وَإِنَّهُۥ لِحُبِّ ٱلْخَيْرِ لَشَدِيدٌ
Root: خ-ي-ر. Good, benefit, the thing preferred. But in Arabic this word is used in the sense of wealth as well, and the Qurʾān makes this use itself:
"It is prescribed for you, when death comes to one of you and he is to leave khayr (wealth), that he make a bequest to parents and kin in a fitting way." (al-Baqara 2/180)
- The settled use of the word in Arabic.
- The context: ingratitude is a fault named together with wealth.
- The natural relation the word shadīd (hard, intense) forms with the love of wealth.
A small number of exegetes have read khayr in the general sense of "good" and understood the verse as "although he loves good greatly, he is ungrateful". This reading stays weak and does not sit with the context; I content myself with recording it.
The fineness in the choice of the word. For wealth Arabic has the word māl, and the Qurʾān uses it abundantly (twice at al-Humaza 104/2-3). Here khayr has been chosen in its place.
There is a diagnosis in this choice: man calls wealth not "wealth" but "good". He sees the thing in his hand not as a neutral object but as the thing that is good. The word itself carries man's way of looking at wealth.
I record this as a reading. But that the Qurʾān chose to name the same thing māl in al-Humaza gives one to think that the choice is meaningful.
Root: ش-د-د. The concrete sense of the root is to tighten, to tie a bond tight. Shadda'l-ʿuqdata — he tightened the knot. From this the sense "intense, harsh, strong" is born: what is tight is what is not slack.
The first reading — "intense". Shadīd here means "excessive, dense", and li-ḥubbi'l-khayr is its object (brought forward): "he is intense in his love of wealth." That is, the degree of the love is what is described.
The second reading — "close-fisted". In Arabic shadīd is also used in the sense of "close-handed, holding, not letting go". On this reading the lām states a cause: "because of his love of wealth he is close-handed." That is, not the degree of the love but the result of the love is described.
Both readings have been defended in the classical sources and they do not exclude one another: the one who loves intensely holds tight. The root's sense of "tightening" carries them both at once.
| Verse 6 | Verse 8 | |
|---|---|---|
| Emphasis | إِنَّ | وَإِنَّهُ |
| The fronted phrase | لِرَبِّهِ | لِحُبِّ ٱلْخَيْرِ |
| Displaced lām + predicate | لَكَنُودٌ | لَشَدِيدٌ |
The two sentences are of exactly the same word order: emphasis + a fronted phrase with lām + a predicate with lām. And their verse-endings agree as well: kanūd / shadīd.
Since the two sentences are on the same pattern, the contrast between them is set up by the pattern itself:
- Towards his Lord: kanūd — barren, giving nothing back, slack.
- Towards wealth: shadīd — tight, holding, not letting go.
The same man looks in two directions and is of two different constitutions. In the one barren like soil, in the other tight like a knot. Tight where he ought to be slack, barren where he ought to be fruitful.
I record this as a reading I have drawn from the grammar of the two verses; I do not present it as transmitted. But the identity of word order in the two verses is plain in the text.
6 — What he is: he is ungrateful. 7 — That he knows it: he is himself the witness. 8 — Why he is so: his interest is elsewhere, and there it is very dense.
The third explains the first two. Ingratitude is born not from an absence of feeling but from a displacement of feeling. The capacity for attachment is not lacking in the person; there is more than enough of it — but it has turned towards another object.
This is the same diagnosis as the one recorded for the word lahw in the section on al-Takāthur: there too the question was not the doing of an evil but the fastening of attention somewhere else. The core of lahw was displacement. Here the same displacement is said of love.