Muḥammad 47:1

Alladhīna kafarū wa ṣaddū ʿan sabīli'llāhi aḍalla aʿmālahum

"Those who deny and turn others away from the path of God — [God] has made their deeds go astray."

The sūra opens with a nominal sentence, and its subject is a relative pronoun: alladhīna — "those who".

This is not an opening often seen in the Qurʾān. Most sūras open with a glorification (sabbaḥa), an oath (wa'l-fajr), a call (yā ayyuhā), a command (qul) or a piece of news (atā amru'llāh). Here the opening is directly the description of a group — and no predicate comes until the description is finished.

And the description is made with two verbs:

• كَفَرُوا۟ — they denied.
• وَصَدُّوا۟ عَن سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ — and they turned others away from the path of God.

That the two stand side by side is not accidental, and the distinction has to be seen. The first concerns the person himself: he believed or he did not. The second concerns someone else: cutting off another's road.

That is, the first sentence of the sūra describes not bare denial but an obstruction added to denial. The Qurʾān often uses these two verbs together, and in this sūra it brings them together two more times: 32 (kafarū wa ṣaddū ʿan sabīli'llāh) and 34 (the same expression). That is, the two verbs of the opening sentence will be repeated word for word twice more towards the end of the sūra.

This is a frame built inside the sūra: 1 — 32 — 34.

Root: ص-د-د. The primary sense the lexicographers record: to turn away from something, to turn; and, used transitively, to turn someone else away, to hold back, to obstruct.

The root has two directions, and both are found in the Qurʾān:

From the same root صَدِيد (ṣadīd) — pus; and it is not to be confused with صَدَف. Also الصَّدَد — the front of a thing, what stands opposite it; in Turkish the expression bu sadedde, meaning "in this connection", is a borrowing from this root.

At the centre of the root there is a picture of "cutting off the way ahead": ṣadd is to get in front of the direction in which someone is going.

Root: س-ب-ل. Sabīl means path; but in Arabic there is more than one word for a road, and the difference between them matters:

In the root of sabīl there is flowing and pouring: sabala'l-māʾ — he poured out the water; سُنبُلَة (sunbula, an ear of grain) is from the same root — the place where the grains are ranged and flow; and إِسْبَال — the letting down of a covering.

That is, sabīl is the road on which moving forward is easy and fluid. This gains its meaning when read together with the verb ṣadd: something that is flowing has its way cut off.

I record this connection as my own reading; the "flowing" sense of the root is lexical data, but this picture between the two words is a connection I have made.

Root: ض-ل-ل. Its concrete sense: to lose the road, to be unable to find where a thing is. The Arabs say ḍalla'l-baʿīr: the camel was lost. And what is striking is this: the same root is used both for the one who is lost and for the thing that is lost.

أَضَلَّ — Form ifʿāl, transitive: he made it lost, he caused it to be lost.

Now let us look at the work of the word in this verse. The verse does not say:

• "He destroyed their deeds" (لم يقل: أهلك)
• "He wiped out their deeds" (لم يقل: محا)
• "He rejected their deeds" (لم يقل: ردّ)

It says: He made their deeds lost. That is, the deeds are still there — but their owner cannot find them. To lose a thing is not for that thing to cease to exist; it is for the connection with it to be cut.

The Qurʾān opens out this picture elsewhere. At al-Furqān 25/23 the same idea comes with another comparison: "And We shall turn to whatever deed they did and make it scattered dust." At Ibrāhīm 14/18: "Their deeds are like ashes which the wind scatters violently on a stormy day."

In all three verses the deeds do not cease to exist; they become unreachable.

In the sentence the subject of the verb أَضَلَّ is not stated explicitly; it is a concealed pronoun. And who the concealed pronoun is can be understood from the preceding word: سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ — the divine name in the expression "the path of God".

This is a point of word order: rather than saying "God has voided their deeds", the verse names God not as the subject of the verb but inside a construct; then it leaves the verb without stating its subject.

The result: although the sentence is a sentence of judgement, the name of the one who judges is not pronounced directly.

I do not speak with certainty about this choice. I record it as an observation: in the same sūra, at another occurrence of the same verb (47/4: fa-lan yuḍilla aʿmālahum), the subject is again concealed. The sūra keeps to this pattern.

أَضَلَّ is past tense. Yet the group described is still alive and its deeds are still going on.

The classical explanation invokes a use often seen in the Qurʾān: the perfect that announces certainty. If it is certain that a thing will come about, it is recounted in the past tense even though it has not yet happened. In the section al-Wāqiʿa this pattern was treated by way of another example.

But a second reading is possible here too, and it stands closer to the text: the loss of the deeds is not something that will happen in the future but something already done and finished. That is, the verse does not issue a threat, it makes a diagnosis: those deeds were lost long ago; their owner is not yet aware of it.

I record this second reading as my own preference, and it is not binding. The first explanation is the widespread one in the classical commentaries.