أَن رَّءَاهُ ٱسْتَغْنَىٰٓ
This verse is the ground of the judgment in the preceding verse and is the sūra's most important sentence. Because it states the cause of transgression — and the cause it states is not the expected one.
The following could have been counted as causes of transgression: pride, greed, anger, ignorance, ill will. The verse says none of these. What it says is: seeing oneself as needing nothing.
The subtlety of this diagnosis lies here: the supposal of self-sufficiency is not a wickedness; it is a miscalculation. The person does not decide to be bad; he simply reads the situation wrongly. And the wrong reading determines the whole of his conduct.
Its logic works like this: one who has no need gives no account. To give an account is to admit that you need something — approval, permission, pardon, help, a return. If you need none of these, you owe no one an explanation either. And one who owes no explanation draws for himself the limit of what he does. And one who draws his own limit has, by definition, exceeded it.
So the bond between istighnāʾ and ṭughyān is not psychological but logical. The one produces the other.
Root: ر أ ي. To see. In Sūrat al-Māʿūn we treated how this root covers two kinds of seeing (seeing with the eye and seeing with the heart); here the second holds: raʾā here means "he counted, he accepted, he saw it so".
A grammatical nicety. Raʾā-hu — "he saw him". The subject of the verb and its object are the same person. In Arabic a reflexive pronoun is normally used in this case: raʾā nafsahu (he saw himself). But for the verbs of the heart (afʿāl al-qulūb: to suppose, to count, to know, to see) the lexicographers record an exception: with these verbs the subject and the object may be covered by the same pronoun.
This is not a dry piece of grammar; it shows what the sentence is recounting. The man passes judgment on himself by himself. There is no confirmation from outside. He looks at himself and finds himself sufficient. The structure of the sentence carries this closed circuit: the seer is he, and the seen is he.
"He saw", not "he became". The choice of word here is exact. The verse does not say istaghnā (he became free of need); it says raʾāhu'staghnā (he saw himself as free of need). That is, the claim works not because it is true but because it is supposed to be true.
This distinction carries the whole sūra. Because it is not possible for a human being really to be free of need: the sūra's first five verses had already shown this — his existence given, his material given, his knowledge given, his instrument given. Freedom from need is a delusion. And the sūra ties the human being's transgression not to a power but to a delusion.
Root: غ ن ي. Ghanī — one who is not in need, self-sufficient, rich. Ghinā — wealth, freedom from need.
Pattern: Form X (istifʿāl). One of this form's chief functions in Arabic is "to count a thing so / to see it so": istakbara (he counted himself great), istaskhara (he mocked, he saw as small), istabʿada (he saw as remote). Another of its functions is seeking: istaghfara (he sought forgiveness).
The sense of the pattern here, read together with raʾāhu, is a repeated emphasis: both "he saw" and "he counted". Two words say the same thing twice — because this is exactly the matter: this is not a state but a conviction.
In respect of what does he count himself free of need? The verse does not say. The absence of an object again opens the scope. In the classical commentaries property and wealth are mentioned most; the reports cited as the occasion of revelation for the sūra also point to the rich of Mecca. But the word is far wider than property: health, power, position, standing, knowledge, the men behind him. Everything that makes a person say "I no longer need anything."
The opposite pole of this verse is the concept of al-Ṣamad, which we treated in Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ: the one who is not in need but who is needed. There we gave this verse:
"O people! You are the ones in need of God (al-fuqarāʾ); God is al-Ghanī, al-Ḥamīd" (Fāṭir 35/15).
The word used in the verse is from exactly this root: al-ghanī. That is, the Qurʾān assigns the attribute "ghanī" to God and places the human being openly on the opposite side: faqīr, that is, the one in need.
In that case what the transgressor of al-ʿAlaq 96/7 does is this: to take upon himself an attribute that does not belong to him. Freedom from need is God's attribute; when the human being ascribes it to himself, a displacement occurs. There is no description showing more clearly what transgression is: to exceed the limit is to pass over into a place that is not one's own.
The link with Sūrat al-Layl. This root was touched on earlier in this commentary: in al-Layl 92/8 it says "as for the one who is miserly and counts himself free of need (wa-staghnā)", and in the eleventh verse of the same sūra comes "his property will not avail him (mā yughnī) when he falls" — the same root, once for the human being's supposal, once for the real capacity of property. That discussion was treated in al-Layl; the finding there holds here too: the origin of transgression is not wealth itself but the supposal of freedom from need. al-ʿAlaq binds this supposal to ṭughyān, al-Layl to bukhl (miserliness) and takdhīb.
The Qurʾān establishes this bond by way of property in Sūrat al-Takāthur and Sūrat al-Humaza — those sūras were treated in this commentary; the diagnosis there, that "property gives the human being the delusion of permanence", is the same mechanism as the istighnāʾ here. In al-Humaza it says "he supposes that his property will make him immortal" (al-Humaza 104/3); here, without property being mentioned, the supposal itself is directly targeted.
One of the most widespread ideals of modern life is to be in need of no one: to stand on one's own feet, to ask nothing of anybody, to suffice alone. This ideal comes largely from a reasonable place — being left to another's mercy really is bad, and independence really is a value.
The verse does not target this value. What it targets is the supposing that independence is real. Because no one is really independent. Even the person who stands on his own feet has not grown the food he eats, has not built the language he speaks, has not constructed the order he relies on. Independence is always partial and always on somebody's back.
The practical symptom of istighnāʾ is for that reason a measurable thing: the disappearance of the wish to give an account. To the degree that a person sees himself as sufficient he finds explaining unnecessary. The sentence "I owe nothing to anyone" is most often said as a declaration of pride; the verse reads it as a diagnosis.
And this is the source of the conduct that will be displayed in the second half of the sūra: the man who sees himself as sufficient sees himself as entitled enough to interfere in another man's prayer. Istighnāʾ begins inside and shows itself outside.