قُل لَّن يَنفَعَكُمُ ٱلْفِرَارُ إِن فَرَرْتُم مِّنَ ٱلْمَوْتِ أَوِ ٱلْقَتْلِ وَإِذًا لَّا تُمَتَّعُونَ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا · قُلْ مَن ذَا ٱلَّذِى يَعْصِمُكُم مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ إِنْ أَرَادَ بِكُمْ سُوٓءًا أَوْ أَرَادَ بِكُمْ رَحْمَةً وَلَا يَجِدُونَ لَهُم مِّن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ وَلِيًّا وَلَا نَصِيرًا
Qul lan yanfaʿakumu'l-firāru in farartum mina'l-mawti awi'l-qatli wa idhan lā tumattaʿūna illā qalīlā · Qul man dha'lladhī yaʿṣimukum mina'llāhi in arāda bikum sūʾan aw arāda bikum raḥma, wa lā yajidūna lahum min dūni'llāhi waliyyan wa lā naṣīrā
"Say: If you flee from death or from being killed, fleeing will not profit you; and then you will be given enjoyment but a little. · Say: Who is it that can protect you from God if He wills harm for you, or if He wills mercy for you? They will find for themselves, apart from God, neither friend nor helper."
In the thirteenth verse the diagnosis had been made: in yurīdūna illā firārā. The sixteenth verse takes the same word and does a piece of arithmetic: does fleeing work?
And the verse's answer is not moral but arithmetical. It does not say "fleeing is bad". It says "it will not profit you".
| Word | Root | What |
|---|---|---|
| ٱلْمَوْت | م-و-ت | Death — an end that comes of itself |
| ٱلْقَتْل | ق-ت-ل | Being killed — the act of an agent |
The function of the distinction is this: the one who flees is fleeing the second. By setting the two side by side the verse says that what is being fled from is not a kind but an end. Fleeing the second does not remove the first.
وَإِذًا لَّا تُمَتَّعُونَ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا — مُتْعَة / تَمْتِيع, root م-ت-ع: to derive benefit from a thing; and matāʿ — goods enjoyed temporarily.
The root already contains transience — and the verse adds to it qalīlā (a little). That is, what flight gains is a small quantity of something that is transient in the very root of the word.
The sentence draws up an account, and I record it: what is obtained by flight is, at best, a slight prolongation of something already transient. The verse does not forbid flight; it calculates its profit.
مَن ذَا ٱلَّذِى — a strong interrogative pattern in Arabic; "who is it that…" It is used for questions that have no answer (the rhetorical interrogative).
عَصَمَ — root ع-ص-م. And the concrete sense of the root is to hold, to grip fast: iʿtaṣama bi'l-ḥabl — he clung to the rope. ʿIṣma — being protected. Maʿṣūm — the one protected.
The concrete sense of the root builds the picture of the verse: the verse does not say "who will defend you"; it says "who will hold you". The one who flees is going from one place to another; the verse looks for a hand that will hold him.
The sentence names two possibilities: harm and mercy. But the question fits only one of them. The question "who will protect you from Him?" makes sense for harm; for mercy it makes none — nobody wants to be protected from mercy.
| Explanation | What it says |
|---|---|
| The mention of the opposite (muqābala) | In Arabic the opposite of a thing is named in order to complete the picture; the ruling belongs to the first |
| The second verb attached to an implied question | "Or if He wills mercy for you, who can prevent it?" — the question is implicitly repeated |
| The widening of the scope | The sentence means "nothing can decide apart from Him"; by naming the two extremes the whole field is closed |
The third explanation is supported by the sentence at the end of the verse: "They will find for themselves, apart from God, neither friend nor helper." Two more words: walī and naṣīr.
I do not impose a preference. But I record this: the naming of the second possibility (mercy) changes the tone of the verse. If the sentence had said only "you cannot escape", it would have been a threat. With the addition of mercy the sentence turns into a statement of scope: flight is a flight from the good as much as from the bad.
وَلِيًّا وَلَا نَصِيرًا — again the root و-ل-ي (for the fourth time in this sūra) and the root ن-ص-ر. The difference between the two: walī is protection born of nearness, naṣīr is help in act. One a position, the other an action.
There are two ways of keeping a person in a hard place: to say that fleeing is bad, or to show that fleeing does not work. The verse chooses the second.
And its ground stands in the verse's own logic: flight carries an assumption about where the thing fled from is. The person assumes that the danger is in one place and not in another. The verse removes that assumption.
Its present-day form is this: what is gained by fleeing a difficulty is almost always measurable and almost always small — illā qalīlā. Flight does not solve the matter; it postpones it and raises its cost.