Rescuing the Wretched: Between Universal and
Particular Readings of Q. 4:75
Rumee Ahmed,
Colgate University
The identification of the verse 4:75 of the Qur'an
as an appeal for universal social justice is
intriguing in its possibilities. The verse reads,
"And what is wrong with you that you do not fight for
the cause of Allah and the wretched men, women, and
children whose cry is: 'Our Lord! Rescue us from this
town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us
from you one who will protect; and raise for us from
you one who will help!'". A surface, or, plain-sense
reading of this verse appears to exhort believers to
fight in the way of God in order to emancipate the
weak and oppressed. Historically, this mode of
reading has been rhetorically useful for political
groups as a clear justification for diverse social
agendas. A close reading reveals that the verse lends
itself to multiple interpretations. I will discuss
two historical interpretations of this verse in
detail and will refer to them, for the purpose of
this discussion, through the terms "universalist" and
"particularist". These are not meant to be reified
categories, but helpful heuristic devices that
describe different methods of reading. Based on the
mode of reading that one chooses, the text takes on a
discrete meaning for the reader that does not exhaust
the possibilities of meaning, but provides a rubric
for understanding and acting upon the text. Although
I argue that a reading that transcends "universalist"
and "particularist" labels is required, it is
instructive to understand the two methods of reading
and their approaches to the text.
Within the universalist and particularist
paradigms of reading, there are three nouns in verse
4:75 that are ambiguous as to their immediate
reference. As such, different interpretations of the
reference result in discrete and disparate meanings
for the verse as a whole. The first noun is the
direct object plural pronoun suffix "you all
(kum)" that is utilized in the opening phrase,
"What is [wrong] with you all that you do not
fight in the cause of Allah?" The second is the
verbal noun that connotes the "wretched
(mustaḍ"afīn)"
individuals from amongst men, women and children. In
the context of this verse the wretched are only known
pragmatically, through their cry to be saved from
oppression. The third noun that demands denotation in
this verse is the "this town (hādhi hi
l-qariyah)" within which these wretched souls are
trapped. The town is only known ontologically,
through the presence of its oppressive citizens. The
perceived reference of these nouns, the "you all",
the "wretched" and "this town", determines particular
readings of the passage and, thus, its application in
various contexts.
The first of these nouns, the "you all (mā
lakum)", engages an unnamed audience directly as
a second-person address. Depending on the perspective
of the reader, the addresser may be speaking to a
third-party, whether past or present, or may be
addressing the reader herself, or both. If one were
to assume this last option - that of God addressing
all believers in all times - then the other ambiguous
nouns obtain a reference that gives a particular
meaning to the verse. The "you all" becomes at the
same time an intimate "you", in that it addresses the
potential reader directly, as well as a "you all"
that encompasses the community that views itself as
addressee. This reading suggests that the address
exhorts all believers regardless of their context and
the exhortation thus becomes unbound from
hermeneutically limiting constraints, such as time
and space.
Though viewing the "you all" as intimate and
universal collapses any contextual limitations of the
exhortation itself, the hortative content may still
be open to interpretation. However, the passage
threatens to lose meaning unless "the wretched" and
"this town" are themselves understood as intimate and
universal terms. Were the wretched peoples or the
town historical entities divorced from the practical
reality of the reader, then the verse would
relinquish hortative immediacy for the reader. Thus,
in order to preserve the verse as an intimate and
universal exhortation, "the wretched" and "this town"
must also be understood in intimately knowable and
universal terms. Hence, the vernacular, universalist
reading of the verse says to the reader, "Why are you
not fighting when there currently exist (and have
existed) wretched people who are crying out from
their city of oppressors for a savior?"
