Verse 29
This verse concludes the sūrah by describing the Prophet and those with him with the description given for them in the Torah and Injīl and gives a beautiful promise of divine reward to those of them who are faithful and do righteous deeds. It is also connected to the verses that came before it because it says that God sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth.
Commentary
مُحَمَّدٌ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ ۚ وَالَّذِينَ مَعَهُ أَشِدَّاءُ عَلَى الْكُفَّارِ رُحَمَاءُ بَيْنَهُمْ ۖ تَرَاهُمْ رُكَّعًا سُجَّدًا يَبْتَغُونَ فَضْلًا مِنَ اللَّهِ وَرِضْوَانًا ۖ سِيمَاهُمْ فِي وُجُوهِهِمْ مِنْ أَثَرِ السُّجُودِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ مَثَلُهُمْ فِي التَّوْرَاةِ ۚ وَمَثَلُهُمْ فِي الْإِنْجِيلِ كَزَرْعٍ أَخْرَجَ شَطْأَهُ فَآزَرَهُ فَاسْتَغْلَظَ فَاسْتَوَىٰ عَلَىٰ سُوقِهِ يُعْجِبُ الزُّرَّاعَ لِيَغِيظَ بِهِمُ الْكُفَّارَ ۗ وَعَدَ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ مِنْهُمْ مَغْفِرَةً وَأَجْرًا عَظِيمًا ٢٩
(48:29) Muḥammad, the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the faithless and merciful amongst themselves. You see them bowing and prostrating, seeking God’s grace and pleasure. Their mark is on their faces, from the effect of prostration. Such is their similitude in the Torah and their similitude in the Injīl. Like a tillage that sends out its shoots and builds them up, and they grow stout and settle on their stalks, impressing the sowers, so that He may enrage the faithless by them. God has promised those who have faith and do righteous deeds of them forgiveness and a great reward.
Muḥammad is the subject of the sentence and the Messenger of God is an explanatory conjunction, adjective, or permutative of this subject. The phrase those who are with him is semantically joined to the subject, and hard against the faithless… is the predicate.
…and those who are with him are hard against the faithless and merciful amongst themselves is a subject and predicate. This statement is meant to describe those who are with the Prophet, and the hardness and mercy mentioned are some of their qualities.
The fact that …and merciful amongst themselves follows are hard against the faithless is meant to dispel the notion that their hardness towards the faithless might entail some harshness amongst themselves. Together, these two phrases show us that their approach with the faithless is hardness while with the faithful amongst themselves it is mercy.
You see them bowing and prostrating… means that they maintain the prayer, and the verb you see them indicates that this is their continuous practice. In other words, they pray regularly. This sentence is a second predicate that follows on from the first one for those who are with him.
Seeking God’s Grace and pleasure—Grace (faḍl) means a gift, referring to His reward, and pleasure (riḍwān) is more powerful in meaning than “satisfaction” (riḍā).
Their mark is on their faces—“mark” (sīmā) means sign (ʿalāmah); this phrase is the both the subject and predicate of the sentence. …from the effect of prostration is a circumstantial qualifier of an implicit pronoun (ḍamīr mustakin) in the predicate, or an exposition of what their mark is. In other words, the fact that they prostrate to God out of fear and humility shows in their faces; this is through the mark of being God-fearing and they are known to anyone who sees them. A similar meaning is narrated from Imām al-Ṣādiq who says that this refers to wakefulness in prayer (al-sahr fī al-ṣalāt).
It is said: This refers to the mark of the dust upon their foreheads because they would only prostrate upon soil, not on clothing.
And it is said: This means a mark on their faces on the Day of Judgement because the place where they prostrated on that day will become bright and luminous.
Such is their similitude in the Torah and their similitude in the Injīl: Similitude (mathal) means their description. In other words: “The way in which we described them (being hard on the faithless and merciful amongst themselves, for example) is how we described them in the scriptures of the Torah and the Injīl.” So Their similitude in the Injīl is semantically connected to their similitude in the Torah.
However, it is also said that And their similitude in the Injīl… is actually a new sentence that is detached from whatever came before it. In other words it is a subject of a new sentence and its predicate is: Like a tillage that sends out its shoots…. This means that their description in the Torah is that they are harsh on the faithless, merciful amongst themselves and that prostration has marked their faces, while their description in the Injīl is that they are like a tillage that sends out its shoots… etc.
Like a tillage that sends out its shoots and builds them up, and they grow stout and settle on their stalks, impressing the sowers…: A plant’s shoots (shatʾ) refers to its fresh sprouts which are produced from it and grow around it; building them up means to assist them; growing stout means to become thick and coarse.
This means that they are like a tillage that sends out fresh sprouts, supports them and, as a result, these sprouts thicken and settle firmly upon stalks, impressing the sowers with their maturity. This alludes to the fact that with each passing day the faithful are becoming more numerous, more powerful and more prepared. That is why God adds at the end: …so that He may enrage the faithless by them.
