al-Shūrā 42:9

Ami'ttakhadhū min dūnihi awliyāʾ, fa'llāhu huwa'l-waliyyu wa huwa yuḥyi'l-mawtā wa huwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr

"Or have they taken protectors besides Him? God alone is the Protector; He gives life to the dead, and He has power over everything."

Am does two things in Arabic: either it brings in the second side of an alternative question ("this, or that?"), or on its own it frames a question conveying reproach and astonishment (am munqaṭiʿa). Here it is the second.

And this particle occurs three times in the sūra, doing the same work in all three: setting one of the other side's attitudes before it in the form of a question.

Three questions, three separate claims: to whom have you attached yourself, who laid down the rule, whose word is this. This distribution is a fact that can be verified from the text.

The structure of the verse is tight: the question and its answer are given in the same sentence, with the same word.

• The question: ittakhadhū… awliyāʾ — "they took protectors"
• The answer: fa'llāhu huwa'l-waliyy — "the Protector is He"

The answer holds three things at once:

1. Definiteness — al-waliyy, with the article. In the question awliyāʾ was indefinite and plural. 2. The pronoun of separation — huwa (ḍamīr al-faṣl): "He alone". 3. Singularity — a singular against a plural.

With three separate instruments, that is, the sentence does the same thing: it brings the plural down to a singular.

The answer does not end there. A verb is brought in as the ground of protectorship: giving life to the dead.

Why this was chosen must be asked, and the answer is in the word itself:

A walī is one who stands beside a person and takes on his affair. The limit of a protector is as far as his power reaches. The protectors a person takes — be they idols, persons or institutions — do their work up to a point within life. Death is the boundary at which every protectorship stops.

The verse defines protectorship at exactly that boundary: the protector is the one who does not stop where the others stop.

I give this as my own reading; its ground is that the proof has been placed immediately after the claim about the walī.

And it is linked with what follows in the sūra: in the twenty-eighth verse al-waliyyu'l-ḥamīd will come, and there too there will be a picture of bringing to life — dead ground revived by rain. Two sentences about the protector, two revivals.