al-Ṭalāq 65:3

Wa yarzuqhu min ḥaythu lā yaḥtasib, wa man yatawakkal ʿala'llāhi fa-huwa ḥasbuh, inna'llāha bālighu amrih, qad jaʿala'llāhu li-kulli shayʾin qadrā

"And He provides for him from where he does not expect. Whoever relies on God, He suffices him. Indeed God brings His command to its end. God has set a measure for everything."

Root و ك ل (w-k-l). The common use of this word has drifted a good way from what the root says; so one has to begin from the root.

وَكِيل (wakīl) — the person appointed to carry out someone's business on his behalf. English keeps the same idea in proxy, agent, power of attorney: when a person cannot or will not do a thing himself, he appoints someone to conduct it for him.

تَوَكُّل is of the tafaʿʿul form and conveys reflexivity: to take someone as one's agent, to consign one's business to another.

And here is the thing to be attended to: appointing an agent is an operation.

To appoint an agent: 1. There must be a business in hand. 2. You must be its owner. 3. And you must give the agency.

That is, tawakkul presupposes not the absence of business but its presence. A man with no business appoints no agent. This is a consequence that comes out of the structure of the word, and it is the word itself that prevents tawakkul from being understood as "doing nothing".

Accordingly the context of the verse confirms it too: the sentence occurs in the middle of a series of rulings listing things to be done. Count the period, do not put the woman out, call witnesses, pay the maintenance — and rely. Tawakkul does not stand in place of the list; it stands beside the list.

A qualification. That tawakkul must go together with taking hold of the means is a subject treated at length in the Islamic intellectual tradition, and there is a widely transmitted saying on it — the saying to the bedouin who left his camel untethered, to the effect of "tie it first, then rely". There is dispute about the soundness of this report; for that reason I do not transmit it as a ḥadīth. The structure of the word already yields the same result and there is no need to rest on a report for it.

حَسْب — the same root (ح س ب) that occurred two words earlier in lā yaḥtasib. The word here means "what is sufficient, what is enough".

Its link with the root's sense of "reckoning" is direct: sufficiency is the result of a reckoning. A thing's being "enough" is its having reached the required quantity. English covers the two ends of this with two unconnected words — reckoning and enough — but the Arabic holds them in one root.

And the two words' occurring this close together sets up a contrast:

• lā yaḥtasib — a human being's reckoning does not suffice; he cannot compute the source.
• fa-huwa ḥasbuh — and God suffices him.

That is, the verse uses the same root twice in two opposite directions: the insufficiency of a human being's reckoning and the sufficiency of God. I record this as an observation about the language; I do not present it as a connection established in the classical commentaries.

بَالِغ — root ب ل غ (b-l-gh), which occurred in verse 2 in connection with balaghna: to reach, to arrive. Bāligh is an active participle: the one who brings, who makes arrive.

أَمْر — root أ م ر (ʾ-m-r). The word has two main uses in Arabic, and both occur in this sūra:

1. Command, order. (Plural awāmir.) 2. Affair, situation, matter. (Plural umūr.)

English renders the two separately, as "command" and "affair"; in Arabic it is one word. And this unity will become important at the end of the sūra.

The meaning of the sentence: God brings His affair/His command to its target. That is, what He decrees does not stop on the road.

And this sentence is the ground of the preceding one (fa-huwa ḥasbuh): God's being sufficient is given as the consequence not of His power but of His bringing His work to completion.

Root ق د ر (q-d-r). This root was analysed in full in al-Qadr; I do not repeat that analysis. A short reminder: in Arabic the root opens onto three separate directions of meaning — (1) measure, determination, apportioning; (2) worth, value, honour; (3) narrowness, constriction. In the discussion of Sūrat al-Qadr it was recorded that these three branches are three faces of the same night.

Which is it here? Plainly the first: qadran = measure, a determined quantity. The sentence says that a measure has been set for everything.

But this is not the main matter. The main matter is this:

al-Qadr, when looking for evidence for the THIRD branch of the root (narrowness), pointed to a place four verses further on in this sūra.

