So That You May Be Reminded

Sndor Fodor was an excellent scholar, a caring friend and a genial host.We saw each other rarely, something we both regretted, but when we met it was as if there had been no gap.The conversation just continued, and it is deeply saddening that it will never do so again.It is a minor comfort that his death was sudden, whilst he was looking after his grandchildren.His memory will live on through them, through his work, and through the department that both he and his successors have maintained as a centre of excellence, despite the cruel government cuts to Hungarian higher education.He always quizzed me about my work on the Qurn, and I remember discussing with him the use of laalla.The following piece on laalla in the Qurn fleshes out our discussion.By the norms of Qurnic vocabulary laalla is a common word.It occurs 129 times, being rare in early material, and then rising to a peak in later Meccan and early Medinan material before tailing off.One would expect a particle that occurs so many times to be clearly understood.This is not so, mainly, I suspect, because examples have normally been looked at individually rather than as a group.In addition, scholars of Arabic are overwhelmingly predisposed to think of laalla as meaning 'perhaps', its meaning in the arabiyya.However, commentators, grammarians and lexicographers have always allowed that in the Qurn laalla does not bear the single meaning of 'perhaps'.From time to time they acknowledge in the briefest of comments that it means 'so that'.Thus Ibn Manr simply says in his secondary explanation of laalla in the Lisn al-arab: wa-qad 'at f l-qurni bi-man kay.Similarly al-Bayw glosses laalla-kum taqiln (12:2) as kay tafham-hu.For slightly more detailed explanations, with a leavening of theological argument, see, for example, a-abar and az-Zamaar on 2:21 (laallakum tattaqna).In this case, for example, a-abar argues that laalla cannot here imply any doubt on the part of God about what might happen if the hypocrites and unbelievers were to serve their Lord.