al-Fajr 89:19-20

Wa taʾkulūna't-turātha aklan lammā • Wa tuḥibbūna'l-māla ḥubban jammā "You devour the inheritance without distinction; you love wealth with a heaped-up love."

Root: و-ر-ث. Wirātha, wārith, mīrāth are from the same root. In the form تُرَاث the initial letter و has turned into ت; this is a sound change seen in some Arabic words beginning with wāw (as in wuqāt → tuqāt). The word lives on in Turkish too as turâs, and indirectly in the cultural sense of the concept of "heritage"; English has no cognate here.

The choosing of inheritance is meaningful and is generally passed over.

The verse does not say "you devour wealth", nor "your earnings", nor "your trade". It says the inheritance — that is, property in which no labour has been invested.

This connects directly with the diagnosis of the sūra. The man in the fifteenth verse counted what was in his hand an indicator of desert. Inheritance is the place where this claim is weakest: property that comes into a person's hand with no contribution of his own. And precisely for that reason, counting an inheritance "deserved" is the plainest contradiction.

The sūra strikes at the point easiest to refute.

Regarding the practice of inheritance in the Arab society of the Jāhiliyya we have this general information: strength and the ability to fight were taken as the basis in the division, and women and small children were most often left out of the shares. The Qurʾān changed this order and determined the shares in detail (the inheritance verses of Sūrat al-Nisāʾ).

The Qurʾān also explicitly forbids one practice:

"It is not lawful for you to inherit women against their will." (al-Nisāʾ 4/19)

The existence of the verse shows that there was a practice by which a woman could in some cases become a subject of inheritance. I do not give the details, because I cannot say anything certain about the scope and the currency of the reports; but the prohibition itself is in the text.

And when this is joined with the orphan, the picture is completed.

Two verses earlier the orphan was mentioned. Now inheritance is mentioned. In the conditions of the Jāhiliyya these two join in a single event: the property of a child whose father has died being devoured by the very people who ought to protect him.

The Qurʾān meets this with one of its severest sentences:

"Those who unjustly devour the property of orphans devour only fire into their bellies." (al-Nisāʾ 4/10)

And further: "Give orphans their property; do not exchange the good for the bad, and do not devour their property by adding it to your own" (al-Nisāʾ 4/2).

Al-Nisāʾ 4/10 is the best commentary on al-Fajr 89/19. In both verses there is the same verb — akl, to eat — and al-Nisāʾ explains what that verb is.

The absolute-object structure. After the verb taʾkulūna comes a verbal noun from the same root: aklan. In Arabic this structure emphasises the verb; and the adjective that follows (lammā) conveys the quality of the verb. In English the counterpart is an expression such as "you devour it utterly", "you eat it right up".

لَمّ — root ل-م-م: to gather, to collect together. Lamma'sh-shayʾa — he gathered up what was scattered, he gleaned it.

All three readings are found in the sources and they do not exclude one another. The second reading overlaps most tightly with the sūra's context of the orphan; I state this as a preference, it is not binding.

The common core of the word is this: not separating. To separate is to distinguish what is one's due from what is not; lamm is the failure to make that distinction. And this has to do not with the quantity of the wealth but with the undifferentiatedness of the relation built with it.

Again an absolute object: tuḥibbūna… ḥubban. The sūra uses the same grammatical pattern in two consecutive verses — and this makes the two sentences into a single pair.

جَمّ — root ج-م-م: multitude, a heap, being full to overflowing. Jamma'l-māʾ — the water collected, it increased. Jamām — a vessel's being filled to the brim, the point of overflowing.

That is, ḥubban jammā is not "to love much"; it is "to love more than the vessel can hold". There is an image of overflowing in the word.

And this connects silently with the eleventh verse of the sūra: there the peoples ṭaghaw — they overflowed. Here the love overflows. I record it as my own reading, but that both words carry the image of overflowing stands in the text.

Note the measure. The verse does not say "you love wealth". Loving wealth is not recorded as an offence in the Qurʾān; on the contrary the Qurʾān uses the word khayr (good) for wealth as well (al-Baqara 2/180: "if he leaves behind some good"). What the verse criticises is not the existence of the love but its proportion.

This forms a pair with Sūrat al-ʿĀdiyāt:

"And he is indeed fierce in his love of good things." (al-ʿĀdiyāt 100/8 — wa innahu li-ḥubbi'l-khayri la-shadīd)

Two words on two separate scales: one states the strength of the grip, the other its quantity. Together they give the two dimensions of the relation built with wealth.

Before establishing this link a warning is needed, because it is open to an easy error:

جَمّ (ج-م-م) and جَمَع (ج-م-ع) are not the same root. Their final letters differ, and in Arabic the root is determined by the identity of the three consonants. There is no root-kinship between jamaʿa mālan in al-Humaza and ḥubban jammā in al-Fajr.

But the family of sense is the same: both carry the idea of piling up, increasing, coming together. I record this as an association, not as a claim of derivation.

The real link is elsewhere and deeper:

The two sūras state two different false beliefs about the same act. One says "wealth makes me lasting", the other "wealth shows my worth". Both take wealth out of being a means and turn it into a certificate: one a certificate of immortality, the other a certificate of worth.

The finding recorded in the section on al-Humaza holds here as well: "The value of a means is in its use; the value of an end is in its existence." The man in al-Fajr uses his wealth — he eats it. But what he eats is not what he laboured for, and while eating he does not distinguish. That is, for him wealth is neither a means nor a trust; it is a state.

And an observation as to subject matter: in the triad al-Takāthur–al-ʿAṣr–al-Humaza, number, wealth and death were treated together. Al-Fajr adds a fourth term to the same triad: worth. I must state that this is not a claim about the arrangement of the codex — al-Fajr is far from that triad; the link I establish concerns the subject, not the arrangement.

The sūra counts four verbs in four verses, and their sequence is not accidental. I record this as my own reading:

The first two are omissions, the last two excesses. And the ordering descends from outside inwards: first what is not done for another, then what is done for oneself, and at the very end the act of the heart.

The last of them — ḥubb, love — is not a behaviour but the source of behaviour. And the sūra puts it last.

This is the same as what al-Humaza does: there too the behaviour was counted first (he gathered, he counted), and then the supposition beneath it was stated (yaḥsabu). The Qurʾān generally builds its diagnosis this way: it begins from the visible act and descends to the source.

And a conclusion follows from this: the sūra is not counting four separate faults. It is counting four appearances of a single fault and naming it in the fourth.