Infa’ala Form of Passive Verbs in the Holy Quran: A Contextual Study

Abstract

This research studies the passive verbs that appear in the form of “Infa’ala” in the Holy Quran. It is based on an integrated approach that looks at this morphological image from the following perspectives: contextual, lexical, phonetic, and syntactic. It is divided into three sections. The first and second sections focus on the grammarians’ definition of passive verbs and their construction respectively. In the third section, the research discusses the contexts of their occurrence (signs of the Hour, the miracle of the staff of Moses, turning away from the Dawah of Muhammad). This research has concluded that most of the passive verbs that were mentioned in the context of expressing the signs of the Hour came in the past tense, coupled with the adverbial ‘itha’ (if) for the future, to indicate that the realization of these events is an inevitable reality, while, most of the verbs mentioned in the context of the miracles of the messengers were coupled with the conjunction fa (and then), which indicates order and sequence, to indicate the necessity of hastening their implementation of the Divine command with no delay. In addition, the passive verbs that appear in the context of the polytheists’ turning away from the Dawah of the prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, coupled with the conditional conjunction ‘in’ (if) indicating doubt in the occurrence of events, in harmony with what this context requires in terms of expressing the infidels’ doubt in the Dawah of Islam.