46/27-28 — The ruins nearby
"We destroyed the towns around you, and We turned the signs about and about in the telling — that they might return."
صَرَّفْنَا — root ص-ر-ف: to turn, to revolve, to change the direction of. Form II here conveys repetition and variation: the same thing told by different routes, from different faces.
And once again the evidence is chosen from near at hand: mā ḥawlakum mina'l-qurā — "the towns around you". Not a distant history but ruins on the roadside.
| Verse | Where the evidence comes from |
|---|---|
| 46/4 | Observation and transmitted report — what is demanded |
| 46/15 | His own birth |
| 46/26 | His own senses |
| 46/27 | The ruins around him |
All four are within a person's reach. I record this as my own reading: throughout the sūra not one item of evidence is fetched from somewhere far from the one addressed.
فَلَوْلَا نَصَرَهُمُ ٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّخَذُوا۟ مِن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ قُرْبَانًا ءَالِهَةًۢ — "if only those gods they took, apart from God, as a means of nearness had helped them!"
قُرْبَان — root ق-ر-ب: nearness. The word means the thing by which nearness is sought. That is, the verse names the purpose of the things they took: to draw near.
بَلْ ضَلُّوا۟ عَنْهُمْ — "rather, they went astray from them." The picture set up in the fifth and sixth verses is completed here: the side called upon could not answer, and knew nothing of it; and now it is not there at all.
وَذَٰلِكَ إِفْكُهُمْ وَمَا كَانُوا۟ يَفْتَرُونَ — and the word إِفْك comes back. In the eleventh verse they had called the Qurʾān ifkun qadīm (an old fabrication). Seventeen verses later the sūra gives the same word back to them. This is a repetition that can be verified from the text.