soil that carries dust; rather, they allowed dry ablution (tayammum) to be performed on sand and rock. Their view is the more consistent with the verse, for the words that follow—“Allah does not wish to place upon you any hardship”—contain an indefinite noun (haraj, “hardship”) set in a negative construction and preceded by the particle min, which serves to reinforce absolute generality. In such a context the indefinite noun is an explicit proof that the negation includes every instance of the category. To restrict the concession to earth that raises dust would plainly involve hardship, since in many of Allah’s lands there is nothing but mountains and sand. A full treatment of this question, together with the Sunnah evidence, will come under Sūrat al-Māʾidah, if Allah wills.

The only purpose in this chapter is to supply a representative example.

Among the modes of clarification contained in this blessed Book is the clarification of a concise statement whose ambiguity arises from a generic term—whether plural or singular—a collective noun, a relative pronoun, or even the meaning of a particle.

1. Ambiguity in a plural generic noun: Allah says, “Then Adam received from his Lord words.” The “words” are left unspecified here, but they are spelled out in Sūrat al-Aʿrāf: “They said, ‘Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves; and if You do not forgive us and have mercy on us, we shall surely be among the losers’” (7:23).

2. Ambiguity in a singular generic noun: He says, “The most beautiful word of your Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel because of their patience.” The word is not identified here, but He clarifies it elsewhere: “We wished to favor those who had been oppressed in the land, and to make them leaders, and to make them inheritors; to establish them in the land, and to show Pharaoh, Haman, and their hosts what they had been dreading” (28:5–6).

3. Another example is His saying, “But the word of punishment has been fulfilled against the disbelievers” (39:71).