al-Māʾida 5:7

Wa'dhkurū niʿmata'llāhi ʿalaykum wa mīthāqahu'lladhī wāthaqakum bihī idh qultum samiʿnā wa aṭaʿnā · Wa'ttaqu'llāh · Inna'llāha ʿalīmun bi-dhāti'ṣ-ṣudūr

"Remember God's favour upon you, and the covenant by which He bound you when you said 'we have heard and we have obeyed'. Be mindful of God; God knows what is in the breasts."

This verse is the bridge between the sūra's first sentence (5/1, awfū bi'l-ʿuqūd) and the long section on the covenant that will begin at verse 12.

And the order matters: first this community's own undertaking is recalled (7), then other people's undertakings and what became of them are recounted (12-14). That is, the history to be told is first tied to the hearer's own word.

I record this as my own reading; its ground is the order of the verses. Before telling anyone else's story, the sūra stands its addressee in the same position.

The root has occurred in al-Aḥzāb, Muḥammad, al-Ḥadīd and al-Fajr. The primary sense of the root: to make a thing firm, to bind it tightly. Wathīqa — a document (the Turkish "vesika"); thiqa — a trustworthy person; īthāq — binding firmly; wisāq — a bond, a strap. The wa lā yūthiqu wathāqahū aḥad of Sūrat al-Fajr (89/26) is from the same root: binding.

The pattern should be recorded: مِيثَاق is on the pattern مِفْعَال, and in Arabic this pattern gives nouns of instrument — miftāḥ (key), mīzān (scales), miṣbāḥ (lamp), miqyās (measure).

That is, mīthāq is not "a word given" but, on the word's own pattern, an instrument of binding. Not the undertaking itself but that with which one is bound.

And the verb is in Form III: wāthaqa (mufāʿala) — a mutual binding. At al-Fatḥ 48/10 the verb yubāyiʿūna's being in the mufāʿala form was treated, and it was recorded there: verbs entering this form are two-sided. I rely on that treatment. The same holds here: a covenant is not a one-way surrender but a two-sided bond.

The content of the undertaking is given, and it consists of two words: samiʿnā wa aṭaʿnā.

This expression was treated at al-Nūr 24/51 and recorded there as the word of the believers. I rely on that treatment.

What belongs here is the order of the two verbs:

The order cannot be reversed, and this has a consequence: obedience comes after hearing. A practice carried out without understanding is not what this sentence describes.

And the opposite of this expression will come later in the sūra: at 5/13, yuḥarrifūna'l-kalima ʿan mawāḍiʿih — shifting the word from its place. That is, hearing and then applying it otherwise.

ذَات — "the possessor of, the substance of". Dhātu'ṣ-ṣudūr — what the breasts possess; what they hold within.

The position of the closing is meaningful: at the end of a passage about giving one's word, it is not the utterance of the word that is named but its inside. A contract is made with the tongue; but whether the contract will be kept stands in the breast.