إِنَّ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ لِرَبِّهِۦ لَكَنُودٌ
The answer to the oath (al-muqsam ʿalayh). The single sentence that comes after five verses of preparation.
1. إِنَّ — the particle of emphasis: "truly, without doubt". 2. لَ — the lām al-ibtidāʾ; because it has slid to the far side of inna it is called the displaced lām (lām al-muzaḥlaqa). A second emphasis. 3. A five-verse oath — set before the sentence, the heaviest emphasis of all.
As was recorded earlier in this commentary (the sections on al-ʿAṣr and al-Takāthur), by the measure of rhetoric this density shows a single thing: the addressee is in a position to object to what is said. No one swears three times over for something that is going to be accepted.
And here the source of the objection is plain: no one counts himself ungrateful. Ingratitude is an attribute nobody takes upon himself.
The ordinary word order of the sentence would have been inna'l-insāna la-kanūdun li-Rabbihī. In the verse li-Rabbihī has been drawn in front of the predicate (kanūd).
In Arabic an element brought forward out of its normal place (taqdīm) gains emphasis and restriction. We saw the same technique in this commentary at the last verse of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: lahū kufuwan aḥad — "to Him there is no equal".
Its function here is this: it emphasises that the ingratitude is not general but is directed specifically at his Lord. A man may not be ungrateful to others; he knows what he owes, he gives his thanks, he shows his loyalty. What the verse states is exactly where the fault is directed.
Rabb — as was treated in the section on al-Fātiḥa, is the name that carries ownership and nurture together: the one who feeds, who raises, who brings to ripeness by degrees. The verse does not say "he is ungrateful to Allāh"; it says "to his Lord".
This names the sharpest form of ingratitude. Ingratitude towards a stranger is a rudeness; ingratitude towards the one who raised you belongs to another category.
Note that the same name is chosen in the preceding sūra as well: "because your Lord has revealed to it" (al-Zalzala 99/5). Two neighbouring sūras name the agent of that scene by the same name.
The key word of the sūra, and a word that occurs only here in the Qurʾān — a hapax legomenon. The same situation we recorded for ṣamad and kufuw in the section on al-Ikhlāṣ: there is no second use inside the Qurʾān to explain the word. The meaning has to be drawn from the use of the root in Arabic.
| Sense | Account |
|---|---|
| One who denies a favour, ungrateful | The most widespread rendering, and the one given most directly |
| Barren soil | Arḍ kanūd — land that takes the rain and yet brings up no plant |
| To cut (kanada = qaṭaʿa) | One who breaks the bond, who cuts off the relation |
| One who rebels | A use recorded in some dialects |
The second sense calls for a pause, because it is what turns the word from an insult into a description.
Kanūd soil is not soil that lacks rain. The rain falls, the water comes down, the season comes — and nothing comes up out of the soil. There is an input; there is no output.
This is exactly the description of ingratitude: what is received turning into nothing. The ungrateful person is not the one who refuses the favour; he is the one who takes the favour, uses it, consumes it, and produces nothing in return.
This is a far wider description than the ingratitude that is understood as "not saying thank you". Thanksgiving is not a matter confined to words; it is what has been received turning into something.
The word the Qurʾān properly uses for ingratitude is كُفْر, and that root was treated in this commentary at al-Baqara 2/6. What was established there was this: the root k-f-r means to cover; a farmer is called kāfir because he covers the seed with soil; kufr is not a failure to know but a covering over of what one knows.
| كُفْر | كُنُود | |
|---|---|---|
| Root sense | To cover, to close over | To be barren, to yield no crop |
| Its place in farming | The sower's act — he covers the seed with soil | The soil's condition — it gives nothing back for what is sown |
| Where it takes place | In the agent: something is done | In the constitution: something fails to happen |
| What it hides | It hides the knower; the knowledge is there and is covered | It hides nothing; there is nothing there to begin with |
| How it is detected | From the presence of what is covered | From the absence of what was expected |
Both come from farming, but from two different ends of the field. Kufr is a work the sower does — an act, a choice, a movement of covering. Kunūd, on the other hand, is the condition of the soil — not an act but a barrenness.
This distinction has a practical consequence: kufr is an action, and so it can be brought to an end at once — the cover is lifted. Kunūd is a fault of make-up; there is no cover to lift. The person who notices his own ingratitude finds no obstacle in his hand to be removed; because the problem does not lie in something done but in something not done.
This parallel, which ties both words to farming, is my own reading; but the dictionary senses of the two roots are as recorded above, and they are not in dispute.
There is a description of this word repeated very often in the exegetical tradition: the kanūd is the one who counts his misfortunes and forgets his favours.
I do not ascribe this description to any one person; since it is transmitted in different sources with ascriptions to different names, I cannot speak with certainty. But the description itself is instructive and agrees with the dictionary sense of the word.
Why does it agree? Because "counting" is a work of attention. The person who counts his misfortunes is not lying; he is counting things he really has lived through. The problem is not in the accuracy of the count but in what enters the count.
The point at which this overlaps with a modern observation. In the psychological literature there is a wide discussion of people's tendency to give more weight to negative stimuli than to positive ones; this tendency goes by various names (negativity bias, loss aversion). Findings to the effect that losses are felt more heavily than gains are widely discussed in economics and in psychology.
In recording this three things must be stated: the scope and the explanatory power of these concepts are disputed in the literature; the verse does not announce these concepts; and the agreement between the two descriptions does not mean that the one foretold the other. The same records I entered for Veblen in the section on al-Takāthur hold here as well.
The difference in the verse is this: the modern literature defines this as a bias of perception, that is, as an error. The verse places the same phenomenon inside a relation of debt. A bias, when it is not said towards whom it runs, is a neutral mechanism; the verse names the party it runs towards: li-Rabbihī.