Even if one were to concede the possibility that the pronoun in zakkāhā (“purifies it”) could return either to nafs (“soul”) or to man (“who”), the word man itself supplies no evidence requiring such a return. Restoring the pronoun to the clearly feminine noun ⦗1⦘ is therefore preferable to assigning it to something that can be either masculine or feminine—its masculine sense being the more obvious precisely because it gives no hint of femininity. Whenever ⦗2⦘ a statement can accommodate two meanings, it must be interpreted according to the one that is more evident—the meaning indicated by the wording itself—and it is impermissible to adopt the other meaning without proof that this is what was intended. ⦗3⦘ Whoever forces any other construction upon the verse has departed from the recognized idiom of the Arabs, and the Qur’an is exalted above such departures. To abandon the plain sense that the words point to and pursue a sense for which there is no evidence is absolutely impermissible—how much more so when the wording is explicit, for Allah has informed us that He inspires both God-consciousness and debauchery. A fuller treatment of this belongs elsewhere.

The purpose here is to command people to purify their own souls and to warn them ⦗4⦘ against debasing them ⦗5⦘, just as He says in another surah ⦗6⦘: “Successful indeed is he who…"