Background: two kinds of sentences
Arabic (like English) splits sentences into two types:
1. Khabar (خبر) — a report / statement. This is a sentence that can be true or false — it reports something.
- “The door is open.” → you’re informing me of a fact.
2. Inshāʾ (إنشاء) — a performance / doing-words. This is a sentence that isn’t true or false — saying it does something, creates something in the moment.
- “I now pronounce you married.” → the priest isn’t reporting a marriage; saying the words makes it happen.
- “I promise.” → the promise doesn’t exist until you say it; the saying is the doing.
So: khabar = telling. inshāʾ = doing.
And here’s a key fact the passage starts with: some sentences can switch from one to the other. For example, business phrases like “I sell” / “I buy” (بِعْتُ، اشْتَرَيْتُ) look like reports (“I sold something”) but in a contract they actually perform the sale — saying them makes the deal. So a report-shaped sentence can be used to do something.
The big question
So now: “al-ḥamdu lillāh” — which is it?
- Is it a report? (“I’m informing you that praise belongs to God.” — a fact about reality.)
- Or is it a performance? (Saying it is the act of praising — like “I promise” is promising.)
Why does this matter? Because if it’s only a report, then when you say it, you’d just be describing praise — not actually praising! And the whole point is to actually praise God. So there’s real tension here. The scholars split into groups.
Group 1: “It’s a report (khabar)”
This group says it’s fundamentally a statement of fact. But that creates the obvious problem above (then you’re not really praising). They have a few ways to handle it:
(a) Pure report — just a fact. Objection: but then the speaker isn’t actually praising God, which defeats the purpose! Their answer: Reporting that “praise belongs to God” is itself acknowledging God’s beauty — because praise just is describing-with-beauty. So even reporting it counts. Plus, when you make a general statement (“all praise is God’s”), you’re included in your own statement — so you’re swept into the praising too.
They add a subtle idea — customary entailment (لازم عرفي): sometimes you say one thing to imply another. Like if I tell you “you stayed up late last night” — on the surface I’m reporting a fact, but my real point is to let you know “I know what you did.” Same here: I report that praise is God’s, but the understood message is “…and I’m one of the praisers.”
(b) Same idea, focused on entailment. He reports everyone praises God, and being a praiser himself comes along by implication. Objection: but then his own praise is just a side-effect, not the main thing — even though the whole context is his praising! Their answer: It’s fine to say something literally for the sake of what it implies. (Example: calling a man “tall of sword-strap” — literally about his sword-belt, but the point is “he’s a tall man.” The literal thing is said to deliver the implied thing.)
Group 1, second strand — “a report meant as a performance.” This is a refinement: it’s a report in form, but intended to perform. Like when the mother in the Qur’an says ﴿إنِّي وَضَعْتُها أُنْثَىٰ﴾ (“I have delivered a female”) — grammatically she’s reporting a birth, but she’s really expressing grief/disappointment. The report-shape is chosen on purpose because it delivers things a plain performance can’t: totality, exclusivity, permanence, stability.
Group 2: “It’s pure performance (inshāʾ)”
This group says: no, it’s purely doing-words — one of those phrases Arabs moved from report-land into performance-land (like the contract phrases). When you say it, you’re praising, full stop — not reporting.
They admit the old report-meaning still faintly survives (you could answer the question “to whom is praise?” with “al-ḥamdu lillāh”), but that original sense is now weak and needs a hint to surface.
Ibn ʿĀshūr’s verdict (he calls it “the truth there’s no escaping”)
“al-ḥamdu lillāh” is a report-in-form, used to perform.
In other words — both things at once, on purpose:
- Your aim is inshāʾ — you are genuinely praising God (doing the action).
- But the form is khabar — a statement — and that form is chosen deliberately, because only the statement-form can carry the five grand features:
- permanence (it’s always true)
- stability (it’s fixed)
- totality (all praise)
- exclusivity (His alone)
- importance (fronted)
A pure performance like “ḥamdan lillāh” or “aḥmadu llāha ḥamdan” (“I praise God”) could not deliver those five things — it would just be me, praising, right now. So God phrased it as a statement to smuggle in all that grandeur, while meaning it as an act of praise.
(His evidence that Arabs felt it as a doing: the poet Dhū al-Rumma described uttering praise using the word “iḥdāth” — “originating/bringing-into-being” — and “bringing into being” is exactly what inshāʾ / performance means. So Arabs sensed you’re making praise happen, not just reporting it.)
The takeaway
When you say “al-ḥamdu lillāh,” you are doing something — actually praising God — not merely stating a dry fact. Yet God deliberately dressed it as a statement so the same little phrase could also carry permanence, universality, and exclusivity. It’s a performance wearing the clothes of a report — you praise Him and, in the very same breath, declare that all praise, forever, is His alone.