al-Ṣaff 61:13

Wa ukhrā tuḥibbūnahā, naṣrun mina'llāhi wa fatḥun qarīb, wa bashshiri'l-muʾminīn

"And one further thing that you will love: help from God and a near victory. And give good news to the believers."

The sentence is incomplete; a word has been elided. The analyses: wa lakum ukhrā ("there is one further thing for you") or wa tijāratun ukhrā ("one further trade"). Both come out at the same place.

The structure is this: the twelfth verse had enumerated the return belonging to the hereafter. This verse adds the one belonging to this world.

And this is the finest point of the verse.

In defining this second return the verse adds a relative clause: تُحِبُّونَهَا — "which you love".

That is, the text knows what a person loves more, and it records this explicitly. A person does not describe the garden as "the thing I love"; it is distant, it has not been experienced, it is desired by being imagined. Victory and conquest, by contrast, belong to the present, are tangible, are wanted at once.

The verse neither denies this fact nor censures it.

But it puts it in order. And note the ordering:

The text places what is loved more in second position, and does not shrink from saying that it is loved more.

This is a good example of the Qurʾān's attitude towards worldly desires: the desire is not treated as non-existent, not suppressed, not censured. It is put in its place. And this is a far harder piece of work than denying the desire; because a desire that has been put on record is more easily managed than one that has not.

And one further observation: the sūra uses a verb of feeling in three separate places, and the three of them draw a map:

The sūra says first what God is revolted by, then what He loves, and at the end what the addressee loves. Three sentences describe a two-sided relationship.

Root ن-ص-ر: to help. And the concrete use of the root is striking: the rain's coming to parched ground.

• نُصِرَتِ ٱلْأَرْض — rain fell on the land, the land was helped.
• نَصَرَهُ — he helped him.

At the centre of the root is this: what comes from outside to what does not suffice on its own. Rain is what the soil cannot produce; it comes from outside and puts the soil in a condition to do its own work.

This root sense explains the caveat the word carries in the verse: نَصْرٌ مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ — "help from God". The caveat may look unnecessary; help is from Him in any case. But in the logic of the root the caveat is apt: help, by definition, comes from outside, and its source must be specified.

And this word will return in the next verse as أَنصَار. The sūra sets up help first as something received (13) and then as something given (14).

Root ف-ت-ح: to open. From the same root come miftāḥ (a key), al-Fattāḥ (the opener — one of the names of God), and fātiḥa (an opening).

The word's sense of "victory" comes from here: the opening of the gates of a city. Conquest, then, in the word's own logic, is not a destroying but an opening.

In the section on al-Baqara 2/89 another form of this root was treated: yastaftiḥūna — "to ask for a victory", that is, to demand superiority and triumph. What was recorded there was this: what was awaited was really not the prophet but the superiority; when the prophet came and the superiority passed to another, the expectation lost its meaning.

Here, by contrast, the victory stands on the side of what is promised, not what is demanded — and in return for a price.

قَرِيب — "near". A caveat about time is placed on the promise. And this caveat completes the language of trade in the offer: in an exchange the term matters. A long-term return (the garden) and a short-term return (the victory) are offered together.

Throughout the sūra the address has been plural: yā ayyuha'lladhīna āmanū, taqūlūna, tuʾminūna. Now suddenly a singular imperative comes: بَشِّرِ — "give good news".

This is an instance of iltifāt (a shift in the direction of address), and the addressee is plainly the Prophet.

Its function is this: the offer was made to the community, but the task of conveying the good news is given to one person. Towards its close, that is, the sūra sets up a distribution of duties: the community will carry out the trade, the messenger will carry the good news.

And the root of the verb bashshir — as was analysed in the section on al-Muddaththir, ب-ش-ر, whose centre is the skin — is the same as the mubashshiran of the sixth verse. Jesus had given good news; now the same verb is commanded to the addressee of this sūra. The root comes back at the two ends of the sūra.