He said: I am the servant of Allah. He gave me the Book and made me a prophet.
'Îsâ (peace be upon him): and He has enjoined on me prayer and zakât as long as I live.
He says awsânî. Arabic has two verbs for enjoining from one root: wassâ, with a doubled letter, and awsâ.
Wassâ, the doubled form: 11 times in 10 verses, and always about religion and doing good.
And Ibrâhîm (peace be upon him) enjoined it on his sons, and so did Ya'qûb (peace be upon him): the religion.
Awsâ, the other form: 6 times. Five are in the two inheritance verses of an-Nisâ', about a bequest.
Allah enjoins you (yûsîkum) concerning your children.
The sixth is 19:31. The only time awsâ speaks of prayer and charity, it is in the mouth of a newborn.
Why the switch? One way to hear it: wassâ, counsel repeated; awsâ, counsel given once, as to a newborn.
Ibn 'Âshûr hears in it a firm and continuing command, like “He gave me the Book”: a counsel for a whole life.
A noun of the family, tawsiya in 36:50, is a bequest though built on wassâ. The pattern holds for verbs, not every word.
Another pair. 'Ayn means an eye, and a spring: 5:45, “an eye for an eye”; 18:86, “a spring of dark mud”.
It has two plurals. A'yun, 21 times, always eyes. 'Uyûn, 10 times, always springs.
And We made the earth burst with springs: 'uyûn.
Two verses apart in al-Qamar: 'uyûn for the springs of the Flood, a'yun for the eyes under which the ark sailed.
Last pair: two words for rain. Ghayth: 3 times, each time the rain that comes after despair, that makes things grow.
He is the One who sends down the rain (ghayth) after they despaired, and spreads His mercy.
Matar and its verb amtara: 15 times in 11 verses. Thirteen times, a rain of stones or of evil on a people destroyed.
We rained on them a rain (matar); evil was the rain of those who had been warned.
One exception, 4:102: rain that troubles soldiers at prayer. Still a rain no one welcomes, never a life-giving one.
In 46:24 the word is in the mouth of 'Âd: “a cloud bringing us rain”, mumtirunâ. It was the wind of their punishment.
A child in the cradle speaks: “He has enjoined on me prayer and charity.”
The verb he uses for “enjoined” is used nowhere else for prayer. Why?
Three pairs, counted word by word: when the Qur'an picks a word, it keeps it for its own use.
Tonight, read 19:30-33, and stop on a word you had never weighed. That is where reading begins.