and His saying: “Indeed, the God-fearing will be amid gardens and springs”; and His saying: “Indeed, the Muslim men and Muslim women, the believing men and believing women”; and His saying: “And it is the disbelievers who are the wrongdoers.” Such usage is exceedingly common in the Quran and in Arabic speech. Without these conditions, however, it is not idiomatic to use the adjective alone. Thus, one cannot properly say in Arabic, “A tall one came to me,” or “I saw a beautiful or an ugly one,” when one means, “A tall man came to me,” or “I saw a beautiful or an ugly man.” Nor does one say, “I lived in a nearby,” meaning “in a nearby place,” even though living somewhere itself indicates a place.

Second: “Thing” is the most general of all objects of knowledge, encompassing both the necessary and the contingent. Neither supplying it implicitly nor stating it explicitly adds anything that would make the discourse eloquent and rhetorically effective, let alone raise it to the highest levels of eloquence and rhetorical excellence. What eloquence or rhetorical excellence is there in explaining hā’id and tāmith (“menstruating”) and tāliq (“divorced”) as “a menstruating thing” and “a divorced thing”? Were someone to state this explicitly, the listener would find it objectionable. How, then, can it be supplied implicitly when it conveys no benefit whatsoever? Being a thing is a known, general fact that indicates neither praise nor blame, neither perfection nor deficiency.

An indispensable point must be understood here: the words of Allah, Mighty and Majestic, must not be interpreted merely on the basis of a possible grammatical or syntactic analysis that the wording permits and that yields some sort of meaning. Most of those who analyse the Quran grammatically have erred in this respect. They interpret a verse and parse it according to what its construction allows, accepting whatever meaning that construction may convey. This is a grave error: the listener knows with certainty that the Quran intends something else. Even if that construction could bear such a meaning in another context or another discourse, it does not follow that it can bear it in the Quran.

One example is the claim made by some concerning the reading, “and the ties of kinship. Indeed, Allah is ever Watchful over you,” in which “ties of kinship” is in the genitive: they say that it is an oath. Another is the claim made by some concerning the Most High’s saying, “and barring people from Allah’s way, and disbelief in Him, and the Sacred Mosque”: they say that “the Sacred Mosque” is in the genitive because it is coordinated with the genitive pronoun in bihi (“in Him”). Another is what some say concerning the Most High’s words: “But those among them who are firmly grounded in knowledge, and the believers, believe in what has been revealed to you and what was revealed