al-Muzzammil 73:19

Inna hādhihī tadhkira. Fa-man shāʾa'ttakhadha ilā rabbihī sabīlā "Surely this is a reminder. So whoever wills takes a path to his Lord."

The first close of the sūra. The twentieth verse will come as a separate section; the main body of nineteen verses ends here.

The root ذ-ك-ر was treated in al-Inshirāḥ. تَذْكِرَة is on the tafʿila pattern and means "an instrument of reminding, the thing that reminds".

And the way the text names itself is worth pausing over.

Heavy things have been said through the sūra: fetters, flame, a morsel stuck in the throat, mountains running away, children growing old. And at the end of all of it the text gives itself a name: a reminder.

That is, the text does not name itself a threat, a ruling, a proclamation.

And the word "reminder" has a presupposition: what is recalled is something the addressee already knew. No new information is being given; something forgotten or suppressed is being brought forward.

In al-Takwīr the text's being defined as dhikr and tied to the divine will (mashīʾa) was treated (81/27-29) and its connection with ʿAbasa was made. The same structure is here too, and it will be completed in the next sentence.

And now one of the most important moves of word order in the sūra comes.

For nineteen verses the sūra spoke in the imperative: qum, rattil, udhkur, tabattal, ittakhidh, iṣbir, uhjur, dharnī, mahhil. Nine commands.

And in the last sentence the imperative is let go: "whoever wills."

That is, the sūra begins with a series of commands and ends with a setting free.

This shows how the text positions its own proposal: the commands were given to the addressee (the Prophet); to the general addressees a door was shown and no compulsion was placed.

There is an inner weaving here, and it is easily missed.

This verb occurs in the sūra for the second time:

The same verb, two moods. The first imperative, the second declarative. The first to a single person, the second to everyone.

And as recorded in al-Balad, Form VIII conveys that the act is performed by the person's own effort. That is, in both verses the "taking" belongs to the person.

I record this weaving as my own reading.

A note: this verse occurs in another place in the Qurʾān in exactly the same wording:

"Surely this is a reminder. So whoever wills takes a path to his Lord" (al-Insān 76/29).

And there what follows is: "But you will not unless God wills" (al-Insān 76/30).

A similar pattern exists in another place too: "…so let whoever wills take a place of return to his Lord" (al-Nabaʾ 78/39).

What these repetitions point to is that the pattern is settled: reminder + willing + path. The three together, in more than one sūra.

And the next sūra will build the same pattern once more: "No indeed, it is a reminder. So whoever wills remembers it" (al-Muddaththir 74/54-55) — followed by "But they will not remember unless God wills" (74/56).

Both sūras close with the same structure: tadhkira → man shāʾa → the qualification of the divine will. This is one of the strongest data for the link between the two sūras, and it will be taken up again in the comparison section at the end of the sūra.

In al-Muzzammil there is man shāʾa ("whoever wills"), but not the qualification found at al-Muddaththir 74/56 and al-Takwīr 81/29 ("unless God wills…").

That is, this sūra leaves the door open and leaves it there; it sets no limitation.

The frame of the discussion of the will was set up in al-Baqara at 2/7 and applied in al-Takwīr at 81/29. The stance recorded there — taking no side, and the note that "none of the parties has held that the human being is without responsibility; the dispute is about how responsibility is constituted" — holds here as well. I shall take the matter up at the last verse of al-Muddaththir, because the note is set down there.