al-Muṭaffifīn 83:4-5

Alā yaẓunnu ulāʾika annahum mabʿūthūn • Li-yawmin ʿaẓīm "Do these people not suppose that they will be raised, for a mighty day?"

Three verses set up a scene of trade. The fourth verse ties that scene, all at once, to the hereafter.

And the tie is made not with an explanation but with a question: alā yaẓunnu — "do they never consider?"

This is the very logic set up in Sūrat al-Māʿūn, and it was treated there in detail: what a person actually believes emerges at the moment when what he does has no worldly consequence whatever. In al-Māʿūn the example chosen was the orphan; here it is the customer shaved off the measure.

The common point is this: no one sees, no one will call to account. And what is done in precisely that situation is the one clean measure of a person's belief in the reckoning.

أَلَا is made up in Arabic of two pieces: the interrogative hamza (أ) + the particle of negation (لا).

It has two functions:

1. Alerting: at the head of a sentence it gives the sense "attention!", "know well that". 2. A question of rebuke (istifhām tawbīkhī): "do they not… at all?"

Both are working here. The sentence both draws attention and rebukes.

And the combination of negation + question conveys assertion in Arabic: the answer to "do they not consider?" is not "they do consider"; the question states that they do not consider, and meets this with astonishment.

The same pattern was taken up in the section on al-ʿĀdiyāt: "Does he not know?" (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/9) — there too it was a question of rebuke.

This word is one of the finest points of the sūra.

Root: ظ-ن-ن. It was taken up at al-Baqara 2/46, and what was recorded there was this: the root can answer, according to context, both to a doubtful guess and to a firm conviction; in the study of language this is called contrariety of meaning.

The technical term from al-Baqara can be given here: the lexicographers call words of this kind الأضداد (aḍdād) — a word carrying two senses opposed to one another. Arabic has other examples, and the lexicographers have written independent works on the subject.

Which sense, then, in this verse?

The first view appears stronger in this context, and its ground is the sūra's own structure.

At al-Baqara 2/46 it was said that the word carries the sense of certain knowledge, and the ground was given there plainly: "the verse says this as praise, and one who doubts is not praised." That is, what settled the sense was whether the sentence was praise or blame.

Here the sentence is a rebuke. And the logic of rebuke runs the other way: in praise the threshold is raised, in rebuke the threshold is lowered. To say "do you not know this?" is a lighter rebuke than to say "do you not even guess at this?"

So the verse is saying: a full faith would not have been needed to prevent what these people are doing. A possibility, a misgiving, a "what if it is so" would have sufficed.

And here the architecture of the sūra becomes visible.

The sūra opened by relating the smallest of frauds: taṭfīf — shaving off the edge. Now it asks after the smallest measure of belief that could have prevented that fraud: ẓann — a possibility.

Two "littles" are set face to face:

And the sūra says: had there been the second, there would not have been the first.

This is the sūra's most elegant balance, and I offer it as my own reading. That the word is among the aḍdād and that the context here is rebuke are data of the text; the equivalence I set up between the two "littles" is an interpretation.

Ulāʾika is the plural demonstrative pronoun used for what is distant.

The two explanations recorded for dhālika in the section on al-Māʿūn hold here too: belittling and distancing (taḥqīr), or visibility — "so plain that you can point to it from afar."

There is a third function as well: the pronoun puts a distance into the sentence. The first three verses described them from close up — enumerating one by one what they do. The fourth verse steps back and looks from a distance: those ones.

Root: ب-ع-ث. To send, to raise up, to set in motion. Baʿth — raising the dead. Bāʿith — the one who sends. Inbiʿāth — to spring up (taken up at al-Shams 91/12: inbaʿatha ashqāhā).

The word is a passive participle: mabʿūthūn — "those who are raised, those who are sent". That is, passive: they do not rise of themselves, they are raised.

And this root ties back to the preceding sūra. At al-Infiṭār 82/4 the verb buʿthirat occurred, and as was recorded in the section on al-ʿĀdiyāt some lexicographers count this four-letter root a compound of baʿatha (to raise) + athāra (to turn up) — a disputed etymology, all the same.

Read side by side: in al-Infiṭār the graves are turned upside down (buʿthirat), in al-Muṭaffifīn people are raised (mabʿūthūn).

The particle لِ here conveys purpose: "for that day", "towards that day". That is, the raising has an aim; it is not a rising for nothing.

يَوْمٍ comes indefinite. As was recorded in the section on al-Infiṭār and earlier in al-Māʿūn, the indefiniteness here conveys magnification (tafkhīm): "such a day that…"

And the adjective: عَظِيم. Root ع-ظ-م. Its concrete sense is bone: ʿaẓm — bone. ʿAẓīm means, at bottom, "big-boned, of large build"; from there it has passed to "great, mighty".

That a bone should lie at the root of the word is worth noticing: greatness has been thought, in Arabic, by way of frame and structure. The size of a thing is the size of the frame that holds it up.

The fourth and fifth verses make the most important transition of the sūra: they tie a commercial behaviour to a matter of belief.

Attention has to be paid to how this is done. The verse could have said any of the following, and all would have been reasonable:

• "This is injustice."
• "You are devouring people's rights."
• "The trust of trade is destroyed."

The verse says none of these. It passes straight to the raising of the dead.

That is, the sūra does not take up cheating in the measure as a matter of law or as a matter of social order. It takes it up as a matter of belief.

In the section on al-Māʿūn this method was named "the backbone of the sūra": "not supporting doctrine with morals; but making morals the evidence for doctrine."

Al-Muṭaffifīn does the same work, but from the other direction: al-Māʿūn went from behaviour to belief ("have you seen the one who denies the religion? that is the one who pushes the orphan away"), al-Muṭaffifīn turns from belief to behaviour ("do these people not consider that they will be raised?").

The two sūras together set up the two directions of the same link. And in verse 12 the sūra will formulate that link plainly.