al-Muʾminūn 23:116

fa-taʿāla'llāhu'l-maliku'l-ḥaqq, lā ilāha illā hū, rabbu'l-ʿarshi'l-karīm

"Exalted is God, the true Sovereign. There is no god but He, the Lord of the noble throne."

The root ع-ل-و was treated at the forty-sixth verse, and its three occurrences were tabulated there (46, 91, 116). This is the third and the last of them.

And the word order must be recorded: the sentence begins with fa — that is, as the consequence drawn from the preceding verse.

I record this as my own reading, its ground being this particle: the hundred and fifteenth verse had asked whether the creation was in vain. The hundred and sixteenth gives the answer with a name: al-Maliku'l-Ḥaqq — "the true Sovereign."

The root م-ل-ك was treated at the eighty-eighth verse (malakūt).

The root ح-ق-ق: a thing's being fixed and in its place. Ḥaqq — what is fixed, what is real; and a right, a due.

And the construction must be recorded: al-Maliku'l-Ḥaqq — an adjective, "the true Sovereign".

I give this as an observation: the adjective reports not that the sovereignty exists but that it is true. And several claims of false sovereignty were named across the sūra — Pharaoh's company (46), the supposed gods (91), those who made others serve them (47).

And the word al-Ḥaqq occurred several times in the sūra: 41 (bi'l-ḥaqq), 62 (bi'l-ḥaqq), 70 (bi'l-ḥaqq and li'l-ḥaqq), 71 (al-ḥaqq), 90 (bi'l-ḥaqq), 116 (al-Ḥaqq). And in the hundred and sixteenth verse the word comes for the first time as an attribute of a name. This is a distribution that can be verified from the text.

The root ع-ر-ش: to raise, to roof a thing over. ʿArsh — a throne, a raised canopy; ʿarīsh — a trellis for vines.

And the construction had occurred in the eighty-sixth verse with a different adjective:

Two adjectives, in the same construction, thirty verses apart. This is a repetition that can be verified within the sūra.

The root ك-ر-م: to be precious, to be generous. The root was treated at al-ʿAlaq 96/3 (wa rabbuka'l-akram) and at al-Dukhān 44/49.

And the difference between the two adjectives is worth recording, and I give this as my own reading: ʿaẓīm looks to measure — magnitude. Karīm looks to worth — nobility.

And the settings of the two verses fit this difference: the eighty-sixth verse was a question (who is the Lord of these) — there magnitude is named. The hundred and sixteenth is a conclusion — there worth is named.

This is a reading, and it is not binding.