وَلَوْلَا فَضْلُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ وَرَحْمَتُهُ وَأَنَّ اللَّه رَؤُوفٌ رَحِيمٌ

Were it not for Allah’s grace and His mercy upon you, and that Allah is all-kind, all-merciful …

EXPOSITION

This verse is the sister of verse 10, which concluded the rulings on zināʾ. This now concludes the exhortations of God which lambasted and reminded the believers regarding the event of ifk. Like verse 10, it exhorts the believers that if it were not for the mercy of God, they would have destroyed themselves and their societies with sin and disobedience. Also similar to there, it does so implicitly, which makes the exhortation even more powerful.[1] It is a strong emphasis on the main theme of the surah and how the ‘clear command’ of God guides the community of believers to salvation and that which is in their benefit.

Were it not for Allah’s grace and His mercy upon you: it is also possible to understand this specifically in reference to the previous verse, in that God does not wish for sin to spread amongst the believers either in practice or in the form of rumours. God guides the community of believers and He also conceals their sins from the eyes of one another so that they should not be shamed and their flaws should not be revealed before all. This concealment of flaws (sitr al-ʿawrah) is God’s grace and mercy.

The beauty of the omission is that it allows the reader to draw different conclusions from the exhortation.

And that Allah is all-kind, all-merciful: The first of these exhortations ended with the declaration that Allah is all-clement (tawwāb), all-wise (ḥakīm) (verse 10), following the rulings mentioned in verses 2-9 regarding zināʾ, slander, and liʿān. It is said that here God mentions His kindness (raʾfah) and His mercy (raḥmah) because the sin of slandering the wife of the Prophet is so much more severe that it cannot be undone through repentance (tawbah) alone, but is only possible because of the kindness and mercy of God.[2]

[1] See Tibyan, 7/419; Tabrisi, 7/208; Tabari, 18/80; Razi, 23/347; Tantawi, 10/100; Sharawi, p. 10222.
[2] Alusi, 9/319.