al-Maʿārij 70:24-25

Wa'lladhīna fī amwālihim ḥaqqun maʿlūm · Li's-sāʾili wa'l-maḥrūm "And those in whose wealth there is a known right — for the one who asks and for the one who is deprived."

In the section on al-Māʿūn 107/3, when the two readings of the construct "the food of the poor" were discussed, the ownership reading was grounded on this verse. What was recorded there:

• al-Dhāriyāt 51/19: "In their wealth there was a right for the one who asks and the one who is deprived."
• al-Maʿārij 70/24-25: "In their wealth there is a known right for the one who asks and the one who is deprived."
• And the conclusion recorded: "The word used in both verses is right — not favour, not benefaction, not gift. And its being called 'known' (maʿlūm) shows that this is not an arbitrary amount but a defined share."
• And three consequences were listed: "The superiority of the giver disappears… The shame of the receiver disappears… Not giving becomes not 'failing to be generous' but 'withholding a right'."

I do not repeat these. Three things are to be added here: the qualification maʿlūm, the difference between the two recipients, and the dropping of the pronoun.

Root: ع-ل-م. To know. Maʿlūm is the passive participle: known.

And here is the difference from al-Dhāriyāt 51/19. Al-Dhāriyāt says only ḥaqq; al-Maʿārij says ḥaqqun maʿlūm. Al-Maʿārij adds a qualification: the right is a known right.

What does "known" mean? There are two readings:

And here we meet the very difficulty recorded in the section on al-Māʿūn.

In the section on al-Māʿūn this qualification was set down for the reading of māʿūn as alms: "the institutionalisation of alms at fixed rates belongs to the Medinan period. If the sūra is counted Meccan, this reading is strained."

The same difficulty is present here. And the second reading removes it: if a person has determined his own share, no institutional rate is needed.

I find the second reading stronger, and my ground lies in the sūra's own logic:

The list counts the ways of coming out of man's halūʿ state. And the second half of halūʿ is مَنُوع: withholding. So this item of the list ought to be the antidote to withholding.

An obligatory tax does not cure withholding — a person pays the tax and goes on withholding. But if there is a share in his wealth that he himself has set aside and that he knows, that is a change of disposition.

This preference is not binding. And its practical difference is limited, since both readings arrive at the same idea: within one's wealth there is a determined portion belonging to someone else.

Note the particle. The verse does not say "they give of their wealth", nor does it say "they set aside a portion of their wealth". It says "in their wealth there is…".

The particle فِى conveys containment. That is, the right is not an obligation coming from outside the wealth; it is something present within the wealth.

And this supports at the level of grammar the ownership reading framed in the section on al-Māʿūn: the right is not added to the wealth afterwards; it is already there.

And the sentence is a nominal sentence, with no verb. That is, no act is announced but a state. What is said is not what the person does but what kind of wealth his wealth is.

I record this as an observation about the word order.

And this is the subtlest point of the verse.

ٱلسَّآئِل — Root: س-أ-ل. The one who asks, the one who begs. The same word as the sāʾil of the sūra's first verse.

ٱلْمَحْرُوم — Root: ح-ر-م. Ḥarama — to forbid, to prohibit, to deprive. Ḥarām, ḥurma, al-Ḥaram (the inviolable precinct) and iḥrām are from the same root. مَحْرُوم is the passive participle: deprived, cut off from his share.

In the classical sources there are two main views on who the maḥrūm is:

Al-Qalam 68/27 is a particularly strong indication, because there the word is used in exactly this sense and from the mouths of the people themselves: the owners of the garden, having lost their produce, say "we are maḥrūm".

The two views do not exclude one another and both are transmitted in the classical sources. What they share is this: the maḥrūm is the invisible needy person.

And this is the real question.

The verse could have used a single word: li'l-fuqarāʾ (for the poor), li'l-masākīn (for the destitute). It does not. It uses two words, and the difference between them is visibility:

And the second row settles the whole matter.

If what is given were a favour, the trigger of the favour would be the request: someone asks, you give. No obligation would arise concerning one who does not ask — because a favour is awakened by asking.

But if what is given is a right, no request is needed. A debt is a debt even if the creditor does not remind you of it. And the verse shows this by putting someone who does not ask into the list.

So the presence of the word maḥrūm is the proof of the word ḥaqq.

In the section on al-Māʿūn the ownership reading was grounded on the words ḥaqq and maʿlūm. What I add here is this: the third ground of the reading is the second recipient.

I record this as my own reading. The senses of the two words and their standing side by side in the verse are data that can be verified.

And setting the poverty-words of the two sūras side by side completes the picture:

What was recorded for miskīn in the section on al-Māʿūn was: "Poverty is not merely 'having little money'; it is the absence of options."

Maḥrūm adds a layer to this: poverty is the cutting off of a share. And the passive pattern of the word says so — maḥrūm is not one who has deprived himself; he is one who has been deprived.

I record this as an observation about the word; the pattern's being passive is a grammatical datum.

And let us return to the grammatical detail recorded above.

In the list the pattern ٱلَّذِينَ هُمْ occurs six times. In two places the hum is dropped:

• Verse 24: وَٱلَّذِينَ فِىٓ أَمْوَٰلِهِمْ حَقٌّ مَّعْلُومٌ
• Verse 26: وَٱلَّذِينَ يُصَدِّقُونَ بِيَوْمِ ٱلدِّينِ

The reason is grammatical and beyond dispute: hum is a pronoun of emphasis and stands between the subject of a sentence and its predicate. In the twenty-fourth verse the subject of the sentence is ḥaqqun (not the persons), and in the twenty-sixth the predicate is a verb (yuṣaddiqūna). In neither case is there room for hum.

This is a grammatical necessity; I draw no inference of meaning from it. But the consequence is worth recording: the two items differ in structure from the other items of the list — one rests on a state (the character of the wealth), the other on an act (affirming). The remaining six items are adjectival clauses.