Qāf 50:43

Innā naḥnu nuḥyī wa numītu wa ilayna'l-maṣīr

"It is We, We who give life and give death; and to Us is the journey's end."

The clause is built with one of the densest structures of emphasis in Arabic:

1. إِنَّ — the particle of emphasis. 2. نَا — "we" (the noun of inna). 3. نَحْنُ — a further pronoun (the ḍamīr al-faṣl, or a pronoun of emphasis). 4. نُحْيِي — the verb, again in the first person plural.

"We", that is, is said three times. In Arabic this structure establishes restriction (ḥaṣr, "only"): giving life and giving death belong to Us alone.

And something in the word order is striking: nuḥyī (We give life) comes first, numīt (We give death) second.

This is also the natural order of life — first to live, then to die. But the Qurʾān sometimes uses these two verbs in the reverse order as well (al-Mulk 67/2: alladhī khalaqa'l-mawta wa'l-ḥayāt — who created death and life; death first).

That ordering was dwelt on in the section on al-Mulk.

In Qāf the order runs in the natural direction and agrees with the context: the sūra is at this moment describing the resurrection. In the forty-second verse people came out of the earth; the forty-third says "giving life is Our work".

Its concrete sense: to pass from one state into another, to become. Ṣāra — he became, he came to be. Ṣayrūra — becoming. Maṣīr — the place arrived at, the end returned to.

Here is the interesting side of the word: the root states not a place but a change of state. Maṣīr is, before "the place one goes to", "the state one will come to be in".

And there is a fronting in the word order: ilaynā has come before the verb (or the predicate). This again establishes restriction: the returning is to Us alone.