al-Burūj 85:8

Wa mā naqamū minhum illā an yuʾminū bi'llāhi'l-ʿAzīzi'l-Ḥamīd "They took vengeance on them only because they believed in God, the Mighty, the Praiseworthy."

The central sentence of the sūra. And one of the most shattering sentences in the Qurʾān, because it finishes off the ground of a whole tyranny in a single sentence.

Root: ن-ق-م. The sense of the root is finer than the English "to take revenge", and it has two stages:

1. To find a thing ugly and unacceptable, to count it a fault, not to countenance it. 2. To set about punishing it for that reason.

Naqm, that is, is first an assessment and then an act. A person first counts a thing a fault, then punishes it.

Its derivatives:

• نِقْمَة (niqma) — punishment, requital. It is used as the opposite of niʿma (favour).
• اِنْتِقَام (intiqām) — the taking of requital for something counted a fault.
• مُنْتَقِم — used in the Qurʾān of God: "We are the takers of requital from the guilty" (al-Sajda 32/22).

What the word does in the verse: it names the wrongdoers' behaviour as a judgement. They did not merely grow angry; they determined a thing to be a fault and punished that fault.

And the fault they determined is given in the rest of the verse.

In Arabic the structure مَا … إِلَّا (negation + exception) is a pattern of restriction (ḥaṣr), rendered in English by "only … because". Its function is to lock the verdict onto a single thing.

And the use of it here is startling, because the pattern of restriction is normally used for a defence or for a belittling: "only this much", "nothing else".

By using this pattern the verse does something appalling: it opens the ground of an entire massacre with the word "only".

In English this tone has to be kept: "The only reason they took vengeance on them … was that they believed."

The weight of the sentence lies not in the greatness of the ground but in its smallness. The sūra builds the disproportion with grammar.

This pattern occurs several more times in the Qurʾān, in almost the same words. Setting three of them side by side shows what the pattern does:

وَمَا تَنقِمُ مِنَّآ إِلَّآ أَنْ ءَامَنَّا بِـَٔايَٰتِ رَبِّنَا "You take vengeance on us only because we believed in the signs of our Lord." (al-Aʿrāf 7/126)

Who says this sentence? Pharaoh's sorcerers — when Pharaoh threatened to kill them for having seen the proof of Moses and believed.

قُلْ يَٰٓأَهْلَ ٱلْكِتَٰبِ هَلْ تَنقِمُونَ مِنَّآ إِلَّآ أَنْ ءَامَنَّا بِٱللَّهِ "Say: O People of the Book! Do you resent us only because we have believed in God…?" (al-Māʾida 5/59)

وَمَا نَقَمُوٓا۟ إِلَّآ أَنْ أَغْنَىٰهُمُ ٱللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُۥ مِن فَضْلِهِۦ "They counted it a fault only that God and His Messenger had enriched them out of His bounty." (al-Tawba 9/74)

Three verses, the same pattern, the same root. And in all three what is related is the same: a community punishes another community for doing a good thing.

The connection with al-Aʿrāf 7/126 is particularly important, because Sūrat al-Burūj itself will mention Pharaoh in its eighteenth verse. The sūra, that is, uses the sentence of Pharaoh's sorcerers in its eighth verse and names Pharaoh in its eighteenth. There is a silent bond between the two verses.

I record this as my own reading; but the shared pattern and root are a datum of the text.

A small but meaningful grammatical detail: the verb is not perfect but imperfect. Not an āmanū (that they had believed), but an yuʾminū (that they believe, that they go on believing).

The imperfect conveys continuity. The crime, that is, is not a decision left in the past; it is an ongoing state. What disturbed the wrongdoers was not a decision taken at some time, but that those people still were so.

And now the finest side of the verse. The one believed in is mentioned by two names. The choice of these names is not accidental.

ٱلْعَزِيز — Root: ع-ز-ز. The concrete sense of the root is to be firm, hard, not to be taken hold of. Arḍ ʿazāz — hard ground that cannot be dug. From here:

• عِزَّة (ʿizza) — invincibility, superiority, not being seizable.
• عَزِيز — the one who cannot be defeated, who cannot be overcome; also "precious, rarely found" (what is rare cannot be got hold of).
• أَعَزَّ — he strengthened, he made superior.

Now look at the context. The people related in this verse are in a state of being precisely defeated. They have been thrown into the fire; they have been able to do nothing.

And the name of the One they believed in is "the one who cannot be defeated".

The sūra utters this name in the very scene of defeat. What this does is the following: the visible outcome and the measure of the truth are not the same thing. Those seated at the edge of the fire were strong at that moment; but ʿizza was not with them.

ٱلْحَمِيد — Root: ح-م-د. Praise. This root was treated in detail in the section on al-Fātiḥa; the finding there — the difference between ḥamd and commendation (madḥ), and ḥamd's requiring will and goodness — I do not repeat here.

حَمِيد, being on the faʿīl pattern, can carry both an active sense (one who praises much) and a passive one (one much praised); here the sense "the one who deserves praise" is the primary one.

That the two names come together is a pattern in the Qurʾān (Ibrāhīm 14/1; Sabaʾ 34/6, for instance). And its function here is this:

• al-ʿAzīz — the dimension of power: undefeatable.
• al-Ḥamīd — the dimension of character: deserving of praise.

Their being uttered together announces that power on its own is not enough. The power at the edge of the fire also possessed a kind of ʿizza — it was not defeated, no one could stand against it. But it did not deserve ḥamd.

The verse, that is, sets up a measure with the two names together: invincibility is meaningful only when it deserves praise.

I record this as my own reading; the coming together of the two names, however, is a datum of the text.