In order for the reader reading in a universalist
mode to maintain the integrity of Q. 4:75 as a
meaningful address, she must find a contemporary
reference for the remaining two ambiguous nouns
contained in the verse. As a result, the verse
applies to any and all places wherein the reader
perceives individuals in a wretched state, and the
verse questions the reader's lack of physical action
against the oppression that leads to such
wretchedness. The reader, then, is forever under
question until either the oppression that leads to
the cry of the wretched has been eradicated or the
reader has dedicated herself to the eradication of
that oppression through physical means. That the
means be physical and violent is unambiguous in this
verse, given the use of the Arabic phrase
"tuqātilūna fī sabīl Allah", which means "you
fight for the cause of God" as opposed the phrase
"tujāhidūna fī sabīl Allah", which can mean
"you struggle for the cause of God". This reading
sets up a worldview wherein to be right - or more
accurately, to not have something "wrong with you" -
requires one to constantly identify cities of
oppression through the cries of their inhabitants and
to fight against them. This action clears one of
blame and also justifies one's actions as dedicated
for the cause of God.
Exegetes who proffer this reading do not deny that
Q. 4:75 may have been understood in a particularist,
and thereby contextually limited, manner by the
Madinan community. However, they argue that the
circumstances that obtained there were merely a
conduit for the revelation of this verse that calls
for a broader call to fight against the oppression of
the wretched.[1] A universalist reading
has found favor amongst many contemporary exegetes
who argue for the transcendental import and holistic
meaning of all Qur'anic verses. Amin Ahsan Islahi,
for example, points out that this verse compels
believers to be constantly fighting against
oppression, and warns against particularizing any of
the ambiguous nouns to a specific time and place,
lest believers become complacent and not
fight.[2] Syed Qutb makes a
similar move, saying that even if the ambiguous nouns
may have had particular references in the past, they
should be understood as tropes symbolizing the
eternal struggle between the "Abode of Islam" and the
"Abode of War".[3]
With regard to the universalized meaning that this
reading imparts upon "the wretched", the reading
compels the reader to consider the standards by which
wretchedness is measured. Within the confines of the
passage, wretchedness is only known through its
pragmatic result; that is, in the cry of a people to
their Lord for deliverance. It would appear that the
mere presence of a group of people who call to their
Lord for a savior and decry the oppression of the
people of the town in which they dwell would fulfill
the minimum requirements of wretchedness. However,
basic prudence requires the reader to determine
whether every caller is, de facto, wretched.
Certainly the reader would be wise to question the
call of criminals or the insane, not to mention agent
provocateurs or self-serving politicians. Such
practical concerns would require the reader to limit
the qualifications of "the wretched" through some
devised rubric that is not provided in the verse
itself. Perhaps the wretched are those who cannot
help themselves and so must call for a savior.
Perhaps they are those who no longer hope for the
rectification of the townspeople and only want to be
delivered from them. Or perhaps they are limited to
those who begin their call with, "Our Lord", and
perhaps further limited to those who speak to their
God in Arabic. The universalist reader is presented
with options of interpretation that can expand or
restrict their definition of "the wretched". The
pressing question that the universalist reader must
answer is whether she is required to act only when it
is her Lord being called to, or whether she is
compelled to act when any divine being is
invoked?
The final noun to be denoted in the universalist
paradigm is "this city". In every instance, "this
city" is, for the reader reading in a universalist
mode, always "that city", meaning a city other than
the one in which the reader resides. It cannot be the
city within which the reader resides, or else she
would either be from amongst "the wretched", in which
case she is not being addressed, or from the
"oppressors", in which case the reader is an object,
rather than the subject, of the address. The reader
is therefore constantly being sent out of her
hometown to try to aid "the wretched". If the reader
resides in a town in which there is no oppression and
no wretched, and is not at the same time fighting
against another town where oppression is occurring,
then the reader has something wrong with her. The
reader may have a hometown where she lives, but until
there are no more cries from the wretched, the
reader's energy is constantly directed outward. It is
interesting to note that in a universalist reading,
this verse does not appear to address the more likely
scenario of the addressee living in a society wherein
oppressors and the wretched coexist with such
righteous believers as the reader, the latter of whom
are incited to fight against the oppressors to help
the wretched. Rather, the wretched in this passage
are praying for deliverance from their city, to a
city where they presume that they will not face
similar oppression. That is the city of the
addressee, which for the wretched is a seemingly
utopian society containing neither oppression nor
wretchedness. The city is the desire of the oppressed
and its existence compels its inhabitants to liberate
others in less fortunate locales. Though it has not
been historically understood as such, it may be that
the verse loses its hortative effect on the
universalist reader if she lives in a society with
even a hint of either oppression or wretchedness.
