al-Ḥujurāt 49:7

Wa'ʿlamū anna fīkum rasūla'llāh, law yuṭīʿukum fī kathīrin mina'l-amri la-ʿanittum, wa lākinna'llāha ḥabbaba ilaykumu'l-īmāna wa zayyanahū fī qulūbikum wa karraha ilaykumu'l-kufra wa'l-fusūqa wa'l-ʿiṣyān, ulāʾika humu'r-rāshidūn

"Know that God's Messenger is among you. If he were to obey you in much of the matter, you would fall into hardship. But God has made faith beloved to you and adorned it in your hearts, and has made denial, transgression and disobedience repellent to you. These are the ones who are rightly directed."

The seventh verse is the direct continuation of the sixth, and the link is made here:

The sixth verse took as its subject a report brought by a transgressor. The seventh verse says: "God's Messenger is among you."

The contrast, then, is this: on one side, information coming from outside whose reliability is in question; on the other, a verified source present among you. The verse reminds the one addressed that a means of verification is already at hand.

This makes the command of tabayyun in the sixth verse concrete: investigation is not an abstract undertaking; there is a place to ask.

In Arabic the normal order of the sentence would have been: anna rasūla'llāhi fīkum — "God's Messenger is among you."

The verse has reversed this: anna fīkum rasūla'llāh — "among you is God's Messenger."

The bringing forward of the adverbial phrase (fīkum) states emphasis. What is emphasised is not who the messenger is — but where he is. "Among you." That is, at a distance where he can be reached, asked, consulted.

And this is directly connected with the first block (1-5): there the one addressed was warned not to go ahead of the Prophet and to wait at his door. Here he is reminded that the same person is among you. A boundary was set, but no distance was set.

This is the most unusual sentence in the verse and is generally passed over quickly.

Many times in the Qurʾān it is said "obey God and His Messenger". Here the relation is reversed: what if the Messenger obeyed you?

And the answer is this: la-ʿanittum — you would fall into hardship.

عَنِتَ — root ع-ن-ت. The concrete sense the lexicographers record: difficulty, hardship, distress; and as one use of the root, the re-breaking of a bone that had knit — that is, the breaking again of something that had been mended — is recorded. I relate this second use as it occurs in the dictionaries, not in definite terms.

The word occurs in several places in the Qurʾān and always states a being strained: "They desire what will cause you hardship" (Āl ʿImrān 3/118) — waddū mā ʿanittum.

What the sentence says is this: for a community to be governed according to its own momentary wishes is not to that community's benefit.

At first sight this may look like a sentence in defence of authority. But the word order says something else: the sentence does not say "he does not obey you", it says "if he did, you would suffer for it". What is recorded, that is, is not the direction of obedience but its consequence.

And read together with the sixth verse, a table emerges:

Two verses close off two different sources of error: the one information coming from outside, the other a demand coming from inside. And the structure common to both is the same as in the sūra's first verse — putting a thing ahead of where it belongs.

I record this as my own reading; that the two verses come one after the other stands in the text.

The qualification is important: not "in every matter", but "in much of the matter".

The verse, that is, does not say that the view of the one addressed is always wrong. The Qurʾān itself commands consultation elsewhere: "Consult them in affairs" (Āl ʿImrān 3/159). And, as was recorded earlier in this commentary, Sūrat al-Mujādala records a woman's disputing with the Prophet without censuring it.

The verse, then, takes as its subject not consulting but imposing. The difference lies between giving an opinion and demanding that the opinion be carried out.

The second half of the verse is a sentence of thanksgiving, and its word order is striking. Three verbs, all three in Form II, and the subject of all three is God:

Form II here states a causing: not loving but making beloved, not finding repellent but making repellent.

And the subject of the verbs is not conduct but inclination. The verse does not say "He commanded you faith"; it says "He made it beloved". A command and a making-beloved are different: a command is an outward note, a making-beloved an inward turning.

This is an important point for the whole of the sūra, and I record it as my own reading: al-Ḥujurāt is a sūra made of commands from beginning to end. And right in its middle, alongside the commands, a language of inclination enters. The text records, that is, that conduct is not built by obeying rules alone, that an order of liking and loathing is needed. That a person avoids backbiting and that he is repelled by backbiting are two separate conditions; the twelfth verse will try to produce exactly the second.

Three things are counted as made repellent, and in the classical commentaries it is recorded that these state a gradation:

The order runs from inside outward: first the refusal of belief, then going out beyond the boundary, then failing to obey individual commands. I relate this gradation as an explanation recorded in the classical sources; I impose no preference.

And there is a balance in the word order: on the other side stands a single positive term — al-īmān. One thing made beloved, three made repellent. One of the classical explanations is this: faith is one, the ways of departing from it are many.

It must be recorded that this is the third occurrence of the root ف-س-ق in the sūra. In the sixth verse the word was the epithet of the one who brings the report (fāsiqun); here it is one of the things made repellent (al-fusūq); and in the eleventh verse it will come back as a name: biʾsa'l-ismu'l-fusūqu baʿda'l-īmān. I shall gather the three occurrences in the section on the sūra as a whole.

رَشَدَ — root ر-ش-د. Rushd: finding the right way, maturity, hitting the mark. Its opposites are ghayy (going astray) and safah (lightness of mind).

The word has a life in jurisprudence: rushd is a person's reaching the maturity to manage his own property (al-Nisāʾ 4/6). Rushd, that is, is not an abstract rightness but the competence to see to one's own affairs.

And this stands face to face with lā yaʿqilūn in the fourth verse:

The first seven verses of the sūra are built between these two poles.

And the ḍamīr al-faṣl (the pronoun of separation) is used: ulāʾika hum al-rāshidūn — "these, precisely, are the ones". This structure makes the ruling definite; it will be used several more times in the sūra (11, 15).