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وَإِذْ
تَأَذَّنَ رَبُّكُمْ لَئِن
شَكَرْتُمْ لَأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ
ۖ وَلَئِن
كَفَرْتُمْ إِنَّ
عَذَابِي لَشَدِيدٌ
And when your Lord proclaimed: "If
you give thanks , I will give you more, but if you are thankless ,
verily! My Punishment is indeed severe." [Surah
Ibrahim 14:7]
The
Secret to Happiness:
لَئِن
شَكَرْتُمْ لأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ
If
you give thanks, I will give you more
This verse contains one of the secrets to happiness, success and contentment, and it is as though Allaah is saying to us, “I shall impart this simple secret to you if you are wise enough to take heed.”
The secret? “All you have to do is be thankful to Me for what I have given you, and oh-so-much-more will come your way. All you have to do is to thank Me, and your rizq [provisions] will come; you need not worry about overburdening yourself and spending sunrise to sunset seeking your rizq [provisions] (although of course you should work),just give Me thanks and praise Me for what you already have and I will give you more!”
How is
He saying all of this through just 3 words? By emphasizing
the concept,
then emphasizing it more,
then emphasizing it once
again, and
even emphasizing it
a fourth time,
so that there is no
doubt
in our minds about it.
In
just these three short words, there are four
emphases; or to be even more accurate there are only two words that
make up this clause for the third is entirely for emphasis.
Emphasis:
Be
Grateful, Allah will give you more:
لَئِن شَكَرْتُمْ لأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ
If you give thanks, I will give you more
The first two emphasis
are the initial laamal-qasm
followed by the particle إِنْ
in لَئِن;
the third is another laamal-Qasm
in لأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ
and the fourth is the
letter noon of
emphasis in the same word.
Four different instances of emphases for one concept – that if we
thank Allaah for what He has already given us, He will provide us
with more.
[This is because the La
لَ
is used as an
emphasis [to
strengthen the certainty of the statement],
and the the 'Inإِنْ
means 'without
doubt'.]
Look back
now to the English translation, If
you give thanks, I will give you more.
Diyaa’i mentioned in his
article Dalaalat al-Tawkeed fee
al-Jumlah al-‘Arabiyyah, one
of the aims of using emphasis in Arabic is to remove all doubts from
the mind of the addressee about a concept which would otherwise
contain doubts.
The
greater the doubts, or the more important the concept, the greater
the number of emphases used. So when you have a concept which has
been emphasized four
times,
this should tell us how important this concept is to us.
..But
if you're ungrateful:
And just as this part
of the verse has been emphasized four times, so too has the second
part of the verse warning us of the consequences of being ungrateful;
a warning from which we seemingly prefer to turn our ears by not
granting ourselves access to it;
وَلَئِن كَفَرْتُمْ إِنَّ عَذَابِي لَشَدِيدٌ
..but
if you are thankless, verily! My Punishment is indeed severe.
Something
to think about next time we complain.
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