Al-Baqarah: (271) If you disclose your charitable offerings...

(If you disclose your charitable offerings) means, if you manifest the giving of them. Al-Kalbi said: When the verse (And whatever you spend of expenditure) was revealed, they said: "O Messenger of Allah, is secret charity better, or public charity?" Then this was revealed. Thus, the sentence is a form of detail for some of what was summarized in the conditional clause, and an explanation of it; that is why the conjunction was omitted between them. The intent of "charitable offerings" (sadaqat), according to the majority of exegetes, is voluntary charity. It has been said: It means the obligatory charities. It has also been said: It is general.

(Then excellent it is) The fa is the response to the conditional clause, and ni'ma (excellent) is a past verb. As for ma (it), Ibn Jinni said: It is an indefinite noun, fully inflected, in the accusative as a specifier (tamyiz), and it is the subject (mubtada') referring back to the charitable offerings, with an omitted genitive addition (mudaf), meaning: "manifesting them." Or there is no omission, and the sentence is the predicate of hiya, with the link being the general sense.

Ibn Kathir, Warsh, and Hafs read it with a kasrah on the nun and ‘ayn for the sake of assimilation (itba'), which is the dialect of Hudhayl. It is said: It is possible that it was quiescent, then given a kasrah due to the meeting of two quescents. Ibn ‘Amir, Hamzah, and Al-Kisa’i read it with a fathah on the nun and a kasrah on the ‘ayn according to the original form, like ‘alima. Abu ‘Amr, Qalun, and Abu Bakr read it with a kasrah on the nun and a shortening (ikhtilas) of the vowel of the ‘ayn. It is also narrated from them that it is quiescent, which Abu ‘Ubaydah chose and cited as a dialect. The majority chose ikhtilas over quiescence, to the point that some considered the latter a mistake of the narrators. Among those who rejected it were Al-Mubarrad, Az-Zajjaj, and Al-Farisi, because it involves the meeting of two quescents in a non-standard way.

(And if you conceal them) means: if you keep them secret. The pronominal object refers either to the charitable offerings in general, or to them specifically in wording but not in meaning, based on the view that "manifested charities" refers to the obligatory ones, and "concealed ones" refers to the voluntary ones; this would be in the vein of the phrase "I have a dirham and its half," meaning half of another dirham. In combining manifestation and concealment, there is a type of literary excellence known as verbal antithesis (tibaq lafzi), just as there is in the words of the Almighty: (And give them to the poor), which is a conceptual antithesis (tibaq ma'nawi), because only the wealthy give charity. It is said: Perhaps the explicit mention of giving them to the poor—even though this is also necessary in public charity—is because concealment is a place of potential confusion and ambiguity; for a wealthy person might claim poverty and proceed to accept charity secretly, whereas he would not do so in front of people. The specification of the poor is to highlight their status. Others said: Since what is manifested refers to Zakat, the poor were not mentioned because its recipients are not limited to them, and since what is concealed refers to voluntary charity, it shows that its recipients are only the poor. But this is baseless, because after conceding that the manifested is Zakat and the concealed is voluntary, we do not concede that the recipients of the latter are only the poor. Proving that would be "the red death" (an impossible task). It is as if for this reason, some interpreted "the poor" as "the recipients."

(It is better for you) i.e., concealment is better for you than manifestation. And "better for you" is one of the many types of "good." The former is what is indicated by the traditions and narrations regarding the superiority of concealment, which are too many to count. Imam Ahmad recorded from Abu Umamah that Abu Dharr said: "O Messenger of Allah, which charity is best?" He said: "A secret charity to a poor person, or an effort from one who has little," then he read the verse. At-Tabarani narrated in a marfu' (attributed) hadith: "Indeed, secret charity extinguishes the anger of the Lord." Al-Bukhari narrated: "Seven whom Allah will shade in His shade on a day when there is no shade but His..." until he said: "...and a man who gave charity and concealed it, so that his left hand did not know what his right hand spent."

The majority hold that this superiority applies when both secret and public charities are voluntary from one who is not known for wealth. Otherwise, manifesting the obligatory charity for others is better to negate suspicion. Likewise, public display is better for someone who is followed as an example and feels secure in his intentions. From Ibn ‘Abbas, may Allah be pleased with them, it is said that secret voluntary charity is seventy times better than its public form, while for obligatory charity, the public form is twenty-five times better than the secret. This applies to all obligatory and voluntary acts.

(And He will remove from you some of your misdeeds) i.e., Allah will remove, or the concealment will remove—the attribution being figurative. "Some" (min) is partitive, because not all sins are removed by charity. It has also been said that it is an augmentative particle, according to the opinion of Al-Akhfash. Ibn Kathir, Abu ‘Amr, ‘Asim (in the narration of Ibn ‘Ayyash), and Ya’qub read nukaffiru with a nun and a dammah, as a beginning sentence or nominal sentence conjoined to what follows the fa, meaning: "And we will remove." It is said that there is no need to assume a subject, and the verb itself is conjoined to the position of ma after the fa, because it is the only one in the nominative, for the connecting fa prevents it from being jussive so that the connector does not become multiple. Hamzah and Al-Kisa’i read nukaffir with a nun and in the jussive, conjoined to the position of the fa along with what follows it, because it is the response to the conditional clause, as stated by more than one. Al-Badr Ad-Damamini found this problematic, as it is explicit that the fa and the ma entered upon it are in a state of jussive, yet it is established that a sentence has no grammatical position unless it is in the place of a single noun, and this is not a place for a single noun such that the sentence would hold that position. This is because the response to a conditional clause must be a sentence and cannot be a single noun; thus, the position is for the sentence fundamentally. He argued that the jussive state of the verb is not by being conjoined to the position of the sentence, but rather because it is an imperfect verb (mudari') that occurred at the beginning of a sentence conjoined to the sentence of the jussive conditional response. If that sentence had begun with an imperfect verb, it would have been jussive; thus, the conjoined sentence was given the ruling of the sentence to which it is conjoined—namely, the jussive state of its beginning if it is an imperfect verb. This can be defended with care, so reflect upon it. It is also read as tukaffir with a ta and in the nominative or jussive, according to what you have learned, and the verb belongs to the charitable offerings.

(And Allah, of what you do, is All-Acquainted) regarding your charities, in terms of manifesting and concealing, (All-Acquainted) means: Knowing, from whom nothing is hidden, so He will reward you for all of that. In the sentence, there is encouragement toward both public and secret acts, even if they differ in superiority. It is permissible that the speech is intended to encourage the latter, due to its proximity and because the acquaintance regarding manifestation does not contain much praise.