لَهُۥ مَا فِى ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ ۖ وَهُوَ ٱلْعَلِىُّ ٱلْعَظِيمُ
"To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. He is the High, the Great."
The ordinary order would have been "mā fi's-samāwāti wa mā fi'l-arḍi lahu". The sentence is not built that way: the prepositional phrase (lahu) has been brought forward.
In Arabic the fronting of an element (taqdīm) conveys specification: "His alone". The same structure was treated in al-Ḥadīd at 57/2 and 57/5 (lahu mulku's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ), and what was recorded there was this: the repetition is itself a piece of work.
In al-Shūrā this sentence occurs twice — in the fourth verse and the fifty-third — with fifty verses in between. As recorded in the section on the structure of the sūra, this is a frame.
| 42/4 | 42/53 | |
|---|---|---|
| Sentence | Lahu mā fi's-samāwāti wa mā fi'l-arḍ | …alladhī lahu mā fi's-samāwāti wa mā fi'l-arḍ |
| Its position | An independent sentence | A relative clause — "the path of God, which…" |
| What it attaches to | A statement standing on its own | Ṣirāṭ Allāh — a path |
The same sentence, then, is first a statement and afterwards the description of a path. I record this as an observation about the arrangement.
ٱلْعَلِىّ — root ع-ل-و: height. ٱلْعَظِيم — root ع-ظ-م: greatness; the lexicographers relate the root to ʿaẓm (bone) — the largeness of a thing's skeleton, of its frame.
These two names come side by side once more in the Qurʾān, and that place is the last sentence of the Verse of the Throne: wa huwa'l-ʿaliyyu'l-ʿaẓīm (al-Baqara 2/255). The structure of that verse was tabulated in al-Baqara, and what was recorded there was this: the verse widens from the inside outward — from the Essence to the attribute, from the attribute to dominion, from dominion to compass — and closes at last with two names.
In al-Shūrā the same pair of names does the same work, but its place is different: in al-Baqara it stands at the end of a long series, in al-Shūrā immediately after a single sentence. In al-Baqara the names are the summary of an accumulating description; here they are the seal of a single sentence about ownership.
I record this as my own reading: the shared work of the two names is to separate ownership from possession. The sentence "everything is His", standing alone, could place the owner on the same plane as what is owned — as a man has a field and stands beside the field. ʿAliyy breaks that plane: the owner is above and outside what is owned. And this prepares for the eleventh verse, which comes seven verses later.