al-Najm 53:24-25

Am li'l-insāni mā tamannā · Fa-li'llāhi'l-ākhiratu wa'l-ūlā "Or shall man have whatever he wishes for? Yet to God belong the last and the first."

Root: م-ن-ي. This root was given above at verse 20 on the occasion of Manāt, resting on the analysis in al-Qiyāma.

تَمَنَّىٰ — Form V: to want a thing, to desire it, to wish it to be.

And the relation between the root's sense of "to apportion, to measure" and its sense of "to wish" is worth dwelling on. In the section on al-Qiyāma this kinship was transmitted as a lexical observation with no interpretation built upon it. Here I add a detail, and I state that it is my own reading:

Manā — he apportioned; tamannā — he apportioned for himself. Wishing, that is, is a person's writing his own destiny in his own head. And the verse refuses exactly this: apportioning is not man's work.

I present this as an inference; I pass no definite ruling on the historical relation between the two senses of the root.

Another derivative of the word in the Qurʾān: أَمَانِىّ (amānī — fancies). This word was treated in the section al-Baqara (2/78), and the finding recorded there holds here too: amānī is a conviction resting not on reality but on wish.

أَمْ joins one question to a previous one in Arabic: "or is it that…?"

And the connection here is this: verse 23 had said that those addressed follow what their souls crave. Verse 24 asks the natural consequence of that sentence: is wishing, then, enough?

The question tests the diagnosis of the preceding verse. If a person were vindicated by following what he desires, wishing would be enough. If not, the diagnosis in verse 23 is the diagnosis of a defect.

The verse does not answer the question — or rather, it gives the answer by another sentence: fa-li'llāhi'l-ākhiratu wa'l-ūlā.

This is a technique the Qurʾān often uses and it has been recorded in several places in this commentary (the opening question in the section al-Māʿūn; the closing question in the section al-Munāfiqūn). A question does not impose an answer, it makes one find it.

The answer given here is not a direct "no" but a declaration of ownership: everything is His.

And the logical link is this: to wish for a thing presupposes that you have some say over the distribution of that thing. If the distribution belongs to another, the wish is valid as a request but not valid as a right.

What is striking in the word order: the hereafter is named first and this world second.

The expected order would be "this world and the hereafter" — that is the order of time. The verse has inverted it.

In the classical commentaries it is recorded that this inversion may have to do with the verse-ending, and this explanation is strong: all the verses of the sūra end on the -ā sound, and al-ūlā fits that sound while al-ākhira does not. The order may therefore be one required by the rhyme.

But a dimension of meaning can be recorded too, and I present it as my own reading: in refusing man's wish the verse names the outcome first. A wish is about its outcome. And in whosever hand the outcome lies, the wish ends there.

In the section al-Aʿlā a similar inversion of order (Abraham–Moses / Moses–Abraham) was discussed, and there too the possibility of the verse-ending was recorded and no definite cause given. The same reserve holds here.

The word ٱلْأُولَىٰ occurs three times in this sūra (25, 50, 56) and each time qualifies something different: the life of this world (25), the first people of ʿĀd (50), the earlier warners (56). I record this as an observation about the distribution of a word.