Third Person Imperatives in the Qur’an

It’s always been kind of strange to me how a language can accommodate imperatives for other than the second person.

English, of course, cannot do this. You can only command someone who is right there in front of you. “Listen, you! Stay here! Don’t touch this! Have a good day!” The addressee is always “you”, even if that pronoun doesn’t appear explicitly.

Arabic, on the other hand, is one of the languages that does have this feature. You can issue an order to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Not present? No problem. Just use the third person imperative.

It’s not even hard to do. Simply add a لِ to the beginning of your present-tense verb, put a sukūn on the last letter, and boom, you’re done. If يَسْمَعُ means “he listens”, then لِيَسْمَعْ means something along the lines of “he must listen”. (It doesn’t really sound the same as a command when put in English!)¹

Of course, this is Arabic, so it’s more nuanced than just that. There are plenty of technical rules and special cases on how the construction is applied in various scenarios. In particular, let’s focus on just one: the leading لِ.

You see, although this ل carries a kasrah by default, in certain cases the harakah is dropped and replaced with a sukūn, resulting in the vowelless sound لْ. These cases include, for example, when the imperative verb comes immediately after some particles like فَ², as in Surah `Abasa, verse 80:24:

فَلْيَنظُرِ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ إِلَىٰ طَعَامِهِۦٓ
“So let man observe his food”

So, it turns out that in the Qur’ān, almost every instance of the third person imperative happens to occur in a situation where the لِ is converted to لْ – I found a total of 53 such occurrences. However, there were still 3 places in the Qur’ān that I could find where the لِ kept its kasrah vowel. Those three verses are as follows:

 یَـٰۤأَیُّهَا ٱلَّذِینَ ءَامَنُوا۟ لِیَسۡتَـٔۡذِنكُمُ ٱلَّذِینَ مَلَكَتۡ أَیۡمَـٰنُكُمۡ وَٱلَّذِینَ لَمۡ یَبۡلُغُوا۟ ٱلۡحُلُمَ مِنكُمْ ثَلَـٰثَ مَرَّٰتٍۢ  
O you who have faith!
Your slaves and any of you who have not yet reached puberty should seek your permission three times …
[Surah An-Nūr 24:58]

وَنَادَوۡا۟ یَـٰمَـٰلِكُ لِیَقۡضِ عَلَیۡنَا رَبُّكَۖ قَالَ إِنَّكُم مَّـٰكِثُونَ
They will call out: ‘O Malik, let your Lord finish us off!’ He will say: ‘Indeed you will stay on.’
[Surah Az-Zukhruf 43:77]

 لِیُنفِقۡ ذُو سَعَةٍۢ مِّن سَعَتِهِۦۖ 
Let the affluent man spend out of his affluence…
[Surah Aṭ-Ṭalāq 65:7]

I’m not sure if there is any meaningful lesson to take away from this. It’s just an interesting observation about a foreign grammar rule as applied in practice in God’s sacred text. If nothing else, it may bring a little more appreciation for these three verses that, unlike so many others, managed to retain their fragile kasrah. After all, in a book of such absolute linguistic precision as the Holy Qur’an, even the presence or absence of a vowel can be worth pausing over.

1. Don’t think first-person statements are exempt: even verbs conjugated for “I” and “we” can be put into imperative form in Arabic. Whatever that even means! ↩︎
2. Another example of a particle that has this effect is the conjuction وَ like in the imperative verb وَلْيَتَلَطَّفْ. Now, where have we seen that before? :p ↩︎