al-Bayyina 98:7

Inna'lladhīna āmanū wa ʿamilu'ṣ-ṣāliḥāti ulāʾika hum khayru'l-bariyya

"Those who believe and do righteous deeds — those are the best of created beings."

These two verses are one of the cleanest patterns of opposition in the Qurʾān. Let us set them side by side:

The pattern is the same, the places of the words are the same, the sealing sentence is the same letter for letter — only one word changes: sharr / khayr.

Paired patterns of this kind are a technique the Qurʾān uses often, and their function is this: to leave no third place between the two options. When the same sentence pattern is framed twice, the reader is obliged to look for himself in one of the two.

Look at the table once more. The third row is empty.

Verse 6 bounds its subject with two names: min ahli'l-kitābi wa'l-mushrikīn. The deniers, that is, are named with a statement of the source they come from.

Verse 7 gives no name at all. Not "from the believers", not "from such and such a community", not "from this umma". Only two verbs: they believed and they did righteous deeds.

This emptiness is the sūra's most important silent declaration, and it says two things:

1. The good side has not been closed to a group. In describing the bad side the source was stated; in describing the good side it was not. The state of "being the best", that is, cannot be secured by a membership, nor barred by one. The door is opened not by a name but by an act.

2. The measure is not identity but conduct. Even in verse 6 what carried the ruling was the verb kafarū (the identity merely bounded it); and in verse 7 there is nothing at all besides the act. In determining the sides the sūra uses a single measure, and that measure is not a name.

This is the rule in Method in the form in which it emerges from the text itself: what the verse enumerates is an attribute, not a name.

This pair is one of the Qurʾān's most frequently repeated patterns, and its analysis was made in the section on Sūrat al-ʿAṣr (the root ṣ-l-ḥ; its opposite fasād; its kinship with iṣlāḥ and ṣulḥ; the definite plural form of al-ṣāliḥāt). I do not repeat it here.

Two points are to be added here:

1. Both verbs are in the perfect. Āmanū, ʿamilū. One would have expected a nominal sentence, or a pattern conveying continuance, to be used for belief. The use of the perfect stresses that the thing has actually happened: not an intention but something done and finished. Belief has been given, and the deed has been done.

2. The order is binding. First belief, then deed. The Qurʾān never breaks this order. The reason is that a deed acquires meaning only when it is tied to an orientation — this is also the work done by the qualification mukhliṣīna lahu'd-dīn in verse 5. The same act, with a different orientation, becomes a different thing.

How can a created being be "the worst of created beings", or "the best"? This places the human being at an extraordinary point in the ranking of being: both the lowest and the highest step are open to him.

The Qurʾān states this doubleness of extremes plainly elsewhere: "We created man in the fairest form; then We reduced him to the lowest of the low" (al-Tīn 95/4-5) — and there too the exception comes immediately after: "except those who believe and do righteous deeds." The same exception, in the same words.

The cause of this doubleness is the sūra's whole subject: the bayyina. Having received knowledge makes a human being able to rise to the highest and to fall to the lowest. A being that has received no knowledge neither rises nor falls; it is fixed. The possibility of rising and of falling is born after the proof has been received.