al-Baqara 2:44 — Forgetting oneself

"Do you enjoin righteousness upon people and forget yourselves? And you recite the Book! Will you not use your reason?"

This verse is the most often quoted sentence in the whole section, and most of those who quote it use it against some other congregation. Yet the structure of the verse turns it back on the one reading it.

Root b-r-r. Its primary sense is breadth: from the same root comes barr — dry land, that is, the wide expanse set over against the sea. Birr is this breadth: goodness, in the word's own logic, is the opposite of narrowness. Miserliness narrows, goodness widens.

The Qurʾān defines this word plainly in one place, and the definition is surprisingly wide: "Righteousness (birr) is not that you turn your faces to the east and the west. Righteousness is that of one who believes in God and the last day… and gives of his wealth, though he loves it, to relatives, orphans and the poor…" (al-Baqara 2/177). Birr, then, is not a ceremony but a sum of conduct.

The verb is not "you do not do" but "you forget". This is a finer diagnosis: the person is not deliberately leaving himself outside; while giving the counsel he simply does not bring to mind that he is among those addressed.

The mechanism is familiar. To explain a truth to someone else gives a person the feeling of possessing that truth. Explaining takes the place of doing. Indeed the better the explaining is done, the stronger the substitution becomes.

وَأَنتُمْ تَتْلُونَ ٱلْكِتَٰبَ — "and you go on reciting the Book". The verb is in the form conveying continuity: the reciting goes on. Contact with the text has not been broken; what has been broken is the bond between the text and the person.

The sense of the root gives the end of the verse a force of its own.

Root ʿ-q-l: to bind. ʿIqāl is the rope tied round a camel's knee to stop it running off. Arabic has given the mind this name — reason, in the word's own logic, is not a store of knowledge but a tether. The thing that holds a person, that reins him in, that keeps him from being swept away.

That the verb in this verse comes from this root completes the sentence: you have knowledge, you recite, you even teach — but if the knowledge does not bind you, you have not used your reason. That is the difference between knowing and using reason: one is acquiring, the other is being bound.