Exegesis of the saying of Allah the Exalted: “And protect them from the evils. And whoever is protected from the evils on that day, then He has shown him mercy. And that is the great success.”

Then Allah the Exalted said: This is conjoined to what preceded it, namely His saying: meaning, “And protect them from the evils.” The sentence consists of a command verb, a subject, and an object, or rather two objects. The sentence contains a verb, a subject, and two objects. The verb is *qa*, the subject is hidden by necessity, the first object is the pronoun *ha*, and the second object is *al-sayyi'at* (the evils). Here, *qa* is a command verb, but it consists of only one letter after two letters were deleted from it, the first and the third. This is the case with every defective root: if it is triliteral, its command verb consists of one letter. This is the rule: every defective triliteral root has a command verb consisting of one letter. A *mithal* root is one whose first letter is a vowel letter, and a *naqis* (defective) root is one whose last letter is a vowel letter. So, this rule covers many examples, and al-Khudhari collected them in his marginal notes on Ibn 'Aqil’s commentary on Ibn Malik’s *Alfiyyah*. He collected them in verses. Yes, among them is *qa-fa-'ayn*, which means “to count.” But the criterion is this: every triliteral root that is *mithal* or *naqis* has a command verb consisting of one letter. Good.