مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ
- وَدَاع (wadāʿ) — the word said at parting. Ḥajjat al-Wadāʿ (the Farewell Pilgrimage) comes from here.
- وَدِيعَة (wadīʿa) — a thing left in trust. Something set down somewhere.
- دَعْ (daʿ) — the imperative "leave". It occurs in the Qurʾān: "Do not obey the deniers and the hypocrites, disregard their harm, and rely upon God" (al-Aḥzāb 33/48).
The two ends of the root are interesting: a thing set down is either abandoned or entrusted. The same verb carries two opposite outcomes — what determines the meaning of the leaving is the intention of the one who leaves.
A point about the form. The verse says mā waddaʿaka — the verb is in Form II, with the doubled middle radical. The plain form would have been wadaʿaka ("he left you"). Form II adds two things here: deliberateness and formality. To waddaʿa is not to leave in passing; it is to end the relationship knowingly and openly. One does not go back to a person one has taken leave of.
This choice of form appears to have been made for a reason: the claim being rejected was exactly this. The words "his Lord has forsaken him" do not mean "it no longer comes to him"; they mean "He is finished with him." The verse chooses the verb that matches the full weight of the claim in use, and negates it.
Root: ق-ل-ي/و. Intense loathing, hatred, a cooling so complete that one turns one's face from another.
The same root is also used in Arabic in this sense: to fry in a pan. Miqlāt means a frying pan; qaliyya is fried food. The classical dictionaries set these two senses side by side under the same entry.
The link between the two senses is the kind of relation the lexicographers establish, and it cannot be presented as a settled etymological ruling. But it is worth recording: rancour is a thing that burns on the inside. Loathing scorches the one who holds it. English carries the same intuition in expressions such as "burning with hatred" and "a hatred that consumes".
The root is rare in the Qurʾān. The other place it occurs is in what Lot (Lūṭ) said to his people: "I am truly one of those who detest what you do" (al-Shuʿarāʾ 26/168). The weight of the word is understood from this — it is not a slight hurt.
- Wadāʿ is an act: the severing of the relationship. "He no longer comes."
- Qalā is a state: the reversal of feeling. "He no longer loves."
A person may grow cold towards another without leaving him; or may leave him without growing cold. The verse closes off both possibilities separately. The silence had two possible explanations — has the attention stopped, or has the affection ended — and both are rejected.
Here is the grammatical point most dwelt upon in this verse: the first verb has an object (waddaʿa-ka, "he forsook you"), the second has none (mā qalā, "he did not turn against" — against whom is not said).
Mā qalāka could have been said. It was not. Several explanations for this are given in the classical works of tafsīr, and they do not exclude one another:
1. For the sake of the verse-ending. Had it said qalāka, the verse would have ended in -ka and the -ā sound that runs through eight verses of the sūra would have been broken. This is the most concrete and least disputed reason. What must be said is this: an omission made for the sake of the verse-ending is not meaningless — while preserving the verse-ending, the Qurʾān also chooses which word it will drop.
2. Propriety and courtesy. This explanation is often stressed in the exegetical tradition: not naming the addressee as the object of a verb as heavy as "to loathe" places a distance between the verb and the addressee. Even while saying the thing it rejects, the sentence does not stick that thing to the addressee. The same can be built in English: "He has not forsaken you, nor has He turned against" — by not saying "you" in the second clause.
3. Becoming absolute. When the object is not said, the verb is left unattached and becomes general. Not "He did not turn against you", but simply "He did not turn against" — no loathing occurred at all.
All three explanations are reasonable, and the second and the third support one another. I adopt no definite preference; but I must state that the ground of the verse-ending is the soundest from the point of view of the language, because the other two remain at the level of interpretation.
How the lam + imperfect (muḍāriʿ) construction works was treated in Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: it states a never-having-been, from the beginning, as a matter of kind.
Here mā + the perfect (māḍī) is used. This construction is closer to the rejection of an event claimed to have taken place within a particular stretch of time. And the context requires it: there is no general claim in play; there is an abandonment said to have occurred in a particular period. The verse takes aim at that period.
The difference is small but apt: the matter is not "does God never forsake His prophets" but "did He forsake you in these past days". The answer is given to that question.
The verse does not say "God has not forsaken you"; it says "your Lord". And this word occurs three times in the sūra: in verses 3, 5 and 11 — that is, within the negation, the promise and the final command.
The analysis of the word Rabb was made in the section on al-Fātiḥa. In brief: the one who nurtures, who raises stage by stage, who has disposal over him, who takes him as his own. That is, a name that states a relationship.
That the name which says he has not been forsaken should be exactly the name that looks after and brings up is no coincidence. The sentence does this: while rejecting the claim, it puts the ground of the rejection inside the name. One who raises you does not leave what he has raised out in the open. In the verses that follow, what this name does — sheltering, guiding, making free of need — will be counted out one by one.