وَٱلَّذِىٓ أَخْرَجَ ٱلْمَرْعَىٰ
The verb is used regularly in the Qurʾān in the context of plants: "With it We brought out every kind of plant" (al-Anʿām 6/99); "so that with it We may bring out grain and plants" (al-Nabaʾ 78/15).
The image of the verb matters: the plant is not made, it is brought out. That is, it is taken outside from a place where it already was. This points to the state of the seed beneath the soil, and it is the same scene as the image of fāliqu'l-ḥabbi wa'n-nawā (He who splits the grain and the date-stone) treated in the section on Sūrat al-Falaq.
1. To pasture, to graze. Raʿa'l-māshiya — the animal grazed; arʿā — he pastured. مَرْعَى (marʿā) — the place where grazing is done, a pasture; and the grazed thing itself.
2. To watch over, to look after, to tend and protect. رَاعٍ (rāʿī) — a shepherd; and, widening from there, "one who stands at the head of a community and watches over it". رِعَايَة (riʿāya) — tending and watching over. مُرَاعَاة (murāʿāt) — taking a thing into account, having regard to it. رَعِيَّة (raʿiyya) — the people a ruler watches over.
How do the two senses join? The shepherd, while pasturing the flock, at the same time watches over it. Riʿāya is "taking to pasture" and "standing guard over it" gathered into a single word. The relation in English between "to tend" and "to look after" is similar — to look after someone is both to feed him and to protect him.
For plants the Qurʾān generally uses the word نَبَات (nabāt). Here marʿā has been chosen, and the difference is meaningful.
Nabāt is a name that looks at the plant from its own side: the thing that grows, that comes out. Marʿā, by contrast, is a name that looks at the plant from the side of the one that eats it: the thing that is grazed.
The verse, that is, names the plant not for itself but for its function. What is brought out is not "greenery" but "fodder". The animal has not yet been mentioned in the sentence, but the animal is inside the word.
This sits within the context of the sūra. In the third verse it had been said that He guided each being according to its measure. The fourth verse gives an example of it: a pasture for the grazing being. Guidance is not merely the describing of a direction; it means that there is something to be found at the place one goes to.
And the sense of riʿāya sets up a second layer here: the one who brings out the pasture is at the same time the one who watches over. Within the word itself these two works stand together. I record this as an observation; the two senses of the root are given in this way in the dictionaries, but it is I who apply the relation between them to this verse.