Inheritance, Transmission, and Turning Back: A Reading of Formed Agency in the Qur'an and Prophetic Tradition

A person may be formed, from infancy, into a tradition he did not choose, by people whose own formation he also did not choose. His capacity to evaluate what he was given arrives only after the giving is complete, and the faculties he would evaluate it with are among the things it shaped. This paper asks what the Qur'an and the prophetic tradition say about his responsibility, and about the responsibility of those who formed him. The answer developed here has three levels rather than two. Inherited position carries no culpability: the pen does not record against a child, and the tradition frames corruption of the innate disposition as an injury done to him rather than an act performed by him. Sustained participation, after capacity has arrived and a conclusive proof has reached the person, is where responsibility attaches. Transmission, the act of forming the next, is where weight attaches and where it compounds with the number who follow. The paper concerns both kinds of creature the Qur'an holds responsible, mankind and jinnkind (the concealed ones), and argues three consequences. Responsibility in the collaboration between them is not divided into shares: each party answers in full for his own act, and neither one's weight is subtracted from the other's. The chain of formation terminates ontologically but not epistemically, and the tradition accordingly resolves individual cases by the availability of a rebuke rather than by lineage. And the remedy, turning back, is indexed to the person's present position rather than to reconstruction of his history, which is why it remains available to someone who cannot trace how he arrived. A guard runs throughout: guidance is not a status a person can verify in himself.