5. Al-Maaida

And you see those in whose hearts is sickness, weakness of faith, the like of ‘Abd Allāh b. Ubayy the hypocrite; vying with one another for them, to affiliate with them, saying, as an excuse for this: ‘We fear lest we suffer a turn of fortune’, which time will bring round against us, such as drought or defeat, and that if Muhammad’s affair should come to nothing, they will cease to supply us with provisions. God, exalted be He, says: But it may be that God will bring victory, by assisting His Prophet and making His religion prevail; or some commandment from Him, that will reveal the secrets of the hypocrites, disgracing them; and then they will end up, for what they kept secret within themselves, in the way of doubt and affiliating with disbelievers, remorseful.

And they say (read wa-yaqūlu, or just yaqūlu, to indicate a new [independent] sentence; or wa-yaqūla as a supplement to what follows), those who believe, to one another in amazement, when their secrets are revealed: ‘Are these the ones who swore by God their most earnest oaths, making the utmost effort thereby [to swear], that they were surely with you?, in religion. God, exalted be He, says: Their, good, works have failed, are invalid; and they have become, they have ended up as, the losers’, in this world, through ignominy, and in the Hereafter, through their punishment.

O you who believe, whoever of you apostatises (read either yartadid, with separation [of the two dāl letters], or yartadd, with assimilation [of one of the dāl letters with the other]), turns back, from his religion, to disbelief — this is a notification of what God knew would happen, for some of them apostatised upon the death of the Prophet (s) — God will assuredly bring, in their place, a people whom He loves and who love Him: the Prophet (s) said, ‘They are people like him’, and he pointed to Abū Mūsā al-Ash‘arī, as reported by al-Hākim [al-Naysābūrī] in his Sahīh; humble, sympathetic, towards believers, stern, severe, towards disbelievers, struggling in the way of God, and fearing not the reproach of any reproacher, therein, in the way that the hypocrites fear the reproach of the disbelievers. That, description mentioned, is God’s bounty; He gives it to whom He will; and God is Embracing, of abundant bounty, Knowing, of those who deserve it.

When [‘Abd Allāh] Ibn Salām said, ‘O Messenger of God, our people have shunned us’, the following was revealed: Your patron is God only, and His Messenger, and the believers who establish prayer and pay the alms, bowing down, humble, or performing voluntary prayers.

Whoever affiliates to God and His Messenger and the believers, He will help them and assist them; for verily the party of God, they are the victors, because of His assistance to them (He has made this [hizb Allāh, ‘the party of God’] to fall in the place of [an implied] fa-innahum, ‘for verily they’, as an explication, since they belong to His party, that is, [they] His followers).

O you who believe, do not take as patrons those who take your religion in mockery, [as something] to be mocked, and as a game, from among (min is explicative) those who were given the Scripture before you and [from among] the disbelievers (read al-kuffāri or al-kuffāra), the idolaters — and fear God, by refraining from affiliating with them, if you are believers, [if you are] truthful in your faith.

And, those who, when you make the call to prayer, take it, that is, the prayer, in mockery and as a game, mocking it and laughing at it among themselves; that, [mocking] attitude, is because they are a people who do not understand.

The following was revealed when the Jews said to the Prophet (s), ‘Whom among the messengers do you believe in?’, and he replied: in God and in that which has been revealed to us [Q. 2:136], and when he mentioned Jesus they said, ‘We know of no religion worse than yours!’ Say: ‘O People of the Scripture, do you spite, [do] you repudiate, us for any other cause than that we believe in God, and what has been revealed to us, and what was revealed, to the prophets, before, and that most of you are wicked?’ (wa-anna aktharakum fāsiqūn is a supplement to an āmannā, ‘that we believe’), that is to say, ‘What you repudiate, in fact, is our faith and your opposition [to it], in refusing to accept it — [a refusal] which is described as ‘wickedness’, [this wickedness] itself being the necessary consequence of such [a refusal] — but in fact this [faith of ours] is not something to be repudiated’.

Say: ‘Shall I tell you, [shall] I inform you, of what is worse than, the followers of, that, about which you are spiteful, by way of reward, requital, from God? They are, those whom God has cursed, [whom] He has removed from His mercy, and with whom He is wroth, and some of whom He has turned into apes and swine, by transformation, and, those who, worship the false deity, Satan, by obeying him (the particle minhum, ‘some of whom’, takes into account the [potentially plural] import of the particle min, ‘[those] whom’, and in what precedes [minhum, ‘some of whom’], the [singular] form [of min is taken into account]; a variant reading has ‘abuda al-tāghūt as [the genitive of] an annexation, ‘abud being a [variant] plural of ‘abd; the accusative ending [of ‘abuda] is because the clause is a supplement to al-qirada, ‘apes’), and these were the Jews. They are worse situated (makānan is for specification), for their abode shall be the Fire, and further astray from the even way’, from the path of truth (al-sawā’ originally means al-wasat, ‘middle’); the use of sharrun, ‘worse’, and adallu, ‘further astray’, is intended to counter their saying, ‘We know of no religion worse [sharrun] than yours’.