Muḥammad 47:22

Fa-hal ʿasaytum in tawallaytum an tufsidū fi'l-arḍi wa tuqaṭṭiʿū arḥāmakum

"Is it to be expected of you, if you turn away / if you are put in charge, that you will spread corruption in the land and cut off your ties of kinship?"

A variant reading is transmitted for this verse and it directly determines the sense of the verse:

Both readings are transmitted. I make no preference.

And the two scenes the two readings give are these:

• On the first reading: the consequence of turning away is corruption. That is, moving away from revelation ends in social dissolution.
• On the second reading: the trial of gaining authority is corruption. That is, what a person who comes into power will do first is put in question.

Both readings stand in the text and both agree with the context of the sūra.

Root: و-ل-ي. It was treated in the discussion of mawlā at verse eleven; the note recorded there does its work here:

"تَوَلَّى (tawallā) — To take charge of a matter; and also: to turn away and go."

And the variant reading rests on exactly these two senses. The word itself carries both directions at once; the reading determines which comes to the front.

How can one word be both "to take charge" and "to turn away"?

The explanation the lexicographers give is this: the core of the root is nearness and turning towards. Tawallā is "to turn in a direction". And a person who turns in one direction has turned away from another.

That is, the word names a single movement; the two senses are the two ends of that same movement.

And this makes the verse meaningful independently of the variant reading as well — it is my own reading: in either case there is a turning. One turns towards power, the other in a direction away from revelation. In both, a direction is turned to by a choice.

The word occurs twice in the sūra: 22 (in tawallaytum) and 38 (wa in tatawallaw). The first warning and the last warning of the sūra use the same verb.

عَسَىٰ — a verb in Arabic announcing hope (tarajjī) and apprehension (ishfāq). When attributed to God it is used in the sense of "it will certainly be so"; when attributed to human beings, in the sense of "perhaps, it may be that".

Here it has the interrogative particle at its head: فَهَلْ عَسَيْتُمْ. This combination sets up a question of reproach: "is it that you…?"

And the hardness of the construction lies here: the sentence is built not as an accusation but as a possibility. It does not say directly "you will spread corruption"; it says "is it that you will?"

This is a construction that leaves the answer to the addressee — the same method as the a-fa-man… ka-man construction of verse 14.

Root: ف-س-د. And the opposite of the root is ص-ل-ح, which we treated at the second verse.

The sense the lexicographers record: a thing's departure from equilibrium, its spoiling, its becoming useless.

And the opposition of the two sets up a frame in this sūra:

The sūra ties setting-right to the inward state (bāl) and corruption to the earth. One is inside, the other outside.

I record this as a lexical observation; the opposition of the two roots is lexical data, this inside-outside distribution is a connection I am making.

تُقَطِّعُوا۟ — root ق-ط-ع, Form tafʿīl: to cut to pieces. The same form occurred in verse 15 as well (fa-qaṭṭaʿa amʿāʾahum).

And when the two occurrences are set side by side something interesting appears:

The same verb, the same form, two different "inner bonds".

I record this parallel as my own reading; I make no claim that a verbal link has been set up between the two verses, but that the verb is the same stands in the text.

Root: ر-ح-م. This root was treated in full in the discussion of the basmala in the section al-Fātiḥa and taken up again in al-Mumtaḥana, al-Balad, al-Ḥujurāt and al-Ḥadīd. I do not repeat it here.

The one note to be carried over from there: رَحِم (raḥim) — the mother's womb; and the word raḥma comes from this concrete source.

What is to be added here is the word's use in this verse: أَرْحَام, plural — "ties of kinship".

The word names not the organ directly but the relationship that arises from that organ: the bond among those who come from the same womb.

And in the word order of the verse two things stand side by side:

• فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ — the earth. The widest scale.
• أَرْحَامَكُمْ — kinship. The narrowest scale.

That is, the verse counts both ends of the spoiling at once: the largest circle and the smallest circle.

And this connects directly with the frame set up in the section al-Ḥujurāt. It was recorded there:

"This arrangement carries an idea of order, and the logic of the order is this: when the outer rings are broken there is visible damage; when the inner ring is broken nothing at all is visible."

This verse places the same two rings side by side in a single sentence.