al-Takāthur 102:5

Kallā law taʿlamūna ʿilma'l-yaqīn "No! If only you knew with the knowledge of certainty."

The densest verse of the sūra. The third kallā, and after it a conditional sentence whose answering clause is not spoken.

لو in Arabic is of the kind called the imtināʿ condition: it supposes a condition that did not come about, and reports that the result depending on it did not come about either. "Had it been thus, it would have been so — but it was not."

The verse, that is, registers at the level of language that the one addressed does not possess certain knowledge. Had they known, the situation would not have been this.

The answering clause of the conditional (jawāb al-law) is not spoken. "If only you knew with the knowledge of certainty…" — and there is no more.

This is a recognised manner of speech in Arabic and the lexicographers treat it under the heading of ḥadhf (ellipsis). Its function is this: when the answer is not spoken, the one addressed completes it himself, and the answer a man completes himself is always more effective than the one spoken. Besides which, the answer is not reduced to a single thing.

Possible completions: …you would not have entered that race. …you would not have been distracted for a single moment. …you would have been seized with horror. …you would have let go of what you had gathered. All of them may be right; the text chooses none of them.

This gap is the third instance of something the sūra has already done twice: abundance of what was not said, what you will know was not said, what will happen is not said. In a text of eight verses, three deliberate gaps. The sūra keeps the one addressed continually at work in his own mind.

The root of يَقِين: ي-ق-ن. The complete removal of doubt; knowledge settling, becoming fixed. Some of the lexicographers record that beneath the root lies the sense of clearing, settling, coming to rest — as muddy water clears and settles to the bottom. Yaqīn is supposition settling out into knowledge.

In the Qurʾān the word occurs both in the sense of knowledge and in the sense of death:

• "and of the hereafter they are certain" (al-Baqara 2/4) — the verbal form.
• "because they were patient and were certain of Our signs…" (al-Sajda 32/24).
• "And serve your Lord until the certainty comes to you" (al-Ḥijr 15/99). According to the majority of the exegetes the yaqīn here is death — because death is the moment about which no doubt at all remains. This usage of the word makes a silent link with the second verse of Sūrat al-Takāthur.

The grammatical analysis of the construct. ʿIlm al-yaqīn is resolved in two ways:

• An annexation that is adjectival in form: originally al-ʿilm al-yaqīn (the knowledge that is certain), turned into a construct. That is, "certain knowledge".
• An absolute object: on the structure taʿlamūna ʿilman (to know with a knowing), the verbal noun being annexed: "to know with the knowing of certainty".

The two come out in the same place and make no difference of meaning. The emphasis is this: the kind of the knowledge is being specified. The matter is not knowing but how one knows.

Three forms of this construct occur in the Qurʾān:

Honesty is required here. In later periods — particularly in the Sufi literature — this trio was turned into a systematic order of stages: to know by report → to see → to live, or to be. This systematisation does not occur, gathered together and defined, in the Qurʾān itself. The Qurʾān uses these three constructs, but it does not present them as a teaching in three steps; nor do the three ever come side by side in one place.

This does not mean that the systematisation is wrong. That the first two constructs come in the same sūra, in the right order and in verses following one another shows that the idea of a gradation has a ground in the text. But to present it as a system of terms set up by the Qurʾān goes beyond the data we have.

There is an example widely repeated in this literature, and I transmit it because it is instructive, without ascribing it to any one person: When someone tells you that a fire exists, you know it — this is ʿilm al-yaqīn. When you see the flame with your own eye, it becomes ʿayn al-yaqīn. And when your hand touches the fire, you have arrived at ḥaqq al-yaqīn.

Where the sūra stands within this trio is important. Al-Takāthur contains the first two and does not contain the third. The text passes from knowledge to seeing and stops there. I read this not as a deficiency but as a limit — and I must state that this is my own reading: the sūra does not describe the moment of contact to the one addressed; it carries him only as far as the moment of seeing. The place left undescribed is exactly the place where the unspoken answer of the conditional in verse 5 lies.

Here the sūra brings its diagnosis to its final form.

Man does not enter into takāthur because he is wicked. He enters it because he does not know. More exactly: he enters it although he supposes that he knows, because the knowledge is not of a kind that works. Almost every man knows that he will die; there is nobody who does not know it. But this knowledge does not change the behaviour.

This is exactly what the verse says: you have knowledge, but not of the kind of certainty. The difference between the two knowledges is not a difference of truth — it is a difference of power to affect. If you do not live according to what you know to be true, that knowledge is of another kind.