al-Shūrā 42:20

Man kāna yurīdu ḥartha'l-ākhirati nazid lahu fī ḥarthih; wa man kāna yurīdu ḥartha'd-dunyā nuʾtihi minhā wa mā lahu fi'l-ākhirati min naṣīb

"Whoever wants the tillage of the hereafter, We increase for him his tillage. And whoever wants the tillage of this world, We give him of it; but in the hereafter he has no share."

The root was treated in two places in the corpus and I do not repeat the findings there:

• In al-Wāqiʿa at 56/63: ḥarth is what a person does — ploughing, sowing, watering; zarʿ is what happens inside the seed — splitting, taking root, coming up. And the conclusion recorded there was: "the sowing is yours, the bringing forth is not."
• In al-Baqara at 2/205 and 2/223: that the root is "what reaches into the future"; the corrupter's destroying of the ḥarth (2/205), and this recorded at 2/223: ḥarth in Arabic is what is valued, laboured over, protected; it is the farmer's source of living, not something neglected but something watched over.

In al-Shūrā the word is used in a third work, and this is the root's share in this sūra: ḥarth here is an object of choice.

And note: the same word is used on both sides.

The verse, that is, does not present this world as without tillage and the hereafter as with it. Both are tillage. The difference is in which is wanted.

The sense of the word drawn out in al-Wāqiʿa works here with its full weight. Ḥarth says three things at once:

The third item is especially important here, and I record it as my own reading: the verse promises a return to both sides, but both returns are in the hand of the giver. Nazid and nuʾtī — the agent of both verbs is "We".

And here is the sharpest place in the verse. Neither wish goes unanswered; but the answers are not of the same kind.

The difference between the two verbs can be gathered into a single word: one is increasing, the other giving.

Giving is the delivery of what was asked for. Increasing is adding something on top of the delivery.

And this distinction is exactly the counterpart of the table of the two prayers recorded in al-Baqara.

The table recorded there was this:

| Prayer | What is asked | Result | |---|---|---| | The first | This world only | Mā lahu fi'l-ākhirati min khalāq — no share in the hereafter | | The second | This world and the hereafter | Counted among those accepted |

And the note entered there was important:

"The point to notice: the prayer that is refused is not refused for asking for this world. The second prayer also asks for this world. What is refused is asking for this world only."

Now I set the two texts side by side — the overlap is at the level of wording:

This is a verifiable fact: in the two verses the sentence is the same, only the last word has changed.

The difference between the two words must be recorded:

Both words mean "share"; but both stress that the share has been set apart. Khalāq set apart by measuring, naṣīb by being planted.

And there is a difference: in al-Baqara two prayers were being compared, in al-Shūrā two wishes. Al-Baqara's second prayer asked for both this world and the hereafter. In al-Shūrā, nothing at all is said about the worldly portion of the one who wants the tillage of the hereafter — it is neither said to be given nor said to be withheld.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the comparison of the two texts: al-Shūrā does not cut off the worldly portion of the one who wants the hereafter; it leaves it in silence. And the silence takes on meaning when read together with al-Baqara's second prayer: there both were asked for, and it was not refused.

The following conclusion cannot be drawn from the verse: "the one who wants this world is given this world, therefore wealth is a sign of wanting this world."

This inference is not supported by the text, and for three reasons:

1. The verse states no quantity. Nuʾtihi minhā — "We give him of it"; how much is not said. And min conveys partiality. 2. The twelfth verse has already said that the distribution differs from person to person (yabsuṭu… wa yaqdir); the amount of worldly goods is therefore no indicator. 3. The twenty-seventh verse will open this further: provision's not being spread without limit will be presented as a protection.

The verse's measure looks not at property but at the will: man kāna yurīd — "whoever wants". And the pattern kāna yurīd conveys a continuing want: not a momentary desire but a life that has turned in a direction.

The root ز-ي-د occurs three times in this sūra, and all three are in the same direction:

In all three, what is increased is what the person himself has brought. In the twentieth what he sowed, in the twenty-third what he earned, in the twenty-sixth what he asked for.

This is a fact that can be verified from the text and I record it as a pattern of the sūra: ziyāda is nowhere in the sūra something given from nothing; it always comes on top of something.

The distinction the verse sets up is not "this world is bad, the hereafter is good"; both tillages are tillage. The distinction is in how far the wanting reaches.

And its practical consequence is this: an effort that aims only at the visible outcome may well obtain that outcome. The verse does not deny it — nuʾtihi minhā, "We give", it says. What it says is that such an effort brings its own limit with it: what is received is as much as what was wanted.

What increases, increases only in what is sown for the long term. And this is the logic of the likeness of tillage itself: a field sown for harvest grows; what is gathered to be eaten at once comes to an end.