al-Fatḥ 48:5

Li-yudkhila'l-muʾminīna wa'l-muʾmināti jannātin tajrī min taḥtihā'l-anhāru khālidīna fīhā wa yukaffira ʿanhum sayyiʾātihim; wa kāna dhālika ʿinda'llāhi fawzan ʿaẓīmā

"To bring the believing men and the believing women into gardens beneath which rivers flow, there to remain for ever, and to cover over their evil deeds. That, with God, is a great deliverance."

The verse is a second purpose clause hanging on the li-yazdādū of the preceding verse. The chain runs on like this: the sakīna came down → so that faith might increase → and in the end so that they might be brought within.

The verb is once again a verb of "bringing in": يُدْخِلَ, root د-خ-ل. This completes the image of fatḥ in the first verse. It was recorded at Sūrat al-Naṣr: the meaning of a door's being opened is that someone will be able to enter. Here too a verb of entering comes after the opened door — and this time what is stressed is not the one who enters but the one who brings in: the verb is Form IV, that is, "to cause to enter".

In the preceding verse only al-muʾminīn was said. Here the pair comes: al-muʾminīna wa'l-muʾmināt.

In Arabic the masculine plural already covers a mixed body; the fourth verse, that is, was not leaving women outside either. The explicit mention here is a tasrīḥ: the extent stated over again in so many words.

And this has a particular place in this sūra. The sūra sets up this pair in three places:

The twenty-fifth verse is decisive. There, believing men and women who were in Mecca and not yet known are shown as the ground on which the fighting was held back. The sūra, that is, does not use this pair for decoration: the course an event takes is tied to the people inside that pair.

The verb is striking: يُكَفِّر, root ك-ف-ر.

The primary sense of this root was analysed at al-Baqara (2/6): to cover, to close something over. That the farmer is called kāfir because he covers the seed with soil, and that at al-Ḥadīd (57/20) the word kuffār is used in the sense of "farmers", were treated there.

What belongs here is this: the same root is used here in Form II and for a favourable act — takfīr: to cover, to close over, to wipe away. Kufr and kaffāra, that is, are from the same root, and both are a covering. The difference lies in what is covered: the one covers the truth, the other a fault.

سَيِّئَة — root س-و-أ: to be bad, to be ugly, to be displeasing. Sūʾ, asāʾa, sayyiʾa. At the centre of the word there is less a moral verdict than a displeasure: the thing that sours the face at the sight of it.

The same root will occur twice in the next verse: ẓanna's-sawʾ and dāʾiratu's-sawʾ. The sūra thus uses this root three times, in three separate places — once as the thing that is covered over, and twice as the state of the other side.

فَوْز — root ف-و-ز: to be saved, to come through to safety; and at the same time "to win, to attain what one sought". The lexicographers record that the root carries the idea of coming out alive from a dangerous place; indeed مَفَازَة (mafāza), from the same root, means desert — a place dangerous to cross, and one from which a man is delivered once he has crossed it.

This note on the root lights up the verse. Fawz is not a prize taken but a danger got through. The English "deliverance" catches this side of it; "success" does not.

عِندَ ٱللَّهِ — "with God". This qualification matters, and it bears directly on the whole tension of the sūra.

The verse does not say "this is a great deliverance". It says: "this, with God, is a great deliverance." A court of assessment, that is, is being pointed to.

I record this as my own reading: the whole of the sūra is an argument about measures. There is an event, and by two different measures it yields two different results — on the human measure a step backwards, "with God" a fatḥ. The qualification ʿinda'llāh sets that distinction down once more, and openly. And the same qualification will be built again in verse 27 as a difference in knowledge.