīm (great). Completing the comparison is left to the reader — and according to the ninth verse, the day of those who make that comparison wrongly will be taghābun.