وَعْدَ ٱللَّهِ لَا يُخْلِفُ ٱللَّهُ وَعْدَهُۥ وَلَٰكِنَّ أَكْثَرَ ٱلنَّاسِ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ · يَعْلَمُونَ ظَٰهِرًا مِّنَ ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنْيَا وَهُمْ عَنِ ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ هُمْ غَٰفِلُونَ
Waʿda'llāh, lā yukhlifu'llāhu waʿdahu wa lākinna akthara'n-nāsi lā yaʿlamūn · Yaʿlamūna ẓāhiran mina'l-ḥayāti'd-dunyā wa hum ʿani'l-ākhirati hum ghāfilūn
"It is the promise of God. God does not go back on His promise; but most people do not know. They know the outside of the life of this world; of the hereafter they are heedless."
The sixth verse ends with lā yaʿlamūn (they do not know). The seventh verse begins with yaʿlamūna (they know).
The same verb, negative and positive, one after the other. And this is not a contradiction — it is a description.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the overlap between the end of the one verse and the beginning of the other: after saying "they do not know", the verse immediately says what they do know. That is: what is lacking is not knowledge but the depth of knowledge. The sentence describes not ignorance but a knowledge that has stopped where it stood.
ظَاهِر — root ظ-ه-ر: to appear, to come out into the open, to be on top. Ẓahr — the back, that is, the outer face and the upper side of a thing. The root will occur twice more in this sūra: tuẓhirūn (to enter upon the noon hour) in verse 18, and ẓahara'l-fasād (corruption has appeared) in verse 41. This is a repetition that can be verified from the text, and it will be tabulated at the end.
That the word comes indefinite must be recorded: ẓāhiran — "an outside". Not definite. And the particle min conveys the partitive: mina'l-ḥayāti'd-dunyā — a part of the life of this world.
That is, the sentence narrows twice: what is known is not the whole of the life of this world, and that part is in turn its outside.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is these two narrowings: the verse does not count the other side's knowledge as false — it counts it as incomplete and as having stayed outside. What they know is true; it is not complete.
The whole backbone of al-Jāthiya is a matter of knowledge, and the words for knowledge scattered across that sūra were tabulated there. This verse adds one more link to that table, and the difference must be recorded:
| Place | The name of the failing | The expression |
|---|---|---|
| al-Jāthiya 45/24 | Ẓann — judgement without knowledge | Mā lahum bi-dhālika min ʿilm, in hum illā yaẓunnūn |
| al-Jāthiya 45/32 | Confession — from their own mouths | In naẓunnu illā ẓannan wa mā naḥnu bi-mustayqinīn |
| Fuṣṣilat 41/23 | Ẓann as the cause of ruin | Ẓannukum … ardākum |
| al-Rūm 30/7 | Superficiality — there is knowledge, there is no depth to it | Yaʿlamūna ẓāhiran mina'l-ḥayāti'd-dunyā |
The difference can be verified and is worth recording: in al-Jāthiya the failing was ẓann — that is, a guess put in the place of knowledge. In al-Rūm the failing is not ẓann: the verb is plainly yaʿlamūn (they know). That is, al-Rūm describes a step above the failing described in al-Jāthiya: to judge not by guesswork but by a knowledge that is real yet has stayed on the surface.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the choice of the verb. And this accords with the structure of the sūra: in the second verse a historical event is announced — an event anyone can see. The sūra sets out from the start the difference between the visible face of that same event and the side of it that is announced.
غَٰفِلُون — root غ-ف-ل: to be unaware of something; and the attention's going elsewhere. The lexicographers record the concrete branch of the root as well: ghufl, a thing that has no mark on it — an unbranded animal, ground with no track across it. That is, heedlessness is the state in which the sign goes unread.
The choice of the word is worth recording, and I give this as an observation about the language: the backbone of the sūra is the word āya (sign). And the word chosen for the other side is a word that carries "the absence of a mark" in its root.
وَهُمْ عَنِ ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ هُمْ غَٰفِلُونَ — in the word order the pronoun hum occurs twice. In Arabic this repetition conveys emphasis (taʾkīd) and sets up a stress close to a restriction of the subject of the nominal sentence.