The evidence given there was: "He whose provision has been straitened for him (qudira ʿalayhi rizquh)…" — al-Ṭalāq 65/7.

That is, the first sense of the root occurs at 65/3 and the third at 65/7. The same root, four verses apart, with two different branches of meaning.

And the relation between the two occurrences is not accidental; they explain one another:

What comes out when the two are joined is this: narrowness is not the absence of measure. No one's provision is randomly narrow; what is narrow is a measure too. 65/3 sets the general principle, 65/7 brings it down into a man's pocket.

And this is the ground of the ruling at 65/7 — "let him whose hand is straitened spend out of what God has given him". The man is not paying short; he is paying by his own measure. And it is not he who determines that the measure is narrow.

I complete this connection from al-Qadr towards this side: there this verse was cited as a lexical proof; here the same word is seen working with two branches of meaning at once inside the same sūra.

A qualification: the debate over destiny. The word qadran is the word at the centre of the debate over destiny in the literature of theology. I do not enter that debate from this verse, because the verse does not construct a theological thesis; it stands inside a series of rulings, as a sentence meant to bring a person to be content with his own measure. To tear it from its context and make it the proof of a school's position is to lose the work the verse does.

These four sentences in verses 2 and 3 — makhraj, provision, tawakkul, measure — what are they doing in the middle of a legal text?

The answer lies in the cost of the rulings.

The rulings the sūra sets are expensive for the party applying them:

• Waiting out the period: the man's not being free at the moment he wishes.
• Keeping the woman in the house: the cost of the dwelling, and the tension.
• Maintenance: money directly.
• The wage for suckling: money again.
• Calling witnesses: the opening of the event to the public.

And none of these has any worldly enforcer. What will happen when the man chooses not to obey the rulings?

The sūra's answer has two layers. In the long run there is a reckoning (verses 8-10). But in the short run these four sentences stand: a way out will be opened for you, provision will come from where you have not reckoned, He suffices you, and your measure is already determined.

That is, the verses set up the psychological ground that will carry the cost of the rule. So long as a person thinks his own resource is limited, he resists sharing his resource with another. When he becomes convinced that the resource is not in his own hand, the resistance lessens.

I record this as an observation: the sūra does not content itself with imposing a ruling; it also gives the picture of the world that makes obeying the ruling possible.

One. The least examined side of the most quoted verse.

The sentence "whoever guards himself against God, He opens a way out for him" circulates on signboards, in messages, in words of consolation. Put into its context, what it says goes beyond consolation:

This sentence is said at a moment when breaking the rule looks like a way out. For the man the easiest way out is to put the woman out of the house. The cheapest way out is to cut the maintenance. The quickest way out is not to wait the period.

The verse closes those ways out and in return promises another door. That is, the function of the sentence is not to soothe; it is to close the short cut and show an alternative.

The side of this that looks to the present is direct and not confined to divorce: a person under pressure sees, most of the time, that he can get out by breaking the rule. And most of the time he is right — in the short run he really does get out. The claim of the verse is that that way out is not a way out.

Two. The limit of making a reckoning.

Min ḥaythu lā yaḥtasib — "from where he has not reckoned". This expression does not reject making a reckoning; it says that the scope of the reckoning is limited.

Its practical counterpart is this: in making a decision we add up all the entries in our hand, and if the sum does not come out we say "it cannot be done". The sum really does not come out. But within the sum there are only the entries we know.

This is not a ground for not deciding — on the contrary, the verse commands a decision (obeying the rule). What it says is narrower: the sum's not closing does not show that the road is closed.

Three. The word "suffices".

Fa-huwa ḥasbuh — "He suffices him". In present-day speech "to suffice" is mostly the voicing of a lack: it does not suffice, it does not stretch, there is none left.

What the verse sets up is not a claim about satisfaction but a claim about a source. And two different anxieties have to be distinguished: "is what I have enough?" and "is there something behind me?" are separate questions. The first is a question of quantity, the second a question of relationship. The sentence answers the second and does not answer the first — accordingly the amount of the maintenance will be regulated separately in the following verses.