Two Readings of the Feet in Q 5:6: A 300-Word Commentary
A committee is drafting a 300-word commentary on Qur'an 5:6 for a mixed adult-education audience. The draft states: 'The verse commands washing the feet,' and a footnote cites only the accusative reading arjulakum. A reviewer objects that the genitive reading arjulikum is also attested in the qirāʾāt and that the draft quietly settles a long legal dispute. The board chair fears that mentioning the variant will confuse readers or appear sectarian. Constraints: the commentary must fit exactly 300 words; it must not privilege one school; it must distinguish qirāʾa from tafsīr; and it must remain usable in a Sunni-majority setting without polemic. The verse concerns preparation for prayer and mentions faces, hands, heads, and feet. The legal issue turns on which noun or verb governs 'feet.' The committee has one week and no permission to add a lengthy appendix. The draft is currently 286 words, so space is tight.
1. Is the genitive reading a qirāʾa, a shādhdh reading, or a scribal variant? What is at stake legally and exegetically?
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The genitive arjulikum is not a scribal variant; it is a reading transmitted in the qirāʾāt tradition, while arjulakum is the accusative reading familiar from the Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim text. The legal stakes are real because the governance differs: the accusative links 'feet' to the washing command governing 'faces' and 'hands'; the genitive links it to the preceding genitive 'heads' (wipe) or to a governing verb understood differently. That is why schools that wash the feet and schools that wipe them can both appeal to a reading, though they also use hadith and practice. Exegetically, the variant alone does not settle the law. The commentary should not call one reading 'the verse' and the other a corruption; nor should it imply that the qirāʾāt are interchangeable private opinions. The accurate move is to distinguish the qirāʾa (transmitted reading) from tafsīr (interpretation) and from fiqh (derived ruling).
2. Rewrite the draft's two sentences so they meet the committee's constraints. Include a footnote line.
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Draft: 'The verse mentions washing the face and hands and wiping the head. The feet are transmitted in two readings: arjulakum (accusative), linking them to washing, and arjulikum (genitive), linking them to wiping or to the preceding genitive. Both belong to the qirāʾāt tradition; the schools differ in how they combine reading, prophetic practice, and legal reasoning. This commentary reports the dispute without resolving it.' Footnote: 'Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim reads arjulakum; other canonical transmissions, such as Warsh ʿan Nāfiʿ, read arjulikum.' If space is tighter, keep the main-text sentence and footnote, and drop the list of schools. The revision does not say 'both are valid' in a vague way; it states what each reading does grammatically and why the legal disagreement follows.
3. Should the variant appear in the main text, a footnote, or a teacher's guide? Justify your editorial choice.
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Because the variant changes the plain sense and has been used in polemic, it belongs in the main text in one clause. A footnote alone would leave the draft's 'commands washing' as the only impression and would make the later mention look like an exception. But the main text should not adjudicate; it should state the two readings and the legal uncertainty. The teacher's guide can carry the detailed school positions and the hadith-based arguments. This respects the 300-word limit and the non-sectarian constraint. The editor should also avoid the opposite failure: a long main-text excursus that turns a devotional commentary into a qirāʾāt treatise. One sentence in the main text, one footnote, and a teacher's-guide note is the proportionate allocation.