عمّر
ʿAmara
To build or operate a land, site, building or piece of equipment so that it fulfils its purpose.
What it means
ʿAmara comes from a root meaning to build, inhabit and keep in good order. In Faruqi’s usage it describes the work of making a place or a thing serve the purpose for which it exists, so that a field is cultivated, a building is lived in and a tool is used for what it was made to do. The sense is practical and carries an ethical weight, because the Muslim is expected to leave the earth better ordered than he found it.
The Quran uses forms of the root in several places. It says that God made humankind settle in the earth and bade them develop it (11:61), and it speaks of those who keep God’s mosques in use and in repair as the true believers (9:18). The word therefore joins ordinary building and cultivation to devotion, and it shows that worship and the care of the earth belong to one life.
Often misunderstood as
That it only means to construct buildings, when it also covers cultivating and operating whatever one has been given to use.
What the sources say
The two verses cited above, 11:61 and 9:18, are the usual starting points. Later writers drew on the same root for the word ʿumrān, the flourishing of settled life, which Ibn Khaldun made central to his study of society.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 40, listed as ʿAMARA. The definition is restated here.