al-Muddaththir 74:15

Thumma yaṭmaʿu an azīd "And then he still hopes that I will give him more."

One of the sharpest sentences of the sūra. And its force lies in a single word: ثُمَّ.

In Arabic three conjunctions convey sequence, and there are differences between them:

Here there is thumma. And its function is twofold:

1. An interval of time: what was enumerated was given, time passed, and then this happened. 2. Unexpectedness: after what was enumerated, this is not what one expects to follow.

The English "and then, on top of that" answers exactly to the second function: "and then, on top of that, he hopes that I will give him more."

Root: ط-م-ع. Its concrete sense: to want a thing intensely, to set one's eye on it, to await it in hope.

And the word has a neutral side in Arabic — it does not always carry blame:

• "They used to call upon Us in hope and in fear" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/90) — raghaban wa rahabā; and similarly khawfan wa ṭamaʿā (al-Aʿrāf 7/56; al-Raʿd 13/12; al-Rūm 30/24; al-Sajda 32/16). Here ṭamaʿ is positive: hope.
• "I hope that He will forgive me my faults on the Day of Reckoning" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/82) — the words of Abraham (Ibrāhīm).

That is, ṭamaʿ means hope; its becoming a thing blamed arises from the context.

The Turkish words tamah and tamahkâr ("greed", "greedy") have taken up only the negative face of the word.

And here one has to be careful.

The verse does not say "to want more is bad". The Qurʾān does not in general blame a person's wanting; indeed asking for provision, asking for good, asking for forgiveness are commanded.

What is blamed is the sentence as a whole: to take what has been enumerated and then, while stubbornly rejecting the signs (verse 16), to hope for an increase on top of it.

That is, the matter is not the wanting; it is cutting off the relation with the giver and expecting him to go on giving.

I record this as an inference. But that the next verse should begin with kallā and say innahū kāna li-āyātinā ʿanīdā supports this reading: what is rejected is not the hope itself but the attitude after which the hope comes.

The verb is again in the first person singular: azīda — "that I should increase".

And this is the fourth singular verb of the sequence: I created, I gave, I prepared, let Me increase.

The man does not acknowledge the source of what has been given him; but he expects the giving to continue. This is the picture the sentence sets up.

The finding recorded in al-Humaza looks directly at this place:

There, the difference between what the man who accumulates wealth says and what his behaviour assumes was treated: "The verse looks not at what a person says but at what his behaviour assumes."

Here there is the same method. The man does not say "give me more" — the verse states what he hopes (yaṭmaʿu). This is not a demand put into words; it is an assumption at work inside the behaviour.

And the assumption is this: this flow will continue.

In al-Humaza the name of that assumption was "the illusion of permanence". Here it is not named, but its structure is the same: to take the continuance of what is given for something independent of the giver.

I set up this link as my own reading.