Key Debate: “Those Who Are With Him” →
God has promised those who have faith and do righteous deeds of them forgiveness and a great reward: The pronoun in of them refers to those who are with him, above. Based on the apparent meaning such a sentence structure would normally yield, of (min) is to indicate partiality. This means that God’s forgiveness and great reward are both contingent upon a person’s continuing faith and righteous deeds. So if there are any amongst them who do not have faith, such as the hypocrites whose hypocrisy is not known (such as those whom God refers to in the verse There are hypocrites among the Bedouins around you and among the townspeople of Medina, steeped in hypocrisy. You do not know them; We know them, ), or someone who believes now but later reverts to polytheism and disbelieves (such as those mentioned in the verse Indeed those who turned their backs after the guidance had become clear to them…If We wish, We will show them to you so that you recognize them by their mark, ), or someone who believes but does not act righteously (as we might deduce from the verses about perfidy, the verse about investigating the report of a profligate, and the like thereof), then these people are also excluded from the promise of forgiveness and great reward.
We have already seen a similar proviso laid down in this sūrah when God said: Indeed those who swear allegiance to you, swear allegiance only to God: the hand of God is above their hands. So whosoever breaks his oath, breaks it only to his own detriment, and whoever fulfils the covenant he has made with God, He will give him a great reward (). And this is further supported by Ibn ʿAbbās’ understanding of the verse: He knew what was in their hearts, so He sent down composure on them… () when he interpreted it, saying: “He only sent down composure on those whom he knew would fulfil their pledge…” (see above).
Another verse we find that lays down such a condition is God has promised those of you who have faith and do righteous deeds that He will surely make them successors in the earth… And whoever is ungrateful after that—it is they who are the transgressors ().
Regarding the present verse, it is said that of (min) is expository (bayāniyyah) rather than expressing partiality (tabʿīḍ), in which case it implies the exact opposite; namely that this promise includes all of those who are with him! However, we must reject this reading because—as it is said—an expository min is never followed by a pronoun in grammatical Arabic.
The proponents of this reading might adduce the verse And had they been separate, We would have surely punished the faithless among them with a painful punishment () to support their position, saying that the pronoun they in had they been separate refers to the faithful, while them in among them refers to the faithless. However, we have already seen in the commentary on this verse that both of these pronouns refer to the faithful and the faithless inhabitants of Mecca, so the min in that verse is also used to express partiality.
Even then, if the promise of forgiveness or this forgiveness itself applied categorically and unconditionally to all of those who are with him without any requirement of faith or righteous behavior, meaning that they would all be forgiven whether they were faithful, idolaters, righteous or sinful, this would lead to an obvious absurdity; it would mean that all religious obligations would be rendered pointless for them and their moral accountability would be removed. This is something clearly impossible according to the Qur’an and Sunnah, so the requirement of faith and righteous behavior would be inherently valid, even if God did not mention it! After all, God has said about His Prophets: But were they to ascribe any partners [to Him], what they used to do would not avail them (). So if this is the condition of the Prophets, who are infallible (maʿṣūm), then what about everyone else?
Poser: Making forgiveness and a great reward conditional upon faith and good works is a common sense condition, as has been mentioned, and there is no way to deny it. However, the context of what He said: God has promised those who have faith and do righteous deeds of them… shows that they do have faith and righteous behavior; in other words, this testifies to their having met this requirement. This is especially so considering that of them is mentioned after those who have faith and do righteous deeds because this demonstrates that they cannot be separated from righteous conduct, unlike (as some scholars have pointed out) the verse in Sūrah al-Nūr, which says: God has promised those of you who have faith and do righteous deeds that He will surely make them successors… (). This is further supported by God’s praise of them: You see them bowing and prostrating, seeking God’s grace and pleasure as this shows that their behavior is continuous and ongoing.
Reply: First, as for of them being mentioned after those who…, this is not to indicate that righteous conduct cannot be separated from them, as the subject of this proposition is the group of those who have faith and do righteous deeds, as faith alone in the absence of righteous deeds will not engender forgiveness and reward. Then, when God says of them, this is connected to the category as a whole and, therefore, it is proper to mention it after the category of those who have faith and do righteous deeds. As for the position of the pronoun being brought forward in the verse God has promised those of you who have faith and do righteous deeds that He will surely make them successors… this is because its context is one of giving glad tidings to the faithful, and it is more appropriate to specify whom this good news is being addressed to so that they will be encouraged to pay attention and receive the good news.
Second, as for the fact that God’s saying You see them bowing and prostrating… denotes continuity, this only refers to what has already passed until that present moment; it says nothing about the future. And the objection that the religious rules would become pointless for them only applies to their future behavior, rather than their behavior in the past. After all, forgiving past sins does not suggest that one’s moral culpability has been suspended; if anything, it only serves to reaffirm its effectiveness. Meanwhile the opposite is true when it comes to completely forgiving someone’s future sins, as this cannot coexist with a person being under a moral obligation to obey God, therefore they are no longer under any moral obligation and this is certainly false, because if the removal of moral obligations means that there is no longer any such thing as a sin, and if there is no such thing as a sin then what is there for God to forgive? In other words, if we assume the existence of such a form of forgiveness, this implies that there is no forgiveness, leading to a logical contradiction.
This is narrated by Ṣādūq in his Faqīh and by Mufīd in Rawḍat al-Wāʿiẓīn in a mursal tradition from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sinān. ↩︎
One of the people of perfidy (ahl al-ifk) is a Companion who is a veteran of the Battle of Badr. God says: Indeed those who accuse honourable and unwary faithful women shall be cursed in this world and the Hereafter, and there shall be a great punishment for them (); and the one about whom the verse came down: O you who have faith! If a profligate should bring you some news, verify it (), referring to Walid ibn ʿUqbah, a Companion whom God called profligate (fāsiq). And God has also said: But even if you are reconciled to them God shall not be reconciled to the transgressing lot (). ↩︎