And to Him belongs all praise in the heavens and the earth — a parenthetical statement in other words the inhabitants in both of these realms praise Him — and as the sun declines wa-‘ashiyyan is a supplement to hīna ‘when’ of the previous verse in which comes the afternoon prayer ‘asr and when you […]
in the nearer part of the land that is in the Byzantine land that lies nearest to Persia in Mesopotamia al-Jazīra. There the two armies met and the Persians were the ones who had begun the invasion. But they that is the Byzantines after their vanquishing ghalabihim the verbal noun ghalab has been annexed to […]
in a few years bid‘ usually means between three and nine or ten years. So the two armies met again seven years after this former encounter and the Byzantines defeated the Persians. To God belongs the command before and after that is before the defeat of the Byzantines and thereafter that is to say the […]
in God’s help to them against the Persians. They the believers indeed rejoiced in this as they came to know of it on the day that it took place on the day of the battle of Badr when Gabriel came down with this news thereon in addition to their rejoicing in their victory over the […]
The promise of God wa‘da’Llāhi is the verbal noun substituting for the full verbal construction; it is actually wa‘adahumu’Llāhu al-nasr ‘God promised them victory’. God does not fail His promise of such help but most people namely the disbelievers of Mecca are not aware of His promise to help them to victory.
They know merely an outward aspect of the life of this world that is to say its various means of securing livelihood such as commerce agriculture construction and cultivation and so on; but they of the Hereafter they are oblivious this repetition of hum ‘they’ is for emphasis.
Have they not contemplated themselves? so that they might emerge from their oblivion. God did not create the heavens and the earth and what is between them except with the truth and an appointed term for that creation at the conclusion of which this creation will perish and after which will be the Resurrection. But […]
Have they not travelled in the land and beheld how was the consequence for those before them? of past communities which was that they were destroyed for denying their messengers. They were more powerful than them — such were ‘Ād and Thamūd — and they effected the land they tilled it and churned it up […]
Alif lām mīm God knows best what He means by these letters.
The Byzantines — who are among the People of the Scripture — have been vanquished; the Persians vanquished them and they are not people of a scripture but worship graven images. The Meccan disbelievers rejoiced in this defeat of the Byzantines and said to the Muslims ‘We shall vanquish you as the Persians vanquished the […]