قالوا بَلىٰ قَد جاءَنا نَذيرٌ فَكَذَّبنا وَقُلنا ما نَزَّلَ اللَّهُ مِن شَيءٍ إِن أَنتُم إِلّا في ضَلالٍ كَبيرٍ
They will say: ‘Yes, a warner did come to us, but we impugned [him] and said: “Allah did not send down anything; you are only in great error.”’
EXPOSITION
The inmates of hell admit that God sent the means of their guidance but they refused to accept it. That is why they are thrown into hell, for they received messengers with manifest proofs: They [the keepers of hell] will say: ‘Did not your apostles use to bring you manifest proofs?’ They will say: ‘Yes’ (40:50). They ascribed lies to the messengers of God, saying that you are liars in claiming that you have been revealed to by God. What makes people dismiss the signs of God and the warnings of His messengers is being deceived and entrapped by the life of this world: ‘O company of jinn and humans! Did there not come to you apostles from yourselves, recounting to you My signs and warning you of the encounter of this day?’ They will say: ‘We testify against ourselves.’ The life of this world had deceived them, and they will testify against themselves that they had been faithless. This is because your Lord would never destroy the towns unjustly while their people were unaware (6:130-131). Indeed, God has made His proof complete and conclusive for His servants, but they heed not: There have already come to them reports containing admonishment; [a] far-reaching wisdom; but warnings are of no avail (54:4-5).
Mankind, by its nature – which is its aspect of creation out of clay, as opposed to its aspect of the ‘All-Merciful’s breath’ – does not have the capacity of excess worldly success and riches. The evil commanding soul uses these bounties to establish itself and plunge the person in illusion, pride, and disbelief. We did not send a warner to any town without its affluent ones saying: ‘We indeed disbelieve in what you have been sent with.’ And they say: ‘We have greater wealth and more children, and we will not be punished!’ (34:34-35); So let not their wealth and children impress you: Allah only desires to punish them with these in the life of this world, and that their souls may depart while they are faithless (9:55).
Wealth, position, and being so smart,
Serve as a loss for those without a heart.
One of the disbelievers’ reasons for rejecting the messengers is that they find them to be mortals like themselves – normal human beings that eat food and walk in the markets: And they say: ‘What sort of apostle is this who eats food and walks in the marketplaces? Why has not an angel been sent down to him so as to be a warner along with him?’ Or: ‘[Why is not] a treasure thrown to him, or [why does] he [not] have a garden from which he may eat?’ And the wrongdoers say: ‘You are just following a bewitched man’ (25:7-8); They said: ‘You are nothing but humans like us, and the All-Beneficent has not sent down anything, and you are only lying’ (36:15). Their argument can thus be broken into the following premises: you are naught but humans like us, and a human being like us cannot be sent as a messenger by God. But their argument is incomplete: Their apostles said to them: ‘Indeed we are just human beings like yourselves; but Allah favours whomever of His servants that He wishes’ (14:11). In other words, a human being can indeed be God’s apostle, depending on God’s will and decree: Allah knows best where to place His apostleship (6:124), and of course God’s decree is not random or vain, but it is based on His wisdom. The argument of the disbelievers is based on assuming all human beings like themselves and failing to realise that a human being can be at infinitely many grades and degrees of perfection and proximity to God.
Likewise was the objection of the Children of Israel when God appointed Saul (Ṭālūt) as their king: Their prophet said to them: ‘Allah has appointed Saul as king for you.’ They said: ‘How can he have kingship over us, when we have a greater right to kingship than him, as he has not been given ample wealth?’ (2:247). Their criterion for acceptance or rejection was the person’s share of wealth. However, God’s criteria are the knowledge and capability of the person in carrying out the required task: He said: ‘Indeed Allah has chosen him over you, and enhanced him vastly in knowledge and physique, and Allah gives His kingdom to whomever He wishes, and Allah is all-bounteous, all-knowing’ (2:247). The contemporaries of Prophet Muhammad (s) also deemed wealth and social class as the determining factors of prophethood: And they said: ‘Why was not this Quran sent down to some great man from the two cities?’ (43:31).
The faithless will be driven to hell in throngs … Evil is the [ultimate] abode of the arrogant (39:71-72). These two verses mention two traits for those who reject the messengers and qualify for the punishment of hell: faithlessness and arrogance. It is indeed one’s arrogance that leads him to reject the messengers and not embrace faith. May God protect us against the evils of our souls. The role of arrogance on deafening and blocking one’s ears from listening have also been emphasised in this verse: And when Our signs are recited to him he turns away arrogantly as if he had not heard them [at all], as if there were a deafness in his ears. So inform him of a painful punishment (31:7; also see 45:8).
For most disbelievers, the claim that Allah did not send down anything reflects their denial of revelation altogether. That is, they deemed it impossible for any human being to be revealed to by God and be sent as a messenger by Him. For some others, it may reflect their denial and impugning of a specific messenger in particular, not prophethood altogether.
REVIEW OF TAFSĪR LITERATURE
Some exegetes have taken the last sentence you are only in great error to be the response of the guardian angels to the disbelievers in the hereafter. Since the disbelievers are in the fire upon this conversation, it would mean that one of the meanings or instances of ḍalāl (error, misguidance) is punishment. Of course, punishment is caused by error, but it does not mean error. The realm of the hereafter is no place for guidance or misguidance; it is only the realm of seeing the results of one’s acts. The sentence being the word of the angels may justify the repetition of And they will say at the beginning of the next verse, but it would make a disconnection and incongruity in the quotes mentioned in this verse. One might draw on verse 34:8 to argue that punishment has been used interchangeably with error: Rather, those who do not believe in the hereafter languish in punishment and extreme error (34:8). However, that verse describes the disbelievers while they are in this world, whereby punishment refers to the reality of their actions – which is hidden from them now. Likewise, it is not likely that you are only in great error is the response of the warners to the disbelievers in this world.
Kafʿamī has offered the following thought experiment that is worth pondering upon: suppose we take off our shoes to attend some event, and when we come back to wear them again a child or a stranger there tells us: ‘Sir, a scorpion just crawled into one of your shoes’, we would withdraw at once in horror and take maximum caution in dealing with both shoes. It would not even cross our minds that this child or stranger may be lying, because what is at stake is very significant. Kafʿamī then says: ‘Now, do the words of the prophets and saints mean less to you than the word of children? Or is the heat of the hellfire and its bitter fruit (zaqqūm) less significant than a scorpion and its poison?’ This is while the number of the prophets have been many, they have all been among the most pious and trustworthy individuals among mankind, and their main message has been one: to harbinger the advent of an immense day and a great punishment (34:46). We trust the findings of modern science and act upon it, even though we see them change and proven wrong constantly. If we dig into the natural sciences that we have, we would realise that they are highly probabilistic, and that certainty is a rare commodity in these fields. Yet, we feel self-sufficient and arrogant by these findings, to the extent that we refuse to assign the smallest probability to the truth of revelation. The solution out of this shaky probabilistic lifestyle is to either get into serious research until we find the truth, or to find a trustworthy and knowledgeable source from which we can obtain reliable principles and practices of our lives.
The origin of this garden, a mosquito cannot know;
For it is born in the spring, and dies when it snows.
[1] Rūmī, Mathnawī, vol. 4, line 1439.
[2] Tibyan, 10/62.
[3] Kafʿamī, Muḥāsabat al-Nafs, p. 46.
[4] Rūmī, Mathnawī, vol. 2, line 2329.