وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى يَقْبَلُ ٱلتَّوْبَةَ عَنْ عِبَادِهِۦ وَيَعْفُوا۟ عَنِ ٱلسَّيِّـَٔاتِ وَيَعْلَمُ مَا تَفْعَلُونَ
This is a detail the grammarians have dwelt on. Min conveys "from" (a source), whereas ʿan conveys "from, off, on behalf of" and carries a sense of moving away or taking off from.
| Explanation | What it says |
|---|---|
| 1 | ʿAn here stands for min; the two particles can be used in place of one another |
| 2 | ʿAn means "off": the repentance is taken off the servant, that is, its burden is lifted |
| 3 | ʿAn means "for the benefit of, on behalf of": the acceptance takes place to the servant's advantage |
I do not impose a preference. The second and third explanations rest on the idea of direction the word carries and are worth recording as a point of language.
Tawba — root ت-و-ب: to turn. And the word's being used both of the servant and of God is striking: the servant tāba ila'llāh (turned to God), God tāba ʿala'l-ʿabd (turned to the servant). The same verb, working in two directions.
The root ع-ف-و was treated in al-Mujādala. The note there was this: the concrete sense of the root is to erase, to wipe out a trace; like the wind erasing footprints in sand. And its difference from ghufrān: what is covered is still there but unseen; what is erased is no longer there.
And now let us look at the root's distribution in this sūra — this is one of the most important weaves in it:
| Verse | Sentence | Who pardons | What |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | wa yaʿfū ʿani's-sayyiʾāt | God | Evil deeds |
| 30 | wa yaʿfū ʿan kathīr | God | Much of what is earned |
| 34 | wa yaʿfu ʿan kathīr | God | Much of what is earned |
| 40 | fa-man ʿafā wa aṣlaḥ | A human being | What was done to him |
Three of the four occurrences are God's, one a human being's. And all four are from the same form of the same root.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is this distribution: before commanding pardon of a human being, the sūra shows pardon three times as a divine act. That the recompense of the one who pardons in the fortieth verse is left to God (fa-ajruhu ʿala'llāh) accords with this sequence — the human being turns out to have done something that is being done in any case.
The first two parts of the sentence come in the third person (ʿibādih), the last in the second person plural (tafʿalūn).
This is an iltifāt, and its effect is worth recording: the sentence begins as a general statement and ends by turning to the one addressed. The sentence "He accepts repentance from His servants", that is, comes directly upon the reader with "and He knows what you do".