Tafsir of Ibraheem 14:23

It is supported by the fact that al-Hasan and ‘Amr ibn ‘Ubayd recited "Adkhulu" (I will admit) in the words of the Exalted: "And [I will] admit those who believed and did righteous deeds into gardens beneath which rivers flow, abiding therein" in the form of the first-person singular imperfect verb. You know that if this recitation is considered to support this view, then the recitation of the majority, "Udkhila" (were admitted), in the form of the passive perfect verb, must be considered as supporting the preceding view, for those who are admitting them are the angels—peace be upon them. So, contemplate this.

It is as if, when the Almighty God brought the two groups together in His words: "And they all appeared before Allah," and mentioned some of the conditions of the disbelievers, He mentioned what the affair of the believers culminated in, which is their admission into Paradise "by the permission of their Lord," meaning by His command—may He be exalted—or by His granting of success and His guidance.

The prepositional phrase is connected to "Udkhila" according to the recitation of the majority. Bringing the description of Lordship while attributing it to their pronoun manifests increased kindness toward them. A group [of scholars] connected it to the other recitation through the words of the Exalted: "Their greeting therein is 'Peace'"—meaning the angels greet them with "Peace" by the permission of their Lord. Abu Hayyan critiqued this, saying that it involves placing the object of a verbal noun—which is resolved into a preposition and a verb—before the verb itself, which is not permissible, because such a construction is equivalent to placing a part of a thing that has ordered parts before the whole.

It was retorted that the apparent meaning here is not resolved into the two, because the intended meaning is not that they are greeted therein with "Peace." Even if it were granted, the one who proposes the conceptual connection intends for the operative factor to be an implied verb indicated by "Their greeting"—meaning: "They are greeted by the permission of their Lord." The second eminent scholar (al-‘Allamah al-Thani) said: The more apparent view is that the precedence is permissible if the object is an adverb or the like, which is frequent in speech; the estimation [of an implied verb] is an affectation, and not everything that is interpreted as something else takes on the ruling of that which it is interpreted as. Moreover, an adverb is something that requires only a scent of a verb, for it possesses a status not enjoyed by others, as it descends to the level of the thing itself by being within it and inseparable from it. For this reason, adverbs have been treated with a flexibility not granted to others. And I concur with this permissibility.

The reason why the verifiers did not make it connected to "Adkhulu" (in that recitation)—even though it is free from objection and contains iltifat (shift in person) or tajrid (abstraction), which are among the embellishments—is that saying "I admitted him by My permission" is weak and does not befit the eloquence of the Revelation, whereas iltifat or tajrid is attained even if connected to what follows.

In al-Intisaf, it is mentioned that what prevents this view is that the apparent form of "Adkhulu" in the first person suggests that their admission into Paradise was not through an intermediary, but directly from Allah; yet the apparent meaning of "permission" implies attributing the entry to an intermediary. Thus, there is a repulsion between the two. It was deemed better to connect it to "abiding therein," and eternity is not the same as entry, so there is no repulsion. This was critiqued in al-Kashf on the grounds that this does not dispel the weakness, as it appears that the permission is for the entry and not for the duration, and the fact that the intended meaning is "by My will" and "My facilitation" does not dispel this upon sincere contemplation. Therefore, what Ibn Jinni went toward—which Shaykh al-Tayyibi found agreeable and approved—is nothing for the one whose taste remains intact.