وَلَا أَنتُمْ عَابِدُونَ مَا أَعْبُدُ
In this verse the grammatical structure differs from the one before, and the difference passes into English only with difficulty.
- Verse 2: lā aʿbudu — a verb. "I do not serve."
- Verse 3: lā antum ʿābidūna — a nominal sentence (subject + predicate), the predicate being an active participle. Word for word: "you are not ones who serve."
In English it is possible to render both as "you do not serve", and most translations do. But this makes the whole structure of the sūra invisible.
What the nominal sentence conveys: fixity and continuance. In Arabic a nominal sentence expresses not the occurrence of an event but the stability of a state. A verbal sentence says "he is doing"; a nominal sentence says "he is one who does". The second touches the person's attribute.
The active participle reinforces this. ʿĀbid means "a person who serves" — it qualifies not the act but the agent. Negated: "you are not of the serving kind", "you have no such attribute".
For this reason a more accurate English rendering of the verse is: "You are not people who will serve what I serve." It negates not an event but a disposition.
The verse also invalidates the second half of the offer. Quraysh had said "we too will serve your god". The sūra does not accept this — and the ground of the refusal is interesting: it says that they will not serve God.
At first sight this is strange, because the Meccan mushrikūn did not deny God. The Qurʾān records this in several places: when they were asked who created the heavens and the earth, they said "God" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/61-63). They also defended their worship of intermediaries with the reason "so that they may bring us near to God" (al-Zumar 39/3).
What the verse says is this: a worship with partners is not worship of God. A God accepted as a member of the pantheon is not the God described by Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ. That is, even if the mushrikūn were to "serve God" for a year, the thing they served — within the logic of the offer — would be something else. The sūra states that even if the offer were carried out there would be no service there at all.