The universalist reading, though expansive and
powerful in its exhortation, by no means exhausts the
hermeneutical possibilities of Q. 4:75. It has been
contended that the "you all" in the beginning of the
passage is not, in fact, a universal reference.
Rather, it may be read as particularly addressed to
the prophet Muhammad and his early community in
Madinah, in accordance with the "occasion of
revelation" literature surrounding this verse. In
this more particularist mode of reading, the
contemporary reader removes herself to a degree from
the address and understands the verse as inextricably
tied to the historical context of its revelation. The
reader may choose, like the 4th century
legal scholar Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣaṣ,[4] to view the ethos
she gleans from the verse as relevant to her personal
life, or to simply approach the verse as a particular
historical instantiation that does not transcend its
time and place. In either case, the "you all" would
seem to refer directly to the fledgling community of
believers in Madinah who, having just emigrated from
boycotts and persecution in Makkah, were struggling
to set up a polity of their own. Many believers from
Makkah were barred from making the journey to Madinah
due to societal pressure, whether manifested through
physical restraint or perceived threat. The "you
all", then, is read to be an appeal to the people of
Madinah to help the wretched people who are still
stuck in "this city", which, according to this
reading, most certainly referred to pagan Makkah.
This reading alleviates the reader from both
immediate questioning and immediate action, but also
leads one to question the ethos of the passage. Why
are the early Madinan Muslims, themselves poor and
suffering, asked to fight to aid "the wretched"? From
a materialist standpoint, it would seem that the
Madinans were themselves wretched, both in terms of
financial stability and political clout. However, in
light of verses 97 and 98 of Chapter 4 of the Qur'an,
it would appear that "wretchedness" is measured
neither by property nor political subjugation, but by
mobility. "Surely," reads the verse, "as for those
whom the angels cause to die while they are unjust to
their souls, [the angels] shall say: 'In what state
were you?' They shall reply: 'We were wretched in the
earth.' [The angels] will say: 'Was not Allah's earth
spacious, so that you could have migrated therein?'
So these it is whose abode is hell, and it is an evil
resort" (4:97). In this verse, the angels challenged
the wretchedness of their interlocutors by citing
their potential mobility and failure to capitalize on
that potentiality. Wretchedness, in this conception,
is not a title that is achieved by simply living in
an oppressive environment. To the contrary, those who
find themselves in an oppressed state are expected to
journey to a place wherein they would no longer be
wretched. Therefore, someone who is truly wretched
would be unable to make this transition. This
definition of wretchedness is further enforced by the
next verse, "Except those who are (really) wretched
from among men, women and children, who have not in
their power the means nor can they find a way (to
escape)" (4:98). The wretched, in the context of
verses 97 and 98, are defined as those who cannot
escape their surroundings and are forced to live
amongst oppression.
Although a restriction of "the wretched" to
individuals who cannot migrate from an oppressive
environment is not exclusive to a particularist
reading, particularism encourages such a reading
given the previous identification of "this city" with
Makkah. In the historical setting in which the verse
was revealed, the Muslim community was settled in
Madinah, which presumably was not self-identified as
a city of oppression. Rather, Makkah, run by the
opposition Qurayshite pagans, was the archetypal city
of oppression highlighted by the Madinan verses of
the Qur'an. Hence, it would appear that, reading in a
particularist mode, "the wretched" would be most
easily identified as Muslims living in Makkah without
the means to migrate to Madinah.
Once "the wretched" have been understood as the
unwilling Muslim residents of Makkah, the
"oppressors" mentioned in the verse can also be
positively identified beyond a vague notion of
wrong-doers. Certainly, the Qur'an suggests that
there was something special about the oppression
present in the city of Makkah that required the
migration of Muslims from its borders. Muslims were
not similarly expected to migrate from Abyssinia or
the Yemen, places where they were also
marginalized--though not persecuted--communities.
