إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتِ لَهُمْ جَنَّٰتٌ تَجْرِى مِن تَحْتِهَا ٱلْأَنْهَٰرُ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ ٱلْفَوْزُ ٱلْكَبِيرُ
Inna'lladhīna āmanū wa ʿamilu'l-ṣāliḥāti lahum jannātun tajrī min taḥtihā'l-anhār; dhālika'l-fawzu'l-kabīr "For those who believe and do righteous deeds there are gardens beneath which rivers flow. That is the great triumph."
| Verse 10 | Verse 11 | |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ فَتَنُوا۟ | إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ |
| Who | Those who put others to the torment | Those who believe and do righteous deeds |
| Requital | لَهُمْ عَذَابُ … | لَهُمْ جَنَّٰتٌ … |
| Close | Two punishments | al-fawzu'l-kabīr |
The same pattern, the opposite direction. This is a structure the Qurʾān uses often in issuing verdicts, and it is another form of the fa-ammā … wa ammā pattern treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa.
The eleventh verse promises the believers the garden. It does not promise deliverance in this world.
Nowhere across the sūra is it said "We brought them out of the fire" or "We destroyed the wrongdoers". In Sūrat al-Fīl the breaking up of the army is related; here there is no such sentence.
This is the hardest side of the sūra and it must not be softened. What the Qurʾān is saying here is: the one who is wronged is sometimes not delivered. There is a requital, but the place of the requital is not here.
The second verse of the sūra had already established this: "by the promised day." The ground of the reckoning is that day.
Root: ف-و-ز. To be delivered, to attain what one sought, to obtain what one wanted. Fāza — he won, he was delivered; mafāza — a place of deliverance; and, curiously, mafāza is also the word for a waterless, dangerous passage in the desert (a naming by its opposite, so that it may be counted auspicious).
At the centre of the word there is coming out of danger and reaching what is desired: not merely to win, but to win by being delivered.
In the Qurʾān fawz is generally mentioned with the adjectives "ʿaẓīm" (great, mighty) or "mubīn" (manifest). Its being qualified here with كَبِير (kabīr) is striking. I do not speak with certainty as to whether this adjective occurs with fawz only here in the Qurʾān; but I record that the collocation is out of the ordinary.
And the choice of the word fawz is meaningful in the context of the sūra for a further reason: inside the root there is the idea of being delivered. The sūra is speaking of people who were not delivered in this world, and it names what is given to them fawz — deliverance.