al-Ḥashr 59:3

Wa lawlā an kataballāhu ʿalayhimu'l-jalāʾa la-ʿadhdhabahum fi'd-dunyā, wa lahum fi'l-ākhirati ʿadhābu'n-nār

"Had God not decreed exile for them, He would have punished them in this world with another punishment. And in the hereafter there is for them the punishment of the Fire."

Root: ج-ل-و. The original sense of the root is to bring into the open, to lift the covering, to polish.

Derivatives:

• جَلَا (jalā) — he opened, brought out, cleaned. To polish a sword: jalā'l-sayfa.
• تَجَلَّى (tajallī) — to come into the open, to become visible.
• جَلَاء (jalāʾ) — the departure of the inhabitants of a place from it, the emptying of the place.

Two uses from the Qurʾān:

• "By the day when it brings it (the sun) into the open" — وَٱلنَّهَارِ إِذَا جَلَّىٰهَا (al-Shams 91/3). The day takes the sun out of being covered and shows it.
• "When his Lord manifested Himself to the mountain, He shattered it to pieces" (al-Aʿrāf 7/143).

Why this word for "exile"? Because jalāʾ is not so much the going of the one exiled as the emptying of the place that stays behind, and its coming into the open. The word looks at the event from the side not of the party that goes but of the place that remains: the house has emptied, its covering has been lifted, its inside has come into view.

This completes the image in the preceding verse: the houses were demolished, the roofs were lifted off, the inside was opened up.

An observation. At al-Aʿrāf 7/143 the same root occurred together with a mountain, and the result was the mountain's being broken to pieces. In the twenty-first verse of this sūra, too, the breaking of a mountain will be recounted (mutaṣaddiʿan). There is an echo between the two scenes; but because they are built with different roots I record it not as a link but as an observation.

This is the side of this verse most often skipped.

The structure لَوْلَآ ... لَـ gives in Arabic the sense "had that not been, this would have been": an unrealised condition and its unrealised consequence.

That is: had the exile not been decreed, another punishment would have come in this world.

This is a sentence that changes the tone of the sūra. The exile is not recounted as something heavy; it is recounted as something that has taken the place of what was heavier.

And this has a further consequence: the verse positions the event not as a revenge but as a measured requital. The name al-Ḥakīm in the verse-ending of the preceding verse is at work here — power bound to wisdom.

What the Qurʾān calls "punishment in this world" occurs frequently in the context of the destruction of earlier communities: ʿĀd, Thamūd, the people of Lot. This verse says that that pattern was not applied. That is, the exile is a ruling put in the place of destruction.

That the requital in this world has been lightened does not change the ruling in the hereafter. The two fields are kept apart.

This distinction is consistent in the Qurʾān and it is important: a thing's not befalling one in this world does not mean that the account is closed; and its befalling one does not mean that the account has been paid. The two ledgers are separate.