إِنَّكُمْ لَفِى قَوْلٍ مُّخْتَلِفٍ يُؤْفَكُ عَنْهُ مَنْ أُفِكَ
Innakum la-fī qawlin mukhtalif · Yuʾfaku ʿanhu man ufik "You are indeed in a contradictory word. Turned away from it is whoever has been turned."
مُخْتَلِف — from the root of ikhtilāf (خ-ل-ف), an active participle of the iftiʿāl form. The concrete sense of the root is to stay behind, to take another's place, to come after someone: khalafa (he stayed behind him), khalīfa (a successor), khilāf (the rear), mukhālafa (opposition).
Ikhtilāf passes from "being behind one another" to "not agreeing with one another". The Qurʾān names the succession of night and day with this root as well: ikhtilāfu'l-layli wa'l-nahār (al-Baqara 2/164) — there the sense is "coming one after the other", not contradiction.
Which sense here? Qawlin mukhtalif — "a word that does not hold together". And there are two readings:
| Reading | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Disagreement among themselves | Those addressed differing among themselves: one says "a poet", another "a soothsayer", another "a madman", another "tales of the ancients" |
| A person contradicting himself | The same person saying two things that do not hold together |
The first is the more widespread and agrees with what comes later in the sūra: in the fifty-second verse it will be recorded that earlier peoples said the same two things.
But the second finds support in the text too. The finding recorded in the section on al-Muddaththir for 74/18-25 looks exactly at this: it was shown there that the two grounds the man produced (siḥr / qawlu'l-bashar) contradicted each other — a word cannot be both magic and an ordinary human word. The same contradiction is in the fifty-second verse of this sūra: sāḥir (a magician) and majnūn (one whose mind is covered) cannot both be true at once, because magic is a skill and madness an incapacity.
The definition "a contradictory word", that is, is confirmed by an example within the sūra itself. The two readings do not exclude one another.
Root: أ-ف-ك. Its concrete sense: to turn a thing from its direction, to invert it, to divert it from where it ought to be.
The structure of the sentence is interesting: yuʾfaku ʿanhu man ufik — both verbs from the same root, both passive, and one imperfect, one perfect.
And the difference of tense sets up a sequence: the one who was turned in the past is being turned now. Today's turning away, that is, is not a new event; it is the continuation of a movement that began earlier.
| Reading | Sense |
|---|---|
| A statement of ruling | "From it only the one already turned is turned" — that is, turning away has a prior history |
| An imprecation / a censure | "Perish the one who is turned from it" — in keeping with the tone of the next verse (qutila'l-kharrāṣūn) |
The first is the more widespread. I do not impose a preference; but the first reading has a counterpart within the sūra: in the fifty-third verse it will be asked "did they enjoin this on one another?" — that is, it will be stressed that the same attitude has been repeated across generations.
To whom does the pronoun refer? ʿAnhu — "from it". Its antecedent is not stated. Three possibilities are transmitted in the classical sources: the Qurʾān, the Prophet, or the day of reckoning (the subject of the preceding sentence). It makes no great difference to the sense; all three are the object of the same turning away.