Al-A‘rāf 7:4

The issue

Literally, this verse reads, “How many towns have we caused to be destroyed, then

our punishment took her [it] on a sudden by night....”

How did the destruction come? Did it come first and then the punishment came

after? Does not destruction logically follow punishment? In the Arabic, the verb is in

the form of if ‘āl , meaning “to cause to perish,” rather than “destruction.”

A Muslim scholar observes, “In the verse there are some actions that were listed first

and other actions that were listed last, out of order. It is as if he was saying, ‘how many

a town did our punishment come to her [it] and so we destroyed her [it]....’”

Notice that the scholar rearranged his observation so that the punishment now comes

first and the destruction afterwards.

Al-Zamakhsharī said that this phrasing describes the intention to destroy, not the act

of destruction itself. Another similar opinion states that destruction is the plunging

of the town into disobedience: “Therefore, Allah’s destruction of the town is his

abandoning them to their disobedience of him, hence, the coming of the ba’s (vengeance or punishment) of Allah onto them becomes a recompense for their disobedience to their lord through his abandoning of them.”

The scholars made an effort to prove that there is no error in the order of the terms;

however, the existence of multiple interpretations and explanations indicates that the

scholars themselves were not satisfied with their own explanations.

It is also noted that if the verse is talking about the people of the town, it would

require the use of the pronoun hum (“them”) in Arabic instead of hā (“her”). (See literal

translation of the verse: “our punishment to them”).

This conflict was resolved in English by some translations (e.g., Yusuf Ali), but it

remains an issue in the original Arabic text.

In response to the issue, al-Rāzī replied, “There is something removed in the verse.

It is something like: how many people of a town.” However, al-Zajjāj said, “If he said,

‘our punishment overtook them,’ it would have been correct.”

The words of the early Islāmic scholar al-Zajjāj are an implicit confession of the existence of complications in the verse, if not even linguistic errors. This disclosure caused embarrassment to some scholars in explaining the verse. So they said that there is no omission in the verse, but that what is meant is the actual destruction of the town itself.