ٱلزَّانِى لَا يَنكِحُ إِلَّا زَانِيَةً أَوْ مُشْرِكَةً وَٱلزَّانِيَةُ لَا يَنكِحُهَآ إِلَّا زَانٍ أَوْ مُشْرِكٌ وَحُرِّمَ ذَٰلِكَ عَلَى ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ
Al-zānī lā yankiḥu illā zāniyatan aw mushrikatan wa'l-zāniyatu lā yankiḥuhā illā zānin aw mushrik, wa ḥurrima dhālika ʿala'l-muʾminīn
"The man who commits adultery marries none but a woman who commits adultery or a woman who associates; and the woman who commits adultery is married by none but a man who commits adultery or a man who associates. This has been forbidden to the believers."
In the second verse the order began with the woman; here it begins with the man. Two verses in succession, in two different orders.
This sets up a balance in the wording, and I record it as an observation: the pair of verses makes it hard to draw any superiority or precedence from which party is named first. The order changes between the two verses.
This verse is one of the places in the Qurʾān most disputed as to the kind of sentence it is, and the source of the disagreement is this: the sentence is built in the indicative, but at its end there stands a prohibiting clause (wa ḥurrima dhālika).
| Reading | The kind of sentence | Its sense |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A statement — the description of a state of affairs | One who does this act in fact comes together with such a person; the verse describes a fact |
| 2 | A performative — a ruling | This is a prohibition of marriage, and the ḥurrima at the end says so |
| 3 | A rebuke — a putting-down | The sentence is one of style, framed to devalue the act |
| 4 | Belonging to a limited case | Revealed about a particular situation, and conveying no general ruling |
This disagreement takes up wide space in the classical works of commentary and of jurisprudence. Among the schools too there is division over the marriage ruling drawn from this verse: some jurists have drawn a binding prohibition of marriage from it, while the majority have not taken it so and have explained the verse in another way.
I make no preference, I issue no legal ruling, and none of these is binding. I content myself with recording that the disagreement exists.
The sense the lexicographers record: one thing's joining with another, interlocking with it. Tanākaḥati'l-ashjār — the branches of the trees interlaced. The word is used both of the contract of marriage and of union, and occurs in the Qurʾān in both senses.
Which sense is meant in the verse is part of the disagreement above. That the word carries two senses is one of the reasons the sentence can be read in two ways.
| Subject | Predicate | Limit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The first | al-zānī | lā yankiḥu | illā zāniyatan aw mushrikatan |
| The second | al-zāniya | lā yankiḥuhā | illā zānin aw mushrikun |
The symmetry is exact. And the work of the symmetry becomes visible when it is read together with the sūra's later verses: in this sūra there is no burden laid on one side alone. In the second verse the penalty was bound equally to both parties; here the description is bound equally to both; in the sixth verse the oath of liʿān will be left equal in number for both.
The reason lies within the sūra: the fourth verse is the verse that binds the naming of someone with this attribute — unless four witnesses are brought — to a penalty. The sūra, that is, takes as its addressee, one verse later, the man who picks up the language of the third verse and fastens it to a person.
This is the same measure recorded in al-Ḥujurāt: the text is an instrument of diagnosis, and the diagnosis is applied first to oneself.