“And fear Allah”...

“And fear Allah”; The believers should guard themselves against disobeying the orders and prohibitions promulgated in this verse. “And Allah teaches you”; it is an independent sentence, not connected with the preceding one, “and fear Allah”. The sentence describes the grace of Allah bestowed on the believers. In this respect it is like the words of Allah in the verse of inheritance: Allah makes it clear to you lest you err (4:176).

Allah in both these sentences shows that He has bestowed His bounties upon the believers by teaching them the rules of religion and by instructing them as to what they were allowed to do and what not. Some people have said that the sentence, “and fear Allah, and Allah teaches you”, were connected to each other. According to them, they show that there is a relation of cause and effect between the two - when people fear Allah then Allah teaches them.

Comment: The principle mentioned above is correct in itself, and is supported by other verses of the Qur’an and by traditions. But this verse has nothing to do with that principle. The second sentence begins with “and”; if it had wanted to enunciate that principle, the word “and” would not have been there; the sentence would have been like this: “and fear Allah, He will teach you”.

Moreover, the said interpretation is not supported by the context; if we accept it then the end of the verse will be quite irrelevant to the main topic of the verse. The above-mentioned reconstruction of the verse gives us another argument against that interpretation. Had that meaning been correct, the divine name, Allah, would not have been repeated in “and Allah teaches you”, a pronoun would have been more appropriate.

In these three consecutive short sentences, the divine name, Allah, has been repeated three times. It was necessary in the first sentence, “and fear Allah”; it had to be repeated in “and Allah teaches you”, because it was an independent sentence; and in the last sentence, “and Allah knows all things”, the name gives the proof of this statement - He knows all things because He is Allah. The two verses contain nearly twenty basic rules concerning loan, mortgage, evidence, etc.

There are numerous traditions about these and related topics. But the proper place to go into these details are the books of jurisprudence. Therefore, we shall not quote them here. Previous…