al-Shūrā 42:51

Wa mā kāna li-basharin an yukallimahu'llāhu illā waḥyan aw min warāʾi ḥijābin aw yursila rasūlan fa-yūḥiya bi-idhnihi mā yashāʾ; innahu ʿaliyyun ḥakīm

"It is not for a mortal that God should speak to him except by revelation, or from behind a veil, or by sending a messenger who conveys by His permission what He wills. He is high, wise."

Bashar — root ب-ش-ر. In al-Qamar a reading was drawn from the choice of this word. The concrete sense of the root is bashara — skin, flesh. Bashar is the word that names the human being on the side of his body and skin.

And its difference from insān is set out by the lexicographers thus:

That bashar is used in the sentence is a point of arrangement, and I record it: the impossibility of speech is tied to the human being's being embodied. The obstacle, that is, is neither moral nor a matter of knowledge; it is a matter of the kind of being.

The verse enumerates three ways, and all three come in a different grammatical form. This is a point the grammarians have dwelt on and is a verifiable fact.

That the three ways come in three different grammatical forms is explained by the grammarians thus: the third requires a verb and an agent (the act of sending and the one sent), and so it is built as a verbal sentence; in the first two there is no separate agent.

I give this explanation as a transmitted report. What I record is the difference of form itself.

And there is something that must be noticed: in all three the word "waḥy" or its root is present.

• The first is directly waḥyan.
• In the third the messenger's task too is fa-yūḥiya — "he reveals".
• The second does not carry the word but is inside the same list.

The word waḥy, that is, is used both in a narrow and in a wide sense: in the narrow sense the first way, in the wide sense the shared name of the three.

This accords with the finding recorded in al-Najm: the concrete sense of the root is swift and hidden communication, and its field of use is wide. The verse displays that width within itself.

Ḥijāb — root ح-ج-ب. It was treated in al-Muṭaffifīn. The note there: the concrete sense is to come between two things and prevent them from seeing one another; ḥājib — a doorkeeper, the official who stands between a ruler and the people; and the eyebrow — what stands above the eye.

And in al-Muṭaffifīn the word occurred in a context of deprivation (innahum ʿan rabbihim yawmaʾidhin la-maḥjūbūn). In al-Shūrā the same root becomes the name of a mode of communication.

The same root, one a cutting off and one a letting through. This is a verifiable fact.

And a point of arrangement: the construction min warāʾi ḥijāb says that the barrier is not removed. The speech takes place not in spite of the veil but by means of the veil. The veil, that is, is the condition of the speech.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the eleventh verse: the sentence laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾ had removed likeness. The veil is the counterpart, in communication, of that removed likeness — without something set in between there is no transmission.

As recorded at the twenty-first verse, the word idhn occurs twice in the sūra, in two opposite directions:

This is a fact that can be verified from the text. And what it shows is this: even the messenger's conveying is not authoritative on its own; it is tied to permission. The measure is the same in both places.

ʿAliyyun ḥakīm shares a root with al-ʿaliyyu'l-ʿaẓīm in the fourth verse (ع-ل-و), and shares a name with al-ʿazīzu'l-ḥakīm in the third (ḥakīm). I complete here the observation recorded at the third verse:

The pair in the fifty-first verse is made of one part from each of the pairs in the third and fourth verses. This is a verifiable fact; I make no claim of a deliberate choice.