أَلَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُۥ عَيْنَيْنِ • وَلِسَانًا وَشَفَتَيْنِ
A lam najʿal lahū ʿaynayn • wa lisānan wa shafatayn "Did We not give him two eyes? And a tongue and two lips?"
This is a method the Qurʾān uses often: instead of rejecting the claim, to take away from the claimant the ground he stands on. The man is speaking by way of seeing and knowing; the verse asks him who gave him the faculty of sight.
The logic is this: the one who gives sight cannot be one who does not see. The Qurʾān establishes this inference openly in Sūrat al-Mulk. First what has been given is counted: "It is He who brought you into being and gave you hearing, sight and hearts" (al-Mulk 67/23). And in the same sūra the question is put: "Would He who created not know? He is al-Laṭīf, al-Khabīr" (al-Mulk 67/14).
The pattern treated in Sūrat al-Fīl: a lam + a verb is a strong affirmation. "Did We not give?" = "of course We gave, and you know it."
The verb is not "khalaqnā" (We created) but "najʿal" (We made, We set). The verb jaʿala in Arabic conveys bringing a thing into a state, setting it to a function. It occurred twice in Sūrat al-Fīl: He put their plot into the state of coming to nothing, He turned them into chewed-up straw.
The verse, that is, is speaking not of the organs' being brought into existence but of their being ordered for a function. The eye is not a substance but a possibility.
- عَيْنَيْنِ (ʿaynayn) — two eyes. The dual form.
- لِسَانًا (lisānan) — one tongue. Singular.
- شَفَتَيْنِ (shafatayn) — two lips. Dual.
The stating of the numbers may look unnecessary — everyone knows a person has two eyes. But in Arabic the dual form is obligatory; to say "eyes" the dual is used. The emphasis on number, that is, is not the verse's own choice but the structure of the language.
Even so the rhythm of the series is striking: two – one – two. And this rhythm continues with two in the next verse: al-najdayn, two ways. Three of the four elements are dual.
The Qurʾān mentions various organs when it speaks of the human body; here only three are counted, and the choice is not random.
The eyes — taking in. The door by which knowledge enters. Man's first relation with the outside world. The tongue — giving out. The door by which knowledge leaves. The conveying of thought outwards. The lips — regulating. The place where sound is shaped and — this matters — where it can be shut off.
What is counted, that is, is not a list of organs but a circuit of knowledge: take in, process, give out.
And note: at the start of the sūra a saying of the man was conveyed — he says "I have spent wealth in heaps." That saying was uttered with exactly the instrument counted in this verse. The verse reminds him of the organs that let him frame his own sentence.
This is the finest point. The tongue having already been counted, was there any need to mention the lips as well?
In the classical explanations two things are mentioned as the function of the lips: helping speech, and closing the mouth — the holding in of food and drink, the covering of the mouth.
This second is worth dwelling on. The lip is a door that opens and closes. The tongue is always inside the mouth; the lip is the curtain that decides whether the word will go out or not.
In the context of the sūra this is meaningful: here there is a man who speaks, and what he says is against himself. In the counting of the organs of speech, the separate mention of the one that can stop speech recalls a possibility: not to say it was also in his hand.
I record this as my own reading, not as a classical transmission. In the classical explanations the function of the lips is generally set out in more concrete terms.
And there is this too: the lips also carry the two basic expressions of a human being besides speech — the smile and anger. The verse does not say this; I merely note the field the word carries.