and gracious favours from their Lord, and the arrival at every moment of whatever delights them.

It also indicates that Paradise is an abode of safety, where they have no need to shut the gates, as they needed to do in this world.

The Arabic grammarians differed concerning the pronoun linking the adjective to the noun it qualifies in this sentence. The Kufan grammarians held that the implied wording is “its gates opened for them.” The Arabs use the definite article al- and possessive constructions interchangeably. Thus they say, “I passed a man handsome of eye,” using “the eye” to mean “his eye.” Another example is Allah’s saying:

“Then Hell will indeed be the refuge”—meaning his refuge.

One of the Basran grammarians held that the implied wording is “the gates thereof opened for them,” with the pronoun and its accompanying preposition omitted.

He said that this reconstruction is better Arabic than treating the definite article al- as a substitute for the pronoun -hā, “its.” The meaning of the definite article has nothing in common with that of the pronoun: the pronoun is a noun, whereas the article is introduced to mark definiteness. A particle cannot replace a noun or stand in its place.

They also argued that, if the definite article replaced the pronoun, “opened” would necessarily contain a pronoun referring to the gardens. The meaning would then be “they are opened,” with “the gates” subsequently substituted for that pronoun. If that were so, “the gates” would necessarily be accusative, since “opened” would already have made its subject pronoun nominative and could not make another noun nominative: a single verb cannot have two subjects.

The fact that “the gates” is nominative therefore indicates that “opened” is a circumstantial qualifier referring to a pronoun, and that “the gates” is made nominative by it. When an adjective contains a pronoun, the second noun must be accusative, as when you say, “I passed a man handsome of face.” If you made “the face” nominative and added nunation to “handsome,” the construction would be invalid. The definite article therefore serves only to mark definiteness. There must consequently be a pronoun referring back to the qualified noun, “Gardens of perpetual residence.” Since no such pronoun appears in the wording, it must have been omitted; the implied wording is “the gates thereof.”

In my view, this does not invalidate the Kufan position. By “substitution,” they meant only that the definite article takes the pronoun’s place and dispenses with the need for it. The Arabs’ unanimous acceptance of both hasan al-wajh (“handsome of face”) and hasan wajhuhu (“his face is handsome”) bears this out. They have also said that nunation