al-Nūr 24:16

Wa law lā idh samiʿtumūhu qultum mā yakūnu lanā an natakallama bi-hādhā subḥānaka hādhā buhtānun ʿaẓīm

"When you heard it, ought you not to have said: 'It is not for us to speak of this. Glory be to You — this is a great slander'?"

The verse opens with the same note of time as the twelfth: idh samiʿtumūh — "when you heard it".

The sūra, that is, returns twice to the same moment and twice asks for a different sentence:

The two sentences look in two different directions, and this is the verse's most important point of arrangement.

The sentence in the twelfth verse rejects the truth of the report. The sentence in the sixteenth, without entering the question of truth at all, rejects the speaker's standing to speak.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the content of the two sentences.

In Arabic the pattern conveys a lack of standing. Literally: "it is not for us", "this does not belong to us". The Qurʾān uses the same pattern elsewhere: mā yakūnu lī an aqūla mā laysa lī bi-ḥaqq (al-Māʾida 5/116) — "it is not for me to say what is not my right".

And the work of the pattern here is worth recording.

The verse does not say "this is not true" or "we do not know this". It says "this is not our business".

Two distinct positions, then, can be taken in the face of a report, and the sūra asks for both:

Recording the second position is important, because it is wider than the first.

We cannot always know whether a report is true. But we can always know whether a report belongs to us. The second question requires no knowledge.

And this is the same as the logic of the prohibition of tajassus (prying) at al-Ḥujurāt, 49/12. The measure recorded there was this: "The difference lies in whose the knowledge is: where a lost brother is is no one's privacy; but a man's hidden condition belongs to him."

al-Nūr 24/16 builds the same measure from the side of speech: if a piece of knowledge is not mine, then speaking about it is not mine either.

I record this connection as my own reading.

Root: ك-ل-م. And the root has an interesting side: from the same root come both kalima (a word) and kalm (a wound).

Kalm — a wound opened upon a body, a cut. The connection the lexicographers draw is this: a word leaves a mark upon the one who hears it — just as a wound does.

I transmit this connection as an explanation the lexicographers record, not as a claim of derivation. That the two words are from the same root stands in the dictionary.

And the context here shows the reasonable side of the connection: the verse is speaking of what a word does in a human being.

Here is the most striking place in the verse, and it has been dwelt on in the classical commentaries.

Subḥānaka — "glory be to You". Root س-ب-ح: to swim, to go flowing; and from there tasbīḥ: to keep a thing clear of what does not befit it. The root has been taken up at many places in this commentary; it will return in the forty-first verse of the sūra.

And the difficulty is this: why is a sentence of tanzīh said in the face of a report of slander?

The explanations transmitted in the classical commentaries are these:

I impose no preference, and none is binding.

But an observation about the word order may be recorded, and I give it as my own reading: the sentence the verse asks for has three parts, and each of the three looks in a different direction.

In a single sentence, then, the verse asks for three distinct judgements: of one's standing, of the measure, and of the report.

Root: ب-ه-ت. This root was analysed in al-Mumtaḥana; I rely on that treatment. The note there:

Root ب-ه-ت: to strike dumb, to leave stunned. Buhtān is not an ordinary lie: it is a slander so unlooked for that it stuns the one it is aimed at, one before which he does not know what to say. The word itself describes the effect of the slander.

And the usage at al-Baqara 2/258 was named there: fa-buhita'lladhī kafar — "the one who disbelieved was struck dumb".

Now the three words in the sūra can be set side by side, and it is seen that each does a distinct work:

Three words in three different places, and none of the three is a needless repetition. The sūra names the same event from three different sides: what it is, what it does, and how it spreads.

I record this table as my own reading; the places and roots of the words stand in the text.

And one further observation: the sense of buhtān as "leaving without an answer" describes the condition of the one slandered.

The heaviest side of a slander is that it cannot be answered. That a thing not done was not done cannot be proved. There is no evidence in hand, because a thing that did not happen leaves no trace either. The one slandered is, for precisely this reason, buhita — struck dumb.

I record this as my own reading; its ground is the sense in the root of the word, and that sense was recorded independently in al-Mumtaḥana.

And why the fourth verse puts the burden of proof upon the claimant is understood exactly here: because the other side cannot prove.