3. Aal-i-Imraan

They, the Jews, will not harm you, O company of Muslims, in any way, except a little hurt, with their tongues, such as slander and threats; and if they fight against you, they will turn their backs to you, in retreat, then they will not be helped, against you, but you will be helped against them.

Yet they, the People of the Scripture, are not all alike, equal; some of the People of the Scripture are a community upright, with integrity, adhering to the truth, such as ‘Abd Allāh b. Salām, may God be pleased with him and his companions, who recite God’s verses in the watches of the night, that is, during its hours, prostrating themselves, performing prayer (wa-hum yasjudūn, ‘prostrating themselves’, is a circumstantial qualifier).

They believe in God and in the Last Day, enjoining decency and forbidding indecency, vying with one another in good works; those, described in the way God has mentioned, are of the righteous, and some of them are not like this and are not righteous.

And whatever good you do, O community, (taf‘alū, ‘you do’, or if this is read yaf‘alū, ‘they do’, then [it is referring to them] ‘the upright community’), you shall not be denied it ([read] in both ways [fa-lan tukfarūhu, ‘you shall not be denied it’, or fa-lan yukfarūhu, ‘they shall not be denied it’]), you shall not be deprived of its reward, but you will be rewarded for it, and God knows the God-fearing.

As for the disbelievers, their riches shall not avail, protect, them, neither their children, against God, that is, against His chastisement: these two are singled out for mention because a person usually avails himself either by paying a ransom, or by [resorting to] the help of his children; those are the inhabitants of the Fire, abiding therein.

The likeness, the description, of what they, the disbelievers, expend in the life of this world, in the way of enmity towards the Prophet or in the way of voluntary almsgiving or the like, is as the likeness of a wind wherein is a blast, of extreme hot or cold, that smote the tillage, the crops, of a people who have wronged themselves, through unbelief and disobedience, and destroyed it, so that they could not profit from it; so it is with what they expend, it perishes and they profit nothing from it. God did not wrong them, when they lost what they expended, but they wronged themselves, through unbelief, which necessitated this loss.

O you who believe, do not take as intimates, as sincere friends, revealing to them your secret thoughts, anyone apart from yourselves, from among the Jews, Christians and the hypocrites; such men spare nothing to ruin you (khabālan is in the accusative because the preposition [that usually precedes it, sc. fī’l-khabāl] has been omitted), that is to say, they would not be remiss about corrupting you; they would love, they wish, for you to suffer ([al-‘anat means] extreme hardship). Hatred, enmity towards you, is revealed, it is manifested, by their mouths, by sowing discord among you and informing the idolaters of your secret [plans]; and what their breasts conceal, of enmity, is yet greater. Now We have made clear to you the signs, of their enmity; if you understand, this, then do not befriend them.

Lo (hā, ‘lo!’, is for calling attention [to something]), there you are, O believers, you love them, on account of their kinship and their [pretence of] friendship towards you, but they love you not, since they oppose you in religion; you believe in the Book, all of it, that is to say, in the Books, all of them, but they do not believe in your Book, and when they meet you they say, ‘We believe,’ but when they are alone, they bite at you their fingertips, in rage, in extreme fury at what they see of your mutual affection: the biting of the fingertips is used to figuratively express the severity of rage, even if there be no biting involved. Say: ‘Perish in your rage, that is, be this way until the end of your lives, for you shall not see what will please you; God knows what is in the breasts’, what is in the hearts, including that which these conceal.

If good fortune, a favour such as victory or booty, befalls you, it is evil for them, it grieves them; but if evil, such as defeat or drought, befalls you, they rejoice thereat (the conditional statement here is semantically connected to the previous conditional, and what comes in between is a parenthetical [statement], the meaning being that their enmity towards you is endless, so why do you befriend them? Avoid them!) Yet if you endure, their harm, and fear, God by [not] befriending them and so on, their guile will not hurt you (read either lā yadirkum or lā yadurrukum) at all; God encompasses what they do (ya‘malūn, or may be read ta‘malūn, ‘what you do’), He has knowledge of it and will requite them for it.