Tafsir of Hud 11:72

She said: "Oh, my woe!" (This is an explanatory resumption, as if an inquirer asked what she did when she received the glad tidings, and it was said: She said: "Oh, my woe!"). From "al-wayl" (woe), the origin of which is disgrace; it is used for every dreadful matter. The intended meaning here is astonishment. This phrase has become frequent on the tongues of women whenever they encounter something they find astonishing. The evident view is that the alif is a substitute for the first-person singular possessive pronoun (ya), and for this reason, Abu 'Amr and 'Asim—in one narration—pronounced it with imalah. A riddle is posed regarding this: "What is an alif that is a singular first-person pronoun?" Al-Hasan read it as "ya waylati" with a ya, according to the original form. It is also said that it is the alif of lamentation (nudba), and for this reason, they append a ha to it, saying: "Ya waylatah."

"Shall I bear a child while I am an old woman?" (A woman of ninety years, according to what is narrated from Ibn Ishaq, or ninety-nine, according to what is narrated from Mujahid).

"And this is my husband?" (The original meaning of ba'l is one who undertakes a matter; it is applied to a husband because he undertakes the affairs of the wife. Al-Raghib said: It is the male of the two spouses. Its plural is bu'ulah, like fahl and fuhulah. Since they conceived of the man as having superiority over the woman, he being her manager and the one who attends to her, he was named with this title, and everything that is superior to another was likened to him and named after him. From here, the Arabs named their idol, through which they sought closeness to Allah the Exalted, Ba'l, due to their belief in him regarding this).

"An old man." (A man of one hundred years or one hundred and twenty. It is derived from shakha, yashikhu [to age]. It is said for a female shaykha, as he said: And she mocks me, an old woman of 'Absham). It is pluralized as ashyakh, shuyukh, and shaykhan. Its accusative case (nasb) is as a state (hal) according to the Basrans, and the agent governing it is the meaning of indication or attention contained in "this" (hadha). Al-Zajjaj said: Such a state is of the subtle and obscure aspects of grammar, for it is not permissible except where the predicate is known. In your saying "This is Zayd, standing," it is only said to one who knows him, so that the standing provides him with new information. If it were not so, it would necessitate that he is not Zayd when he is not standing, which is incorrect. So here, her husband is known, and the intent is to state his old age; otherwise, it would necessitate that he was not her husband before old age. Al-Tayyibi said this and critiqued it, noting that it only applies if the state is not necessary and inseparable. As for phrases like "This is your father, being kind," the warned absurdity does not apply. The state here describes the condition of the subject or the object because the agent governing it is what is indicated. By that interpretation, the agent of the state and the possessor of the state become unified. The Kufans held that "this" functions like kana, and "my husband" is its predicate; they called this "approximation." Ibn Mas'ud—and in his codex, al-A'mash—read shaykhun in the nominative case as a predicate for a deleted subject (i.e., "He is an old man") or as a predicate after a predicate. In al-Bahr, it is said that the speech here is like their saying, "This is sweet, sour," or it is the predicate, and "my husband" is a substitute for the demonstrative pronoun or an explanation of it. It is also permitted that "my husband" is the predicate and "old man" follows it.

Both sentences occurred as a state from the pronoun in "Shall I bear a child?" to account for the sense of impossibility and the reasoning behind it. That is: "Shall I bear a child while both of us are in a state that contradicts that?" She prioritized the statement of her condition over the statement of his condition—peace be upon him—because the contradiction between her state and the mentioned childbirth is greater. For while old men may sire children from young women, old women suffer from barrenness. Furthermore, the glad tidings were directed at her explicitly. Additionally, the reversal of the statement might, from the beginning, have suggested attributing the barrier to childbirth to the side of Ibrahim, peace be upon him, and in that is a manifest danger. Her limitation of the impossibility to her own childbearing, without addressing the condition of the child, is because she is the one who is considered incapable, whereas the birth of her child is not related to her ability—this was stated by Shaykh al-Islam.

"Indeed, this" (meaning what was mentioned regarding the occurrence of a child from two aged people like us). It is also said: It is an indication of the birth itself or the glad tidings of it. The masculine gender is used because the verbal noun is in the interpretation of anna along with its verb, and perhaps the outcome is that this act "is a strange thing."

"Indeed, this is a strange thing." (Meaning: from the custom of Allah the Exalted, which is practiced among His servants. The sentence is a justification by way of investigative resumption, and her intent, as it is said, is to magnify the grace of Allah upon her, within the context of customary astonishment, not to consider it impossible in terms of [Allah's] power).