“Idhā mā rāya rufiʿat li-majd: When a banner is raised for glory”?
Here mā is redundant, for the utterance stands without it. You say “idhā rāya,” “when a banner,” and it exercises no governance here.
Likewise the particle in within Imruʾ al-Qays’s saying, “Famā in min ḥadīth wa-lā ṣāl: There is no conversation, nor one warming himself by a fire.” Here in is redundant and exercises no governance.
It may be so, without impediment. Were we to omit ʿan from “min ʿan yamīn,” “from off the right,” the meaning would not be impaired. The particle need not leave its category for that of nouns without necessity.
When one particle is substituted for another, does it impart the substituted particle’s meaning or a different one?
(The Abode’s Other Sciences)
This Abode contains knowledge of mounts and riders, time, speech’s honor, and remembrance’s honor over thought: the Real described Himself through remembrance but not through thought, although He affirmed governance for Himself, which is thought or occupies the place of what necessarily accompanies it.
It contains knowledge of creation and attributes, clarification, states, preparedness, beneficence, and the middlemost self-disclosure between tasting and being quenched, according to those who affirm quenching.
Knowledge of certainty’s refreshing coolness and whence it comes; of servanthood to God rather than other things, and this servanthood’s effects within the sciences.
Knowledge of what fulfilling obligations gives,
Notes
Translator’s note TN6260-1: In the second poetic example, ṣāl is provisionally one warming himself by a fire; the cited spelling lacks a final yāʾ, which an indefinite defective participle need not retain. The argument concerns the redundant particle in, not a reconstruction of the verse.
