al-Nūr 24:53

Wa aqsamū bi'llāhi jahda aymānihim la-in amartahum la-yakhrujunn, qul lā tuqsimū, ṭāʿatun maʿrūfa, inna'llāha khabīrun bimā taʿmalūn

"They swore by God with the utmost of their oaths that if you ordered them they would certainly go forth. Say: 'Do not swear. A known obedience is what is asked. God is aware of what you do.'"

جَهْد — root ج-ه-د: to spend strength, to exert oneself. Jihād and ijtihād are from the same root. And jahda aymānihim: the utmost degree their oaths can reach.

The expression is a pattern repeated in the Qurʾān (al-Anʿām 6/109; al-Naḥl 16/38; al-Nūr 24/53; Fāṭir 35/42).

And what the places where the pattern occurs have in common is worth noting, and I give this as an observation: in the Qurʾān the expression generally occurs together with a warning that follows the oath.

Here is the most striking place in the verse.

A group makes an undertaking with the heaviest oath. And the answer is this: "do not swear."

This builds a link with the sūra's twenty-second verse. There too there was a matter of an oath: wa lā yaʾtali — on the first reading, "let them not swear". In both verses an oath is used as an instrument for fixing a behaviour, and in both verses it is rejected.

I record this as my own reading; the discussion of the oath in the two verses stands in the text.

And the logic common to the two prohibitions is this: an oath is an attempt to put a word in the place of a deed. In both places the sūra asks for the deed.

There is disagreement in the classical commentaries over the case of the expression, and it needs transmitting:

I impose no preference, and it is not binding.

But the word maʿrūf may be dwelt on.

مَعْرُوف — root ع-ر-ف: to know, to recognise. And maʿrūf: what is known, what is recognised; and from there "the good" — what everyone knows to be good.

The word is the opposite of munkar, and munkar occurred in the twenty-first verse of this sūra (yaʾmuru bi'l-faḥshāʾi wa'l-munkar).

The two words stand facing each other in the sūra. I record this as an observation about the word order.

And the measure the expression carries is this, which I record as my own reading: a maʿrūf obedience is an obedience whose measure is known. Not one exaggerated in words, but one done in fact and within known bounds.

The verse, that is, sets what is known over against great oaths.