أَفَنَضْرِبُ عَنكُمُ ٱلذِّكْرَ صَفْحًا أَن كُنتُمْ قَوْمًا مُّسْرِفِينَ
"Are We then to turn the reminder away from you and set it aside, because you are a people who overstep?"
The question is one of denial: its answer is "no" — it is asked in order to refuse. In Arabic this pattern, opening with hamza + fāʾ, attaches to the preceding sentence and says "after all this, are we to do such a thing?"
What it attaches to is the third and fourth verses: the Book was made clear, was put into a language, is high and wise in its origin — is it then to be withdrawn?
The concrete sense of the root is the name of a surface: ṣafḥa — the side of a thing, its flat face.
- صَفْحَة — the side of the face, the cheek; the flat of a sword; the flat side of a thing.
- صَفَحَ عَنْهُ — he turned his face away from it; and from there: he pardoned, he let it pass.
- صَفَّحَ — he flattened it, made it into a sheet. Ṣafīḥa — a sheet, a plate.
- مُصَافَحَة (muṣāfaḥa) — shaking hands; the touching of two palms, that is, of two flat surfaces, one to the other. This is the source of the word musafaha in Turkish.
- تَصَفَّحَ الكِتَاب — he went through a book, turning its leaves one by one. The word صَفْحَة is also used for one face of a leaf. (Whether the Turkish word sayfa, "page", comes from this root or from the very close root ص-ح-ف — ṣaḥīfa — is recorded in different ways in the dictionaries; I adopt no preference.)
| Derivative | The movement | The result |
|---|---|---|
| ṣafḥan (here) | Turning one's face away and leaving | Abandoning, pushing aside |
| fa'ṣfaḥ ʿanhum (89) | Turning one's face away and passing on | Pardoning, not dwelling on it |
This is the most striking ring in the sūra, and I point to it already now: the same root is refused in the fifth verse and commanded in the eighty-ninth. I shall give the difference in a table at verse 89.
The verb is ḍaraba, and here it stands inside an idiom. The lexicographers explain the construction thus: ḍaraba ʿanhu — to put a thing away from someone, to turn it aside, to withdraw it.
| Reading | The role of ṣafḥan | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Absolute object (cognate with the verb) | "To turn away with a turning" — to withdraw it altogether |
| 2 | Circumstantial accusative (ḥāl) | "As one turning away" — by giving up on it |
Both come out at the same door, and I do not impose a preference. What is to be recorded is that the verb chosen is ḍaraba: the word carries a movement of the hand — pushing something aside with one's own hand. This is the sūra's first ḍaraba; the root will then return in verses 17 and 57.
The root ذ-ك-ر has been treated at length in the corpus (Qāf, al-Aʿlā, al-Muddaththir). Its core: to call to mind, to keep in memory; and to name with the tongue.
Here the word comes definite (al-dhikr) and in context indicates the Qurʾān. In the thirty-sixth verse the same word will return inside a construct: dhikri'r-Raḥmān — the reminder of al-Raḥmān.
| Reading | Written form | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| an kuntum | أَن كُنتُمْ | "because you are…" — an conveying a ground |
| in kuntum | إِن كُنتُمْ | "if you are…" — in conveying a condition |
Both are transmitted among the imams of the readings. The difference in meaning is this: in the first the situation is settled and the question says "are we then to abandon it on that account?"; in the second the situation is made conditional and the question says "even if you were so?" I do not impose a preference; on either reading the answer to the sentence is the same: no.
The sense the lexicographers give the root: to pass the boundary in something, to lose the measure. Isrāf — the usual English renderings stay tied to wealth, but in Arabic the root conveys overstepping the measure in any field whatever.
The lexicographers also record the word sarif: to go past without noticing, to let a thing escape one's eye. Marra fa-sarifahu — he passed by and did not see it. Alongside overstepping the measure, then, the root also holds a core of inattention.
This fits the word's place in the verse, and I record it as an observation: the verse names the other side not by the name of a crime but by the name of a fault of measure. And the whole subject of the sūra is measure.
The logic the sentence builds is this: the condition of the one addressed is not made the ground for cutting off the reminder.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is that the question is one of denial: the verse sets out the thought "these people do not understand, let us leave off" as an option, and rejects it. The reason the thing is given is not the state of the one who receives it; it is the quality of what is given — the quality enumerated in the third and fourth verses.