2/99-100 — Clear signs and the covenant thrown aside
"We have sent down to you clear signs; none reject them but the transgressors. Is it not so that whenever they made a covenant, a group of them threw it aside? Indeed most of them do not believe."
These two verses look as though they were placed in between, closing the previous section (enmity towards an angel) and passing to the next (sorcery and Solomon). In fact they are the link joining the two: they record the groundlessness of the objection and the fact that it is not new.
The concrete sense of the root ف-س-ق has been treated at several points in this commentary — at verse 26 of the sūra and in the discussions of al-Ḥadīd and al-Ḥujurāt: a date's coming out of its skin, that is, overflowing its own vessel. I do not repeat it.
The word's place here is striking. The sentence does not call those who reject the signs "those who do not know" or "those who do not understand"; it calls them those who have come out of their skin. The cause of the rejection, that is, is not a lack of knowledge but an overstepping of the boundary one stands in.
This continues the finding built up from the beginning of the section: at verse 89 "though they recognised it", at verse 90 "out of envy", at verse 91 "we believe in what was sent down to us" — in all of them the rejection is given not as a problem of knowledge but as a problem of position.
The pattern of the sentence reinforces this too: mā… illā — in Arabic this is the style of qaṣr (restriction). First there is a general negation, then a single exception is left. Not "those who reject them are generally transgressors"; but "none reject them but the transgressors."
نَبَذَ — root ن-ب-ذ. This root was treated in the discussion of al-Humaza (104/4); I do not repeat it. The summary of the finding there was this: nabdh is to throw a thing away because one counts it worthless — not every throwing is nabdh; nabdh is the counting of the thing thrown as useless.
The choice of word matters for that reason. The covenant is not broken, not transgressed, not forgotten — it is thrown away. The verb carries within it the value placed on the contract.
The same root is used of this community once more in the Qurʾān, and even more concretely: "they threw it behind their backs" (Āl ʿImrān 3/187). There the act of throwing acquires a direction as well: backwards, to the side that is not seen.
كُلَّمَا — "whenever". The word takes the event out of being a single occurrence and makes it a repeated pattern. That the question comes in the form of a question (a-wa kullamā) reinforces this: no answer is expected, something known is being recalled.
| Verse | What is said about the covenant |
|---|---|
| 2/27 | Those who break God's covenant after making it firm |
| 2/40 | "Fulfil My covenant and I shall fulfil yours" |
| 2/83-84 | A covenant in seven items had been taken |
| 2/100 | At every covenant a group has thrown it aside |
| 2/124 | "My covenant does not reach the wrongdoers" |
Five occurrences draw a course: the covenant is taken, its keeping is asked for, it is thrown away — and finally it is said whom the covenant will not reach.
Two clauses stand side by side, and both are limiting: the ones who throw it are a group, the ones who do not believe are most of them. The ruling, that is, is not passed wholesale.
This is the sūra's general scrupulousness in language, and it is seen elsewhere too: "a group of them" (2/75), "most of them" (2/109), "they are not all alike" (Āl ʿImrān 3/113). The text builds what it describes by way of attributes; it does not close it over a whole community.
That this distinction is preserved here in particular is meaningful: the rest of the sentence is extremely hard — "at every covenant", "most of them do not believe". Even inside the hardness the distinction is preserved.