Muḥammad 47:31

Wa la-nabluwannakum ḥattā naʿlama'l-mujāhidīna minkum wa'ṣ-ṣābirīna wa nabluwa akhbārakum

"We shall certainly test you — that We may bring out those among you who strive and those who endure, and that We may test your reports."

The sentence carries the same strong emphasis as the second sentence of the preceding verse: لَ + نَّ (the lām of the oath + the nūn of emphasis).

And the pronoun is again the second person plural: كُمْ. That is, the address continues from the last clause of verse 30.

This is the place where the sūra changes direction: 20 to 29 were about "them"; from the end of 30 "you" begins, and it will continue to verse 38.

The root ب-ل-و was treated at verse 4 (li-yabluwa baʿḍakum bi-baʿḍ). It was recorded there: the primary sense of the root is to wear out, to make threadbare; and the connection between testing and wearing out is that use wears a thing down.

And the root occurs twice in this verse: la-nabluwannakum and wa nabluwa akhbārakum.

Three occurrences in total in the sūra:

And the third is interesting: what is tested is no longer persons but reports.

The expression "that We may know" is a place the classical commentaries dwell on: if God already knows, what does "that We may know" mean?

The explanations transmitted:

These views are transmitted in the classical commentaries; I make no preference.

And I record this much: the particle ḥattā announces a limit (ghāya). That is, the testing has a purpose, and the purpose is written explicitly in the sentence.

مُجَاهِد — root ج-ه-د, the active participle of Form III.

The primary sense of the root: جَهْد — strength, capacity, being pressed to one's limit. Jahd is a person's coming up against the last edge of his strength. From the same root جُهْد (effort), إِجْتِهَاد (the expending of all one's strength), جَهْد and مَجْهُود.

And Form III here — as with qitāl in verse 20 — announces reciprocity: jihād is an effort with a resistance facing it.

This root was taken up in the section al-Ṣaff at 61/11 (wa tujāhidūna fī sabīli'llāhi bi-amwālikum wa anfusikum). The frame recorded there holds here too and I do not repeat it.

صَابِر — root ص-ب-ر. The primary sense of the root: to hold a thing in a place, to confine, to bind. Ṣabara nafsahu — he held himself back.

And that the two stand side by side is meaningful:

One is movement, the other standing. And the sūra had already said this in verse 7: yanṣurkum (help — movement) and yuthabbit aqdāmakum (making firm — standing).

The same pair, in two different places, with two different pairs of words.

I record this parallel as my own reading.

And the last word of the verse is a striking choice.

Root: خ-ب-ر. This root was taken up in al-Mujādala, al-Mulk, al-Ḥadīd, al-Ḥashr, al-Munāfiqūn, al-Ḥujurāt and al-Zilzāl (in the contexts of the name Khabīr and of tuḥaddithu akhbārahā). I do not repeat it here.

The note to be carried over from there: the primary sense of the root is to learn the inner side of a thing by trying it. Khabara'l-arḍ — he ploughed the soil, turned its underside up. And خَبِير (Khabīr) names the one who knows not the surface but the inside.

And from here comes the word ٱخْتِبَار (ikhtibār) — examination, test.

Now let us look at the last clause of the verse: وَنَبْلُوَا۟ أَخْبَارَكُمْ.

Two words, from two different roots, but both carrying the idea of "testing":

• نَبْلُوَ — root ب-ل-و: to test (in the root: to wear out).
• أَخْبَار — root خ-ب-ر: reports (in the root: to learn the inner side by trying).

That is, the clause makes a word that carries the sense of "testing" in its root the object of the verb "to test".

This is a weave of sound and sense and is worth recording. The root senses of the words are lexical data; the weave between them is one I am setting up, and it carries no claim of a play on words.

And there is disagreement over the meaning of the expression "to test your reports":

I make no preference.

But the second view agrees strikingly with the context of the sūra — the preceding verse had speech as its subject (laḥni'l-qawl), and the central matter of the section al-Ṣaff was the distance between word and deed.

I record this as an indication, not as a preference.