إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ يُنَادُونَكَ مِن وَرَآءِ ٱلْحُجُرَٰتِ أَكْثَرُهُمْ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ
Here the scene changes. The first three verses were inside an assembly — beside the Prophet, in a place where his voice was heard. In the fourth verse the one addressed goes outside: behind the chambers.
What is meant are the chambers that made up the Prophet's house. According to what is transmitted in the sources these were plainly built, separate compartments adjoining the mosque.
That the word comes in the plural is worth recording. Had it been singular ("from behind the chamber") a single place would have been meant. The plural describes a structure: adjoining the mosque yet separate from it; right beside the space open to the public, yet not part of it.
Until now the sūra had been speaking about voice and speech — abstract boundaries. In the fourth verse the boundary turns into a wall.
A ḥujra is by definition an object of boundary: what encloses an area and separates it from the rest. And the verse puts on record the calling out from behind that boundary.
The point to notice is this: those who call do not break the wall down, do not force the door, do not go in. All they do is call out. The wall stands where it is; the voice crosses it.
And this is exactly what the sūra records: a physical boundary can be crossed by voice. A door may be shut and the person may still disturb the one inside. Privacy is not kept safe by a wall alone; it is kept safe by the wall being respected.
This is directly connected with the prohibition of prying later in the sūra (12), and I shall make that connection there. But the idea in the two verses is the same: the existence of a boundary is not enough; the boundary has to be acknowledged.
I record this as my own reading. The fact that stands in the text is this: the act censured is not entering but calling out.
Root: ن-د-ي / ن-د-و. Nidāʾ — to call out to one far off, to summon. Munādī — the one who calls. Al-nādī — an assembly, a place of gathering (at al-ʿAlaq 96/17, nādiyah).
Form: Form III (mufāʿala) — nādā. This form generally states reciprocity; the explanation the lexicographers record here is this: nidāʾ includes the sending of the voice to a distance and the expectation of an answer from the other side.
And the word itself presupposes a distance. You do not "call out" to the person beside you; you speak. Nidāʾ is an attempt to close the distance in between with the voice. Here the distance being closed is a wall.
وَرَاء — behind, beyond. The word is counted among those in Arabic that can mean both "behind" and "before/beyond"; here the sense is plain: the other side of the wall.
The first note: aktharuhum — "most of them". The verse does not say "all of them". This is a qualification the Qurʾān often uses when speaking about communities, and it agrees with the measure repeated in this commentary: no wholesale ruling is issued against a group. Not all who do the same act may be doing it for the same reason.
Root: ع-ق-ل. It was treated in detail in the section on al-Fajr; what was recorded there was this: the concrete sense of the root is to bind — the rope that ties a camel's leg is called ʿiqāl. Reason is a bond, a power of holding; not a capacity but a brake.
And this changes the ruling of the verse entirely. Lā yaʿqilūn does not mean "their intelligence is poor". In the logic of the root, reason is a person's being able to hold himself back. The verse is saying, that is: these people cannot hold themselves back.
The table set up in the section on al-Fajr works here exactly: ḥijr (reason) and ḥujra (chamber) are from the same root — both are a boundary. And the fourth verse records, of the person who calls out from behind the ḥujra, the absence of ḥijr (the failure to use reason).
Two words from the same root, face to face in the same verse: the person who does not respect the boundary outside is one who is not using the boundary inside — his power of holding himself back.
I record this link as my own reading; I do not ascribe it to any classical exegete. But the shared root of the two words is a fact that stands in the language, and it had been recorded independently in the section on al-Fajr.
The sources transmit that a tribal delegation came to Medina and, growing impatient during the Prophet's hour of rest, called out to him from behind the chambers. In the reports the name of the tribe is given as well.
I relate this account with the note "it is transmitted" and do not write the tribe's name. The reason is this commentary's general practice: the accounts of the occasions of revelation diverge from one another at the level of detail, and, more importantly, attaching the name of a tribe to a verse can be read as a ruling about people who bear that name today or who are traced to that lineage. The wording of the Qurʾān does not do this: the verse speaks not of a tribe but of "those who call out".
What the reports have in common is reasonable and historically familiar: the manners of speech of desert life and those of a settled city — still more of a seat of government — are different. To raise the voice in order to summon someone is normal in a wide and thinly peopled space; in a settlement of chambers with doors it is a breach of a boundary. The verse stands at that transition.
The picture in the verse is more than familiar today, because the possibility of "calling out from behind the chamber" has increased as never before.
A person's door is no longer only the door of his house. His telephone, his message box, the end of his working hours, his day off — each of these is a ḥujra: an enclosed, separated area. And all of these areas, just like the wall in the verse, can be crossed by voice. No one breaks down the door; they only call out.
The verse's measure will come in the fifth verse: to wait. But this much can already be recorded: the verse does not charge the one who crosses the boundary with ill will. The word it uses is not moral but mental: lā yaʿqilūn — they cannot hold themselves back. Impatience is described not as a wickedness but as a lack of brakes.