Lesson 10 of 16 · Full sentences
The sentence that starts with a verb
الْجُمْلَة الْفِعْلِيَّة
After this lesson: Find the doer and the thing done in a verbal sentence.
A verbal sentence puts the verb first, then the doer (fāʿil), then whatever the action lands on (mafʿūl bihi). Jāʾa naṣru llāh: 'the help of Allah has come' — verb, then doer.
The endings mark the roles. The doer is marfūʿ, ending in -u. The object is manṣūb, ending in -a. This is why word order in Arabic can move without the meaning collapsing: the endings, not the positions, carry the roles.
The doer is often not a separate word at all. In aʿūdhu, 'I seek refuge', the 'I' lives inside the verb. Arabic verbs already tell you who is acting.
In the Qur'an
إِذَا جَآءَ نَصْرُ ٱللَّهِ وَٱلْفَتْحُ
idhā jāʾa naṣru llāhi wa-l-fatḥ
When the help of Allah comes, and the victory.
Notice. Verb first, then the doer naṣru llāh — itself an 'of' phrase from Stage 2.
أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ فَعَلَ رَبُّكَ بِأَصْحَـٰبِ ٱلْفِيلِ
a-lam tara kayfa faʿala rabbuka bi-aṣḥābi l-fīl
Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?
Notice. Faʿala rabbuka: the doer rabbuka ends in -u, exactly as the rule predicts.
Watch out. Do not assume the first noun after a verb is the doer because it comes first in English too. Check the ending: -u for the doer, -a for the object.
Check yourself
Nothing is scored or saved here — answering is how the rule sticks. When you want a score, the same checks are drilled to mastery below.
Which ending marks the doer of a verb?
In aʿūdhu, where is the word for 'I'?
Word morphology, grammar and syntax trees are shown by the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com), the annotated linguistic resource developed at the University of Leeds.