al-Taḥrīm 66:11

Wa ḍaraba'llāhu mathalan li'lladhīna āmanu'mraʾata Firʿawn, idh qālat rabbi'bni lī ʿindaka baytan fi'l-jannati wa najjinī min Firʿawna wa ʿamalihī wa najjinī mina'l-qawmi'ẓ-ẓālimīn

"And God set forth, for those who believe, the example of the wife of Pharaoh. When she said: 'My Lord! Build for me, with You, a house in the garden. And save me from Pharaoh and from his work; and save me from the wrongdoing people.'"

The previous verse recounted the worst outcome in the best house. This verse does exactly the reverse.

Pharaoh is the most conspicuous historical example the Qurʾān uses for tyranny. The analysis recorded at al-Baqara 2/49 was this: the verb yasūmūnakum (root s-w-m: to put a good up for sale, to press insistently) stated that the torment was not a single occurrence but a state continually pressed upon them; and the commercial root of the word made one sense that people were being disposed of like a good haggled over.

There was one further finding there and it serves here: that the male children were killed and the women left is "not a slaughter born of rage but a calculated policy" and "the most dangerous form of oppression is not the angry but the planned."

That is, the woman recounted in this verse lives at the centre of a planned system of oppression. And there she offers a prayer.

The word order of the prayer is the finest detail of the sūra and it is almost always lost in translation.

The Arabic order is this:

رَبِّ — my Lord ابْنِ لِي — build for me عِندَكَ — with You بَيْتًا — a house فِي الْجَنَّةِ — in the garden

Note: عِندَكَ comes before بَيْتًا.

That is, the sentence does not say "build me a house in the garden, let it be with You". It says this: "with You — a house — in the garden."

In Arabic the bringing forward of an element (taqdīm) generally states specification and importance. What is brought forward here is nearness.

The meaning of this is: the woman says first where she wants to be, then what she wants. What is asked for is not a place; it is a position. The house comes second, within that position.

And in third place stands the garden. So the order is: nearness → house → garden. The garden is at the very end of the list — as the address of what is asked for, not as the thing itself.

To see how out of the ordinary this is one must compare. In most of the examples of prayer in the Qurʾān what is asked for is named directly: forgiveness, mercy, patience, offspring, the garden. Here what is asked for is described by way of the place of what is asked for.

The finding treated at the last verse of al-Bayyina — that at the summit of the reward there is placed not an object but a relation, and that "a deed becomes not a payment but an attempt at approach" — is the exact counterpart of this prayer. There the Qurʾān set good pleasure above the description of the garden. Here a servant asks for nearness before the garden.

There is no verbal link between the two texts; but the hierarchy they set up is the same. I record this as an observation.

Root ب ن ي (b-n-y): to build, to raise a structure. Bināʾ (a building), bannāʾ (a builder, a mason), bunyān (a firm structure) are from the same root. The Turkish bina (building) and bünye (constitution) come from here.

The concrete sense of the word is putting stone upon stone — handwork, taking time, done by stages.

And here I record an observation as my own reading; I do not present it as transmitted and I do not load too much upon it:

Pharaoh is mentioned once in the Qurʾān as building a structure: it is recounted that he ordered a high tower to be built for him (al-Qaṣaṣ 28/38; al-Muʾmin 40/36-37). That is, in history his name is that of a ruler mentioned together with vast structures.

And in the same house a woman asks for a structure — but not of stone, and not from himself.

I do not want to force the difference between the two structures; the verse sets up no such comparison and I do not pretend that I do. I record only this: the same family of verbs looks in two different directions within the same household.

A linguistic note: the imperative ibni has come down to a single syllable because the final letter of the root (yāʾ) has dropped — an ordinary conjugation in Arabic's defective verbs. Like qū in the verse at 66/6, this too is a shortened imperative.

The second half of the prayer is as striking as the first.

نَجِّنِي — root ن ج و (n-j-w): to be saved, to slip clear of a danger. Najāt (salvation), nājiya (one who is saved) are from the same root. One of the concrete senses of the root is also "a high place, a hill the flood does not reach" — salvation is staying above the water.

In the tafʿīl form (najjā): he saved. And this form, as was recorded in al-Bayyina, states intensification and repetition.

The verb occurs twice and this repetition is meaningful:

1. Najjinī min Firʿawna wa ʿamalih — "save me from Pharaoh and from his work." 2. Najjinī mina'l-qawmi'ẓ-ẓālimīn — "save me from the wrongdoing people."

And the real matter is in the first request: عَمَلِهِ.

The woman asks to be saved from her husband. And she asks besides to be saved from his work. The two are counted separately.

This distinction is worth pausing over. To move away from a person and to move away from what that person does are not the same thing. A person living inside a system, even if he puts a distance between himself and the owner of that system, goes on living inside what the system produces: he eats at his table, he benefits from his order, he stands in the security he provides.

What the prayer does is to name this second bond separately.

And there is a third layer: al-qawmi'ẓ-ẓālimīn — the wrongdoing people. That is: the person, the work, and the community. Three separate rings:

The prayer counts all three rings one by one. And note the order: it goes from the nearest to the furthest — husband, order, society.

This is the most concentrated expression of a question that has met us many times in al-Baqara: the question of how a person can separate himself from the structure he is inside. And the answer the prayer gives is that the separation does not happen in a single step.

I record one further observation.

The verse does not recount what this woman did. No escape, no revolt, no struggle is recounted. The only thing recounted is the sentence she said.

Idh qālat — "when she said". And after it, the prayer.

That is, the ground for a person's being presented as "an example for those who believe" is a sentence that came out of her mouth. Not an act, but a word. And the word is not a claim either, but a request.

One must think about what this means. A person is in a position where she can change nothing — she is in the house of the most powerful man, she cannot flee, she cannot resist, she cannot bring down the system. The only thing left in her hands is what she wants.

And the verse says that this is enough.

I write this as my own reading; but the structure of the verse supports this reading: the example is built not upon an act but upon a prayer.