Vocabulary

Kaffalahā (“charged…. with her care”): Kafāla means to undertake the practical responsibility of providing for and fulfilling another’s livelihood and life affairs. Takfīl takes two objects and means to make someone the guardian of another, just as God made Zechariah (a.s.) the guardian responsible for providing Mary’s (a.s.) livelihood and life affairs: “And He charged Zechariah with her care”(59)

Ibn Athīr, in discussing “I and the guardian of an orphan will be like these two in Paradise,” states that a guardian (kāfil) is one who attends to the orphan’s affairs and raises them: “the one who manages the orphan’s affairs and raises them”.(60)

Al-Miḥrāb (“sanctuary”): “Ḥarb” as opposed to “silm” means to struggle and act harshly. Miḥrāb on the pattern of mifʿāl is an instrumental noun meaning a means of struggle, whether external or internal battle; the first like weapons of war, whose plural is maḥārīb (weapons), and the second like a place chosen for struggling against the self and Satan(61) (miḥrāb al-masjid), and sometimes the mosque itself was called miḥrāb,(62) as in the verse “as many temples as he wished”(63) where maḥārīb means mosques.(64)

Some have equated the miḥrāb under discussion with the altar (madhbaḥ) of the People of the Book, which is a small structure built in front of the temple with a special door accessed by a ladder with few steps, such that whoever is in that altar is hidden from the view of those in the temple.(65)

Sometimes miḥrāb refers to a special chamber or room of a ruler, because in that special room the king engages in managing the kingdom and battling enemies (think tank), and the use of the instrumental noun form instead of the locative noun indicates fighting and striving, diligence in worship and seeking recourse to it,(66) since standing in a place of battle does not indicate fighting, unlike taking up weapons of war.

Note: Since in the verse “Has there not come to you the account of the contenders, when they scaled the wall into the sanctuary”,(67) sūr means wall and tasawwur means to come over a wall, it becomes clear that those two (angels who had come to test David) had entered the mosque by climbing over the wall of the miḥrāb.(68) Therefore, that miḥrāb was not like the current miḥrābs of mosques which are inside the building.