Amongst exegetes reading in a particularist
mode,[5] however, persecution
was not a significant factor in labeling Makkah as
oppressive. Rather, the majority posited that the
oppression being referenced in the verse was actually
the polytheism that dominated the practice of Makkans
at the time. Citing the sage Luqman's claim that
"polytheism is the greatest oppression,"[6] these
exegetes suggest that the belief system propagated by
the Makkans was, in fact, oppressive in and of
itself, and therefore whoever could escape its
influence must. In this light, the exhortation
for the Madinans to fight becomes extremely specific.
The verse as a whole is then understood in a
particularist reading as follows: "What is wrong with
all you Madinan Muslims that you do not fight for the
cause of Allah and those Muslims who cannot escape
Makkah, who cry out 'Our Lord! Rescue us from this
town of Makkah whose people practice
polytheism'?"
The ethos of war derived from this verse in a
particularist mode is one that justifies itself
almost exclusively on theological grounds. The cry of
a people who could not escape Makkan polytheism
warranted physical confrontation to correct the
problem - the problem here not being their
marginalized or persecuted state, but their inability
to migrate from a polytheistic society. The verse
suggests that any Madinan who would say that fighting
for that cause was unnecessary or unwarranted would
have something wrong with them. Not only is the
primary concern theological, but the sanction for
fighting is dependent almost entirely upon divine
decree. As Professor Kelsay points out, the Prophet
was forbidden from fighting before the revelation of
this verse. Instead, he was commanded to preach only
and to try to change the minds of his oppressors. At
that time, there would be something wrong with the
Prophet and his community if they did fight, thus
leaving the wretched to fend for themselves. A few
years after the revelation of this verse, Muhammad
signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah. At Hudaybiyah, he
enacted an agreement with the Makkans that forced the
Madinan Muslim community to return any fleeing Makkan
Muslim back to Makkah. In the context of the verse
under study, the treaty of Hudaybiyah would seem to
have aided the oppression of these refugees, or at
the very least, perpetuated their wretched state. A
small time later, the Prophet was commanded to fight
the Makkans again, after the Makkans were accused of
breaching the treaty of Hudaybiyah, until oppression
in its entirety was eradicated. Certainly, historical
circumstance played a role in the changing decrees,
but at each stage the action of the community was
predicated on Divine sanction. God determined whether
the wretched were to be fought for and when
oppression warranted physical confrontation. The
particularist reading defines a "just war" as one
that is sanctioned by God, and defines the actors in
the war - the just, the oppressors and the wretched -
in almost exclusively theological terms.
We are presented, then, with two modes of reading
Q 4:75. The universalist reading places the believer
in constant question, sending her out to fight
against wrongs where she sees them. The particularist
reading looks in from without, onto a community that
knows when to fight based on God's decree and defines
right and wrong theologically. While these poles of
reading are heuristically helpful approaches to the
verse, it is important to highlight a third method of
reading that was employed by the vast majority of
medieval exegetes, which is a sort of mixture of both
methods. Many medieval scholars suggested that the
exhortation at the beginning of the verse was
universal, placing all believers in all times in
question and encouraging them to fight. The second
part of the verse, however, they read particularly.
These exegetes posited that the wretched were the
Muslims of Makkah who could not migrate and equated
oppression with polytheism.[7] The equation of
"oppression" with polytheism and the assertion that
the hortative introduction is universal incites
believers to identify theological excesses around
them, to the exclusion of all other forms of
oppression. However, the identification of "the
wretched" with the Muslims of Makkah appears to limit
the possibility of physical violence to correct that
oppression to circumstances that precisely mirror
those of the immobile Makkan Muslims. Depending on
the rubric the reader devises in equating the
circumstance of a contemporary people to the Makkan
Muslims, the verse might be read as applicable only
in the rarest of circumstances or wherever Muslims
are unable to migrate from pagan-dominated
societies.
