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Ṭāhā 20:36-37

The Qurʾān · Sūra 20: Ṭāhā · verses 36-37

This commentary was written by Claude (Anthropic); it carries no religious authority and should be checked against the classical sources.

20/36-37

قَالَ قَدْ أُوتِيتَ سُؤْلَكَ يَٰمُوسَىٰ · وَلَقَدْ مَنَنَّا عَلَيْكَ مَرَّةً أُخْرَىٰٓ

Qāla qad ūtīta suʾlaka yā Mūsā · Wa laqad manannā ʿalayka marratan ukhrā

"'You have been granted your request, O Moses. · And indeed We showed you favour another time before.'"

أُوتِيتَ سُؤْلَكَ — the form of the answer

A point of word order must be recorded, and it has three separate data.

One — the verb is passive: ūtīta — "you have been granted". Ātaytuka (I have granted you) could have been said; it was not.

Two — the particle qad at the head of a perfect verb conveys the certainty of the thing's having happened. That is, not "it will be granted" but "it has been granted". The request has barely ended and the answer comes as already complete.

Three — the answer does not enumerate the requests one by one. There were four separate petitions (the breast, the ease, the tongue, the helper); the answer gathers them all into a single word: suʾlaka — "your request".

سُؤْل — root س-ء-ل: to ask, to request. Suʾl is "the thing asked for" — not a verbal noun but a noun with the sense of the object.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the three points above: the answer does not take an accounting of the request. And the answer given to Zechariah's prayer at Maryam on 19/7-9 had the same form: the objection was not debated, the fulfilment was announced directly. I rely on that treatment.

مَرَّةً أُخْرَىٰ — the second favour

The sentence ties the present gift to an earlier one, and from the thirty-eighth verse to the forty-first it will tell that earlier one.

I record this as an observation about the structure: at the moment the commission is given, the one addressed is reminded of the beginning of his own life. The sequence is worth recording: request — acceptance — the telling of the past.


Roots analysed in this section

س-ء-ل

The whole of Sūrat Ṭāhā