Muḥammad 47:12

Inna'llāha yudkhilu'lladhīna āmanū wa ʿamilu'ṣ-ṣāliḥāti jannātin tajrī min taḥtiha'l-anhār; wa'lladhīna kafarū yatamattaʿūna wa yaʾkulūna kamā taʾkulu'l-anʿāmu wa'n-nāru mathwan lahum

"God will surely bring those who believe and do righteous deeds into gardens beneath which rivers flow. As for those who deny, they take their enjoyment and they eat as the grazing animals eat; and the fire is their lodging."

The comparison in the middle of this verse is a place that has to be treated in careful and unwounding language. Let us set up the structure of the verse first; I shall come to the comparison after.

The most striking feature of the verse is that in speaking about two groups it uses two different planes of time.

That is, the verse does not situate the two groups in the same time.

The place where the believers are has not yet come; the verb is imperfect and in the sense of the future. What those who deny do is happening right now: they eat, they take their enjoyment.

And then the sentence closes with a nominal clause: وَٱلنَّارُ مَثْوًى لَّهُمْ. In Arabic the nominal sentence announces fixity (thubūt, permanence); the verbal sentence announces coming-to-be (ḥudūth, renewal).

The result: their present state is given with a verbal sentence (temporary, flowing), their place of arrival with a nominal one (fixed).

Root: م-ت-ع. Its primary sense: to derive benefit from something, to enjoy; and the concrete sense the lexicographers record: a thing's stretching out and continuing — mataʿa'n-nahār — the day grew long.

From the same root مَتَاع (matāʿ) — the thing enjoyed, a means of living, goods. And an expression the Qurʾān uses often: مَتَاعُ ٱلْغُرُور — the enjoyment of delusion (Āl ʿImrān 3/185, al-Ḥadīd 57/20; the latter treated in al-Ḥadīd).

And at the centre of the word lies an idea of duration: matāʿ is an enjoyment that has an end. The Qurʾān uses the expression matāʿun ilā ḥīn (enjoyment until a term) in several places.

تَمَتَّعَ — Form V (tafaʿʿul). This form announces intent and taking pains (takalluf): doing a thing willingly, applying oneself to it. That is, tamattuʿ is not ordinary enjoyment; it is turning towards enjoyment.

I have to be careful here, because this comparison can easily be turned into a sentence of contempt — and that is not what the verse does.

First I have to write this: the verse does not condemn the animal's eating.

This can be seen from the text itself. The Qurʾān counts the anʿām (that is, the grazing livestock) elsewhere as a favour, and there is a sūra named for them (al-Anʿām, 6). At al-Naḥl 16/5-8 the creation of these animals is recounted as a bounty, together with the warmth, food and transport they provide for people.

That is, the verse does not say "eating like an animal is bad". An animal's eating is exactly the right thing for an animal.

What, then, does the verse say?

Root: ن-ع-م. And there is a subtlety here in the choice of the word.

This root has been treated in many places in this commentary (al-Wāqiʿa, al-Takāthur, al-Ḍuḥā, al-Ghāshiya, ʿAbasa, al-Maʿārij and others). The family of meanings in the root:

• نِعْمَة (niʿma) — a gift, a kindness.
• نَعِيم (naʿīm) — a state of abundance.
• نَاعِم (nāʿim) — soft, fine. Nuʿūma — softness.
• أَنْعَام (anʿām) — grazing animals.

The lexicographers explain the anʿām taking this name in two ways: either because they are a favour, or because of the softness of their gait. Both explanations are transmitted; I make no preference.

And this detail is worth noting: in the same verse the place where the believers will go is named جَنَّات (gardens); and the frequent epithet of the garden in the Qurʾān is نَعِيم (jannātu'n-naʿīm). That is, the same root carries the animal on one side of the verse and the name of the garden on the other.

I record this as a lexical observation; I do not claim that these two uses have been deliberately set side by side in this verse.

Now let us come to what the comparison does.

The clause is this: يَأْكُلُونَ كَمَا تَأْكُلُ ٱلْأَنْعَٰمُ — "they eat as the grazing animals eat".

The particle of comparison كَمَا attaches to the verb, not to the agent. That is, the sentence does not say "they are like animals"; it says "their eating is like the animal's eating".

This difference is everything.

What does an animal's eating comprise? Hunger, searching, satiety. And when it is over it is over. There is nothing missing in the animal's eating — it is doing exactly what is expected of it.

What the verse records is that a person's eating stays at just that much.

A person eats too; the verse does not forbid this and does not condemn it. The Qurʾān makes eating a subject in its own right and commands eating what is lawful and good (al-Baqara 2/168). The matter is not eating; it is whether there is anything beyond the eating.

And the verse says this by way of a subtraction: in the sentence nothing is added to the person's eating. Not thanks, not thought, not the question of where it came from, not with whom it is shared. There is only the act.

That is, the comparison is not a contempt but a measurement: the space a person's life occupies is measured, and the result comes out the same as the space an animal's life occupies.

And the verse says explicitly to whom this measurement is to be applied: alladhīna kafarū. Per the method (Method): this is not an identity but an attribute. Whoever carries that attribute is included in it — and the attribute is "being content with just this much".

I rest this reading on the wording of the text (kamā taʾkulu — the particle of comparison attached to the verb); the "measurement" interpretation I draw from it is my own inference.

The Qurʾān sets up this comparison in one other place, at greater length — and there it writes out explicitly what the measure is:

"We have created for hell many of the jinn and of mankind: they have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, ears with which they do not hear. Those are like the grazing animals; indeed they are further astray. Those are the heedless ones." (al-Aʿrāf 7/179)

Note: the verse in al-Aʿrāf counts three organs before setting up the comparison — heart, eye, ear. That is, the measure of the comparison is not the absence of the organs but their not being used.

And al-Aʿrāf enters one further qualification: أُو۟لَٰٓئِكَ كَٱلْأَنْعَٰمِ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ — "indeed further astray". This addition matters: the animal is not "astray" because it lives according to its own measure. The straying arises from not using what has been given.

That is, when the two verses are read together the direction of the comparison becomes clear: the comparison is not against the animal but in favour of the capacity given.

Root: م-ث-و. Its meaning: to stay in a place, to reside, to lodge. Mathawā bi'l-makān — he stayed there.

مَثْوًى — a noun of place: the place where one stays, a lodging, a dwelling.

And there is something in the word: mathwā can also carry the sense of a temporary lodging place (a traveller's lodging), but in the Qurʾān it is generally used in the sense of the final place of arrival.

The word occurs twice in this sūra:

And this is a turn worth recording. In the twelfth verse mathwā is the place of arrival of a group. In the nineteenth verse the same word comes back as one of the two states of the addressee's own life: mutaqallab (where you move about) and mathwā (where you come to rest).

The sūra turns a word it used about a group back upon the one it addresses, seven verses later. This is an example of the sūra's general method; we shall see the same movement in the word aḍghān (rancours) in verses 29 and 37.

I record this observation as textual data; the two occurrences of the word are fixed, this reading of a "turning back" is mine.