«لَوْلَاهُ لَمْ تُقْطَعْ يَمِينُ سَارِقِ، وَلَا بَدَتْ مَظْلَمَةٌ مِنْ فَاسِقِ»
Without it, the poet says, a thief’s right hand would not be severed, nor would a wrongdoer’s injustice emerge.
The verse links acquisitive desire with theft and injustice using an emphatic counterfactual. It is designed to indict greed through striking consequences, not to provide a complete causal history of each crime.
Wealth may occasion temptation, but human beings commit wrongful acts. Reading the line as poetic moral intensification preserves the rhetorical force without treating money itself as a literal legal agent.