Of these historically articulated options of
reading, the universalist reading appears more
palatable to modern conceptions of morality, whereby
the reader is constantly called to work for social
justice. At the same time, this reading allows for an
interpretation of the text that justifies an
exhortation to struggle against injustice broadly
defined. The inherent vagueness of terms in a
universalist reading allows for the text to be
interpreted narrowly to justify the theological or
political machinations of the reader. In any case,
while the possibilities of the universalist reading
concerning justice are appealing, the historical
context of revelation constantly lurks in the
background, threatening to collapse hermeneutic
possibilities into a single particularist reading. Of
course, most exegetical discourses on this verse are
a mix of these approaches, moving from universalist
to particularist with impunity. The holistic meaning
derived from the text is predicated on the
identification of the ambiguous nouns referenced in
the verse, which exegetes are warranted to define as
either universal or particular, based on their
understanding of the text. No one scheme of
definition is more intellectually honest or dishonest
than another; the vagueness inherent in the text
allows for multiple, valid readings.
What, then, can be said about the "correct"
reading of the verse? If one reading cannot be
justifiably privileged over another, how can meaning
be confidently derived from the text? The very
existence of multiple, valid readings suggests that
the polar logic of "right and wrong", or even "better
or worse" may not apply to the reading of this verse.
The most that can be said about a proffered
interpretation is that it is "relatively better or
worse for the particular reader interpreting in a
particular context". Such relativity is unsatisfying
when the wretched are calling out for salvation and
the reader is prescribed with liberating them through
potentially violent means. Relativity, however, need
not be a weakness of the text, but a strength that
the vagueness imparts onto the text. If any one
reading cannot be ontologically privileged over
another, then no reading can claim exclusive
legitimacy. Hence, the very existence of multiple,
valid readings proscribes the reader from
dogmatically adhering to or forwarding a singular
thesis concerning the verse. In order to circumvent a
situation wherein a plurality of readers see
themselves as charged with a violent mandate to free
those whom the reader views as oppressed, a complex
logic must mediate the interpretation the verse. To
avoid the dogmatism that accompanies either a
universalist or particularist reading, this logic
must be one that combines the various interpretations
available, a community of interpreters, and a
resistance to noumenal truth claims.
A detailed outline of such a logic of reading is
beyond the scope of this paper, but acknowledging the
need for such a reading complicates the relationship
of war and the text, and may frustrate any attempt to
articulate an overarching theory of just war that
emanates from the text. But it may be that any
attempt to pin down such an ethos is itself
misguided, if not impossible. Perhaps the text
subverts justifications for war that appeal to a
desire to establish functioning and just societies
without paying close attention to the excess and
transgression that inevitably accompanies war. Or, in
a more positive light, it may be that the discomfort
generated by this verse is a reflection of the
Qur'anic conception of war overall. It may be that
the Qur'an recognizes that war is always
ideologically, politically, economically and
otherwise motivated by material gain; and so
recognizing that reality, discusses the underlying
theological aspects of that motivation. It may well
be that this verse is not delineating a situation
wherein war is acceptable, but is purposely
referencing war in a manner that does not ease our
conscience and calls our attention to the discomfort
that should accompany any discussion of war.
[1] Zamakhshiri,
al-Kashshāf, 1:523.
[2] Islahi,
Tadabbur-e-Qur'ān, vol.2, pg. 336.
[3] Qutb, Fi Ẓ
il āl al-Qur'ān, from
altafsir.com, 4:75, pg. 9.
[4] Jaṣṣāṣ,
Aḥkā m
al-Qur'an, vol. 2, pg. 241.
[5] See for example, Ibn
Kathīr, Tafsīr al-‘Aẓīm 1:641, Shawkani,
Fatḥ al-Qadīr, 396.
[6] Qur'ān, 31:13.
[7] See for example, Tabarī,
Tafsīr al-Tabarī 4:171, Qurtubi, al-Jāmi‘
al-Aḥkām al-Qur’ān 5:268, Razi, al-Tafsīr
al-Kabīr, 4:141.
Editorial Comment: Due to the limitations of HTML
coding, some of the transliterations in this article
may not exhibit the more precise linguistic symbols
provided by the author.
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