ما سَمِعنا بِهٰذا فِي المِلَّةِ الآخِرَةِ إِن هٰذا إِلَّا اختِلاقٌ
We did not hear of this in the latter-day creed. This is nothing but a fabrication.
EXEGESIS
Millat al-ākhirah (latter-day creed): millah means religion, referring to everything it includes as a whole, such as the creed (millah) of Abraham (3:95). Ākhirah is opposed to the beginning, and means the final or last of something. The hereafter is known as the ākhirah because it comes last, after the dunyā, and everything that precedes it. Here it should be referring to most recent and latest millah vis-a-vis the Meccan elite who uttered these words, namely the polytheistic religion of idol worship.
Idolatry, which had been introduced to Mecca about four centuries before the revelation of the Quran, was to the Meccan idolaters the most recent and modern religion. By referring to themselves as millat al-ākhirah they wish to say the religion of Muhammad (s) is archaic and defunct.
Ikhtilāq (fabrication) comes from the root of khalq, meaning to create. Ikhtilāq al-qawl means to come up with something based on nothing but your own whims, which has no basis in reality. Here it means that this claim (of there being only one God) is nothing but a lie and fabrication.
EXPOSITION
We did not hear of this in the latter-day creed. The word this is referring to the statement in verse 5 regarding the oneness of God. The latter-day creed refers to the prevalent views of their time. This is part of their shiqāq or drawing lines of division that was spoken of in verse 1. They wished to say that Muhammad (s) was an outlier in Meccan society, a pariah that believed in something no one else believed in, and what he said was nothing but a fabrication, lies that he had come up with. In a way, they were putting the other person on the spot: ‘Who will you side with? Everyone else, or that man who is alone and who says everyone else is wrong and has come up with something unheard of in modern Mecca?’
In the previous verse, we were indirectly told that not every type of patience is necessarily a good thing, and now we are told that not all social innovations are necessarily bad. To the Meccan elite, the claim of one God was an innovation and nothing but a fabrication. The verse directly continues the idea of social inertia picked up in earlier verses and states it far more explicitly. They claimed (of course inaccurately) that the idea of monotheism was an innovation without precedent in their society, and therefore should be resisted.
The lesson is twofold: new things are not necessarily bad, but neither is every new thing necessarily good. What should be the criterion for judging an idea is not its newness or oldness, but rather its merit, so give good news to My servants who listen to the word and follow the best of it (39:17-18).
The irony is that what was to the Meccan idolaters a newly created fabrication, is simply a restatement of what had been told to man from the beginning of his stay on earth, as the first verse that began this surah stated, this message is simply a Quran bearing the reminder.
In another way of understanding the verse, they are saying that this is somehow an ancient superstition, nothing but myths of the ancients (83:13) and incompatible with modern views. In this case, their claims are of course contradictory, as here they are claiming it is nothing but a fabrication, and not that it is an ancient myth.
REVIEW OF TAFSĪR LITERATURE
There are different opinions suggested as to what latter-day creed means:
- From Mujāhid, that it means the people of Mecca, specifically the Quraysh. Similarly from Qatādah, that it means ‘in our religion and time’.
- From Ibn Abbas and others, that it is Christianity, because it was the last nation and creed to be revealed before the coming of Prophet Muhammad (s). This is illogical because the topic is about rejection of idol worship (as per verse 5), which would definitely have been a part of Christian views. This interpretation seems to just be concluding what the latest divinely revealed religion (millah) before Islam was and inserting that into this verse.
- From Hasan al-Baṣrī, that it means ‘we didn’t hear that this would happen in the end times’, as in ‘we haven’t heard of a prophet bringing monotheism near the end times’. This is a very strange one, and seems to be simply latching on to the word ākhirah – which refers to the hereafter – and transposing that concept to the Meccan idolaters, while it is not proven that they had any beliefs about an apocalypse or that they thought of themselves as being close to the end times.
Of these opinions the first one is the most in harmony with the context of the verse.
[1] Lisan, 11/631.
[2] Tantawi, 12/134.
[3] Tibyan, 8/545; Tabari, 23/81.
[4] Nemuneh, 19/221.
[5] Mizan, 17/183.
[6] Tibyan, 8/545; Tabari, 23/80.
[7] Suyuti, 5/297.
[8] Tibyan, 8/545; Tabari, 23/80; Suyuti, 5/296; Ibn Kathir, 7/47; Shawkani, 4/483; Qaraati, 8/81. Some add that by this they meant that the Christians were not known to worship one God either as they believed in the Trinity (Tabrisi, 8/727). The exact nature of the theological views of Christians living in the Arabian Peninsula at the beginning of Islam is debatable though (many might have been Unitarians), but the claim makes no sense in any case as any Christians – no matter their school of thought – would have been strongly opposed to the idol worship of pagan Arabs.
[9] Tabrisi, 8/727-728; Zamakhshari, 4/74.