al-Nūr 24:21

Yā ayyuhā'lladhīna āmanū lā tattabiʿū khuṭuwāti'l-shayṭān, wa man yattabiʿ khuṭuwāti'l-shayṭāni fa-innahū yaʾmuru bi'l-faḥshāʾi wa'l-munkar, wa law lā faḍlu'llāhi ʿalaykum wa raḥmatuhū mā zakā minkum min aḥadin abadan wa lākinna'llāha yuzakkī man yashāʾ, wa'llāhu samīʿun ʿalīm

"O you who believe, do not follow the footsteps of Satan. Whoever follows the footsteps of Satan — he commands indecency and what is wrong. Were it not for God's bounty towards you and His mercy, not one of you would ever have been purified; but God purifies whom He wills. God is hearing, knowing."

Root: خ-ط-و. Its concrete sense is to take a step. Khuṭwa — a step, the distance between two feet.

That the word comes in the plural, and that it is not a figure, is worth noting. The verse does not say "do not follow Satan's road" — it says "his footsteps".

And the difference between the two words describes a mechanism, which I record as my own reading:

A road is seen from the start; one decides whether to enter it or not. A step, on the other hand, is not a road by itself. As one steps, where one is going is not visible; only the place of the next step is.

And what is told between the eleventh and the twentieth verses is exactly a process that works step by step: a report is heard (12), repeated (15), thought a small thing (15), spread (19). At no stage does anyone say "I am now doing a great evil".

This is why the verse chooses the word khuṭuwāt, and the connection can be read from the arrangement: the verse comes immediately after the diagnosis of hayyinan (thinking it a small thing) in the fifteenth.

The form is worth noting too: tattabiʿū — Form VIII, ittibāʿ. This form conveys here a going after, a following of tracks. The man is not looking ahead; he is looking at someone's tracks.

And the expression is a pattern repeated in the Qurʾān: the same expression occurs at al-Baqara, 2/168 and 2/208, and also at al-Anʿām 6/142. The same structure in all four places: lā tattabiʿū khuṭuwāti'l-shayṭān.

فَحْشَاء — root ف-ح-ش: analysed at the nineteenth verse. An ugliness that exceeds the measure.

مُنكَر — root ن-ك-ر: not to be recognised, to be found strange. The root was analysed at Luqmān, 31/19 (ankara'l-aṣwāt — the most jarring of voices) and occurred at 31/17 as wa'nha ʿani'l-munkar; I rely on those treatments.

The coming of the two words together sets up a scale:

The one, that is, looks at quantity, the other at recognition. The opposite of munkar is maʿrūf: what is known, recognised, accepted by everyone as right.

زَكَىٰ — root ز-ك-و. This root has been taken up at many places in this commentary — al-Aʿlā, al-Shams, al-Layl, ʿAbasa. Its concrete sense: to increase, to grow, to be fruitful; and to be cleansed.

The lexicographers draw the connection between the two senses of the root thus: a thing grows only when it has been cleared of foreign elements. A crop yields nothing until it is cleared of weeds.

And the word will return again and again in the sūra:

The same root in four places, in three different tasks. And in all three the same thing is said: to hold back from a thing is the condition of increase.

I record this as my own reading; the places of the words can be counted in the text and their repetitions seen.

And the qualification in the verse's arrangement is important: mā zakā minkum min aḥadin abadā — "not one of you would ever have been purified". Purification, that is, is not set down as an outcome man reaches on his own. The sentence goes on with an exception: wa lākinna'llāha yuzakkī man yashāʾ.

This enters a note upon the whole of the section. The verses from eleven to twenty-one were correcting a community's fault. And the section closes by saying that those who were corrected did not achieve it themselves.

This note also settles how the sūra is to be read: to take up the text and use it to sort the purified from the unpurified runs against the verse's last sentence.