al-Naḥl 16:110-111

Thumma inna rabbaka lilladhīna hājarū min baʿdi mā futinū thumma jāhadū wa ṣabarū inna rabbaka min baʿdihā la-ghafūrun raḥīm · Yawma taʾtī kullu nafsin tujādilu ʿan nafsihā wa tuwaffā kullu nafsin mā ʿamilat wa hum lā yuẓlamūn

"Then your Lord — for those who emigrated after they had been put to the test, and then strove and were patient: your Lord after all that is surely most forgiving, most merciful. · On the day when every soul comes pleading for itself, and every soul is paid in full for what it did, and they are not wronged."

The verse ranges three verbs with thumma and wāw:

And it must be compared with the forty-first verse:

This is a repetition verifiable within the sūra, and I record this as my own reading, its ground being the difference of the closings: the forty-first verse closes with a reward, the hundred and tenth with forgiveness.

And the reason for this lies in the context: the hundred and tenth verse comes directly after the passage on compulsion in the hundred and sixth. The choice of the word "forgiving" is thus connected with the four verses before it. This is an observation, and it rests on the two passages standing back to back.

And one of the plainest rings in the sūra is completed here.

In the fourth verse man was named khaṣīmun mubīn (an open disputant). In the hundred and eleventh the same verb is used for the last scene of disputation: tujādilu ʿan nafsihā — "it pleads for itself."

All three occurrences can be verified from the text, and they stand at three different places in the sūra.

I record this as my own reading, my ground being this threefold set: the sūra first identifies disputation as an attribute (4), then shows that attribute in its most helpless state (111) — a soul pleads for itself and the plea avails nothing — and finally gives that same tendency a direction (125).

The sūra, then, neither ignores nor forbids man's most conspicuous trait; it sets it to a task.

And the line recorded at al-Kahf, 18/54 (akthara shayʾin jadalā) is completed here: it was said there, "the tendency is identified, then a limit is set". In al-Naḥl the tendency is identified, its outcome is shown, and a method is given.