LessonsSupplementary Practice 19: Comparative Rhetorical Analysis of Sūrat al-ʿAṣr and al-TakāthurQuiz

أَلْهَاكُمُ التَّكَاثُرُ
Rivalry for increase has distracted you. (التكاثر: 1)

Alhā is a past-tense verb, -kum its object, and al-takāthur the grammatical subject. The clause opens by directly asserting the occurrence of distraction, then explicitly identifies the activity responsible. The cause is therefore not an unexpressed subject; it appears after the verb and object.

Al-takāthur evokes competition to accumulate or outdo others rather than the simple existence of possessions. The past form vividly presents the distraction as real, but it does not confine the warning to a bygone audience merely because it is morphologically past tense.

Opening interactive controls...

Distraction named through verb and agent

Supplementary Practice 19: Comparative Rhetorical Analysis of Sūrat al-ʿAṣr and al-Takāthur

أَلْهَاكُمُ التَّكَاثُرُ
Rivalry for increase has distracted you. (التكاثر: 1)

Alhā is a past-tense verb, -kum its object, and al-takāthur the grammatical subject. The clause opens by directly asserting the occurrence of distraction, then explicitly identifies the activity responsible. The cause is therefore not an unexpressed subject; it appears after the verb and object.

Al-takāthur evokes competition to accumulate or outdo others rather than the simple existence of possessions. The past form vividly presents the distraction as real, but it does not confine the warning to a bygone audience merely because it is morphologically past tense.