al-Dukhān 44:13-14

Annā lahumu'dh-dhikrā wa qad jāʾahum rasūlun mubīn · Thumma tawallaw ʿanhu wa qālū muʿallamun majnūn

"How should the reminder come to them, when a manifest messenger had already come to them? Then they turned away from him and said, 'A man taught, possessed.'"

Annā carries three senses in Arabic: whence, how, when. And there is something common to all three: the question is asked not to seek information but to report an impossibility (istifhām inkārī).

The sentence, that is, does not ask "when will they take the reminder?"; it says "how should taking the reminder be possible for them?"

And the ground comes immediately after: wa qad jāʾahum rasūlun mubīn.

The wāw at the head is the wāw of circumstance: "while…". And qad + the perfect strengthens the fact of its having happened.

The logic of the sentence is this, and it is worth recording: the impossibility of their taking the reminder is drawn not from their incapacity but from the opportunity's having already been used.

The verse says, that is: the reminder has already come. There is no place for asking for something new.

I record this as my own reading: when the offer of faith made under punishment is refused, the ground given is not "you are not sincere" — it is "it has already been tried". The measure is not intention but history.

The root was treated in many sections (Qāf, al-Qamar, al-Aʿlā); I do not repeat it here.

What is peculiar to al-Dukhān is the root's two occurrences in the sūra, and the difference between them is sharp:

The same root, at the two ends of the sūra, in two opposite moods.

I present this as my own reading, and its ground is the wording of the two verses. And it is no contradiction: the thirteenth verse speaks of the moment inside the punishment, the fifty-eighth of the time before it. The matter, that is, is not whether the reminder is possible but at which moment it is possible.

And this carries the whole logic of the sūra: the invalidity of the appeal made when the punishment arrives comes not from the appeal itself but from its timing.

The third of the five occurrences of mubīn in the sūra. And what is qualified this time is a person.

Two readings are transmitted for rasūlun mubīn, and both rest on the two branches of the root:

I do not impose a preference.

Thumma in Arabic conveys a delayed sequence: "then". Its difference from fāʾ is that time passes in between.

And here it says something: the turning away did not happen the moment the messenger came. There is an interval.

I record this as an observation: the verse describes the rejection not as a sudden reaction but as a stance taken after a while. This strengthens the ground given in the thirteenth verse — the opportunity was not merely given, there was also time to use it.

The root ت-و-ل: tawallā ʿan — to turn away from a thing, to turn one's back. The original sense of the root is nearness and adjacency (walī, mawlā); tawallā + ʿan is the reversal of that nearness. The root was treated in sections such as al-Baqara and al-Layl.

And what is striking is this: the same root will come back in the forty-first verse as mawlā — "on that day no mawlā will avail a mawlā anything." What they turned away from and what will not avail on that day are from the same root. I record this as an observation about the wording.

Two attributes are placed side by side, and this deserves careful reading, because the two together are strange.

مُعَلَّم — the root ع-ل-م, the passive participle of Form II: "taught". That is, he has taken lessons from someone; he does not speak on his own.

مَجْنُون — the root ج-ن-ن, a passive participle: "possessed by jinn". The concrete sense of the root is to cover, to conceal (janna'l-layl — the night covered; janīn — the one covered in the womb; janna — a garden whose trees cover the ground). Majnūn — one whose mind is covered over.

Now let us look at the strangeness:

The two accusations spoil one another. A man who has been taught cannot be mad; a madman cannot transmit an orderly teaching.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the definitions of the two words: the other party cannot produce a single explanation, and lays two explanations one upon another. And this confirms the diagnosis of the thirteenth verse: what is present is not a proof but a decision to reject — the ground is sought afterwards.

And a detail of word order: there is no wāw between the two words. Muʿallamun majnūn — "a man taught, possessed". The unconjoined sequence fuses the two attributes into a single verdict; they are said, that is, not as two separate claims but as a single piece of abuse. And this too turns their words into a hurling rather than an analysis.