al-Jinn 72:17

Li-naftinahum fīh, wa man yuʿriḍ ʿan dhikri Rabbihī yaslukhu ʿadhāban ṣaʿadā

"So that We might test them by it. And whoever turns away from the remembrance of his Lord, He will drive him into a mounting punishment."

The lām at the head conveys purpose: the aim of the abundance is stated.

And the aim is this: a testing.

This is where the whole weight of the verse gathers. In the preceding verse a promise was given — abundant water, blessing, expansion. And immediately after, what that promise is is stated: an instrument of testing.

The root ف-ت-ن was analysed in full in al-Burūj. The finding there was this: the original sense of the root is to put gold into the fire and melt it, thereby separating out the alloy within and bringing its purity to light; the one who does this is called a fattān. And it was recorded that the usual English renderings of fitna hold only one end of this range ("sedition", "stirring up trouble"), while the centre of the field the Qurʾān uses is testing. I do not repeat that analysis.

Among the fields of the root's use in the table in the section on al-Burūj there was this too: being tested by favour — "Your wealth and your children are only a fitna" (al-Anfāl 8/28).

Al-Jinn 72/17 is the plainest expression of that item. For here the favour is given with its being a fitna stated plainly.

The most important link of this verse is with Sūrat al-Fajr, and the two texts together complete a single finding.

Al-Fajr 89/15-16 said this: when a human being is given abundance he says "my Lord has honoured me"; when he is given straitness he says "my Lord has humiliated me". And the Qurʾān rejected both: kallā.

The finding made in that section was this — and it is worth repeating, because it attaches here: "The text is most often read as though only the second were being rejected; as though the first sentence were a proper expression of thanks. It is not. The structure of the sūra gives the two within the same grammatical pattern, attached to the same verb, and cuts both off with a single kallā."

And this was added there too: "Whoever counts abundance an honouring must count straitness a humiliation… a person who takes his own abundance for divine approval is bound to collapse when he falls into straitness."

Al-Jinn 72/17 is the other face of the same finding.

Al-Fajr shows the wrong inference and cuts it off; al-Jinn gives the right name. Abundance is neither an honouring nor a humiliation — it is a testing.

And the necessary note entered in the section on al-Fajr holds here too: "it is not being said that abundance is not a gift." A favour is a favour; the verse does not reject the favour. What it says is what the favour is for.

The pronoun refers back to māʾan ghadaqā (the abundant water). And the particle is fī — "within".

This is a structure seen in the analysis of fī taḍlīl in the section on al-Fīl as well: fī conveys containment, and carries the idea of a vessel and an enclosing. That is, the testing is not something added to the abundance; it is something inside the abundance. Favour and testing are not two separate operations but two names of a single one.

أَعْرَضَ — root ع-ر-ض: the breadth, the width of a thing; its side. Aʿraḍa ʿan — to turn one's side to someone, to turn one's face away and show one's flank.

This is the concrete image of the word, and it has the same logic as the English "to turn one's back on": a refusal expressed by the posture of the body. Iʿrāḍ is not an argument; it is not turning towards the one addressing you. No answer is given, no interest is taken, the speaker is not treated as an interlocutor.

ذِكْرِ رَبِّهِ — "the remembrance of his Lord". Root ذ-ك-ر: to remember, to call to mind, to utter. In the sections on al-Aʿlā and al-Ghāshiya the differences of pattern in this root (Form II dhakkir — reminding from outside; Form V yadhdhakkaru — remembering from within) were treated.

The construct can be read in two ways, and both are meaningful:

• "The remembrance [sent down] by his Lord" — that is, the revelation, the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān names itself dhikr in many places.
• "Remembering his Lord" — that is, the act of remembrance itself.

The two readings come out at the same place in practice: whoever turns away from the text has turned away from the remembering too.

The relation between the two halves of the verse has been set up with care.

First half: abundance is a testing. Second half: whoever turns away from the remembrance is driven into a punishment.

The link between them is not stated but is plain: the way abundance is a testing is the possibility of its taking a person away from remembrance. Expansion lessens the sense of need; when the sense of need lessens, the turning lessens too.

This is a link the Qurʾān sets up plainly elsewhere and it was taken up in the sections on al-ʿAlaq and al-Layl: istighnāʾ — seeing oneself as free of need. "No! The human being does indeed transgress, in that he sees himself as free of need" (al-ʿAlaq 96/6-7). Al-Jinn 72/16-17 is the expression of the same mechanism on the side of the promise: abundance will be given, and precisely for that reason that abundance will be a testing.

Root ص-ع-د: to go up, to climb. Ṣuʿūd — ascent. Ṣaʿīd — the surface of the earth, the ground (what one climbs upon). Taṣaʿʿada — he climbed with difficulty.

صَعَدًا is explained in the classical lexicons as a slope hard to climb, exhausting to ascend. That is, the punishment is described as a climb: a load a person cannot get out from under, forced constantly upward.

The parallel within the Qurʾān is very close: "I shall drive him up a steep ascent (ṣaʿūdā)" (al-Muddaththir 74/17). And the verb used in that verse is أُرْهِقُهُ — that is, the root ر-ه-ق, the word in verses 6 and 13 of this sūra. In al-Muddaththir the two notions (rahaq and ṣaʿad) join in a single sentence: the load that rides on top and the slope that cannot be climbed.

In Sūrat al-Balad too there was a slope: العقبة (al-ʿaqaba) — the steep ascent (al-Balad 90/11-12). And in that sūra the slope was what one is asked to climb: freeing a slave, feeding the hungry, seeing to the orphan.

Setting the two slopes side by side shows how the Qurʾān uses the same image for two separate works:

The same difficulty, in two separate places. In al-Balad the difficulty is chosen; in al-Jinn the difficulty is imposed. And a relation can be set up between the two — I record this as my own reading, not as a transmitted report: whoever does not climb the first slope is driven up the second. The difficulty is present in either case; what changes is who chooses it.

Root س-ل-ك: to pass a thing into a place, to insert, to bring inside as one passes a thread. Silk — thread, a string. From the same root sulūk — to walk on a road.

The concrete image of the verb is threading a needle: to insert through a narrow place. In the Qurʾān this verb is used in the context of punishment and carries the idea of being passed through a narrow passage.

The verb will return in verse 27 — there it will be used of God's inserting / stationing a raṣad before and behind the messenger. The sūra uses the same verb for two separate works: in one, driving into punishment; in the other, stationing a protection. This is another instance of the sūra's economy of vocabulary — the same happened with the word raṣad (9 and 27).

Who is the agent? The subject of the verb is not stated plainly. From the context it is understood to be God. It is transmitted that in some readings the verb is read in the first person plural (naslukhu — "We drive in"); this does not change the sense, only moves it into the plural of majesty.