إِن يَثْقَفُوكُمْ يَكُونُوا۟ لَكُمْ أَعْدَآءً وَيَبْسُطُوٓا۟ إِلَيْكُمْ أَيْدِيَهُمْ وَأَلْسِنَتَهُم بِٱلسُّوٓءِ وَوَدُّوا۟ لَوْ تَكْفُرُونَ
In yathqafūkum yakūnū lakum aʿdāʾan wa yabsuṭū ilaykum aydiyahum wa alsinatahum bi's-sūʾi wa waddū law takfurūn
"If they get you into their power they will be enemies to you; they will stretch out their hands and their tongues against you with evil, and they will wish that you should return to unbelief."
The first verse laid down the prohibition. This verse gives the ground. And the ground is not a description of a belief but a prediction of behaviour: a description of what they will do if they find the opportunity.
This already shows the method of the sūra. Throughout the sūra the measure will always be the deed — in the eighth verse this will be expressed as a principle. Here the negative side of the principle is at work: what is said about this particular group is not what they think but what they will do.
The root ث-ق-ف. The semantic field of the root looks scattered at first sight, but its centre is single: to catch a thing completely, to establish full mastery over it.
- ثَقِفَ الشَّىْءَ — he found and caught a thing, reached it and held it in his hand.
- تَثْقِيف الرُّمْح — to straighten a bent spear by clamping it in a tool. That is, both to grasp and to give shape.
- ثَقِف — a person quick to grasp, clever, capable.
- ثَقَافَة — in present-day Arabic, "culture". This sense of the word settled in the modern period; its link with the "straightening, training, shaping" in the root is plain.
The meaning of the verb here is not "if they meet you" but "if they get you into their hands": that is, a situation in which the upper hand has passed to them.
This caveat is important, because the verse sets up a conditional prediction. They are described not in their present state but in their state when power has come into their hands. The finding that a party's real attitude will be seen only when it has taken power into its own hands is one of the most realistic sentences of the sūra.
بَسَطَ — the root ب-س-ط: to spread, to open, to stretch out. From the same root come bisāṭ (a spread mat), basīṭ (spread out, simple), basṭ al-yad (the opening of the hand — used in the Qurʾān both for generosity and for violence).
The verb itself is neutral; what settles its direction is the caveat at the end: بِٱلسُّوٓءِ — "with evil". The same verb occurs positively in the Qurʾān as well: "do not open your hand altogether" (al-Isrāʾ 17/29) — there it is a matter of spending.
Hand and tongue are named together. The mention of this pair covers the two forms of harm: deed and word. By placing the second beside the first, the verse puts harm done by speech into the same sentence as harm done in fact.
And the order is striking: the hand first, the tongue after. As a classical observation this can be said: the stretching out of the hand requires a set of conditions (nearness, power, opportunity); the stretching out of the tongue requires no condition at all. For this reason the stretching out of the tongue is more widespread and more continuous. The verse does not equate the two, but it counts both.
سُوٓء — the root س-و-أ: to be bad, to become ugly. From the same root come sayyiʾa (an evil deed) and — strikingly — sawʾa (the part that must be covered). At the centre of the root there is the idea of "what is not pleasant to see".
It was pointed to above at the first verse; here it is completed. The verb وَدُّوا۟ is from the same root as مَوَدَّة in the first verse: و-د-د.
| 60/1 | 60/2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Word | مَوَدَّة (mawadda) | وَدُّوا۟ (waddū) |
| Who | The believers | The other side |
| Direction | Towards them | Towards the believers |
| Content | Closeness, wanting good | Wanting them to return to unbelief |
That the same root should be used in two verses in two directions is no accident. The sūra is describing an affection that is not returned — and by naming the other side's "wanting" with the same word, it shows into what kind of place the thing the believer sends falls.
And recall the double sense of the root: و-د-د means both "to love" and "to want, to wish". In the first verse the love side of the meaning comes forward, in the second the wanting side. That is, the sūra uses both faces of the word.
لَوْ تَكْفُرُونَ — here the particle law, after the verb wadda, is an established pattern in the Qurʾān and carries the sense "would that…": "would that you returned to unbelief". The verb is imperfect; that is, what is wanted is not an event left in the past but a wish that is going on.
And the content of the wish is striking: they want not to kill you but that you should lose your faith. The verse defines the other side's aim not as physical but as a matter of belief. This definition looks to the same place as the ground given in the first verse (the cause of the driving out: faith). The subject of the conflict has been the same from the start: faith.