Khatamallahu was one of those places.
At first I wondered whether it was a possessive construction, two words joined in the way I knew as mudaf and mudaf ilayh. It was not. The phrase gives an action and names who performs it: Allah Subhanahu wa Taala has sealed.
The wording is:
خَتَمَ ٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمۡ وَعَلَىٰ سَمۡعِهِمۡۖ
Allah Subhanahu wa Taala has sealed their hearts and their hearing. The verse then speaks of a covering over their sight. Baqarah 2:7
That grammatical clarification did not settle my question. It made the question sharper.
The people have already been described through kufr, rejection. Warning them or not warning them makes no difference to their response. I was reading this against the people whose understanding included the ghayb, revelation and the Akhirah. Their orientations seemed opposed. But the people are the ones rejecting. Why does the next verse say that Allah Subhanahu wa Taala sealed them? Why not say that they sealed themselves?
I was trying to approach this through psychology and neuroscience. Repeated choices becoming established in the brain was the kind of explanation I was considering. Suppose I could describe that process. Someone keeps rejecting; their responses become deeply established. My question would remain: why does Allah Subhanahu wa Taala attribute the sealing to Himself?
I was not asking for the mechanism again. I was asking what the attribution meant for the reality in which that mechanism exists.
This also made qalb difficult to pass over. I had encountered an explanation connecting the word with turning or changing. What kind of change did the books mean? Did they give examples? When the passage speaks of hearts, hearing and sight, what exactly am I being asked to understand about a human being?
With my neuroscience and neuroinformatics background, I naturally think about the brain when I think about changing perception and judgment. Could the language of qalb encompass that turning? Or would I be stretching the word to fit a modern account? Was there another word that referred more specifically to the bodily heart? I wanted the dictionary evidence before deciding what I could do with the connection.
I also did not want a ready-made answer to end the thinking. There may be answers people have developed over centuries, and I can consider them. But if the point is to open the book and read, I need room to encounter the question myself.
My starting belief is not in doubt here. I believe the universe has a Creator, and that this is His book. That makes the wording more significant to me, not less. If I can describe a human process in physical terms, what have I described? And what have I not yet understood about why the Creator speaks of it this way?
I wanted to record that question without replacing it with either a brain explanation or a theological conclusion I had not reached through this reading.
A later note. In the reflection I subsequently published, I wrote: “What I was beginning to see was a reality in which human choice and divine agency belonged together.” The question I had carried from the psychology lecture had changed: “Why should knowing how it happened mean it happened without Him?”