هُوَ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُمْ فَمِنكُمْ كَافِرٌ وَمِنكُم مُّؤْمِنٌ وَاللَّهُ بِمَا تَعْمَلُونَ بَصِيرٌ
"He is the one who created you. Then some of you are deniers, some of you are believers. And God sees what you do."
At first sight this verse looks like a plain statement of fact. It is not. It is the most compressed expression of one of the most debated matters in the Qurʾān — the relation between a person's act and his creation.
The difficulty is in the fāʾ. In Arabic the fāʾ can convey succession and cause. The sentence "He created, then some of you are deniers, some of you believers" says that the two states come after the creation. But after it in what sense? Merely in respect of time, or in respect of cause?
In the classical commentaries this is the direct field of the debate in kalām. I am not in a position here to relate all the parties in full, nor am I going to settle the dispute. What I can do is to show what the wording of the verse says and what it does not say.
What the verse does not say: the cause of the two states. In the sentence there is no jaʿalakum (He made you …); there is khalaqakum (He created you). And the two states are given not as the object of the creation but as a distribution among those created: minkum … wa minkum — "some of you … some of you".
This distinction is not small. The sentence does not say "He created you as deniers and believers". It says "He created you; among you there are deniers and believers too." The wording itself preserves the difference between these two sentences — and exegesis must not efface a difference that the wording preserves.
The link with al-Insān: two forks, in two different places
إِنَّا هَدَيْنَٰهُ ٱلسَّبِيلَ إِمَّا شَاكِرًا وَإِمَّا كَفُورًا "We showed him the way: he is either grateful or ungrateful." (al-Insān 76/3)
In that section the following were established, and I do not repeat them, I only recall them: the structure immā … wa immā conveys division (taqsīm), sets out two possibilities of equal weight and exhaustively, and leaves no third option; shākiran and kafūran are grammatically circumstantial accusatives. And a point recorded there holds here too: in the Qurʾān what is most often set opposite denial is not faith but gratitude; denial is at bottom a notion of ingratitude.
| al-Insān 76/3 | al-Taghābun 64/2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Before the fork | hadaynāhu'l-sabīl — the way was shown | khalaqakum — created |
| The words of the fork | immā … wa immā — possibility | minkum … wa minkum — distribution |
| Type of sentence | A circumstantial clause: a state of possibility | A nominal sentence: a state already realised |
| The pair of opposites | shākir / kafūr — the axis of gratitude | kāfir / muʾmin — the axis of faith |
| Time | Looks forward | Looks at the situation |
Al-Insān describes a possibility: the way was shown, you will be one of the two. Al-Taghābun, by contrast, records an actual picture: humankind was created, and at this moment there are two groups within it.
That is, one of them stands before the decision, the other looks at the result of the decision. The same duality, seen from two different times.
I write this as my own reading. I do not claim that there is a classical exegetical tradition binding the two verses together; the link has been drawn from the structure of the two texts.
This is striking, because the Qurʾān's habit is generally the reverse — the good is mentioned first. Indeed in al-Insān 76/3 too shākiran comes first.
In the classical commentaries several explanations are proposed for this order. I relate them, but I take none of them as certainly correct:
| Explanation | Its ground | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| It reports the majority | On that day most of the addressed body were in denial; the order is built according to the actual situation. | Reasonable, but drawn from history rather than from the text. |
| The verse-ending and the ordering of sound | There is a difference of phonetic weight between kāfirun and muʾmin; the arrangement may have been built for rhythm. | Weak: the verse-ending of the sentence is neither of the two, but baṣīr. |
| The flow of the sūra | The sūra will speak of the deniers in verses 5-7; the order announces what is to follow. | It has a ground within the text; this looks the most defensible explanation. |
| The heavier is mentioned first | In texts of warning what is dangerous is brought forward. | It can be said as a general tendency, not as a rule. |
And here I prefer to stop. Drawing meaning from word order is a legitimate method of Qurʾānic exegesis; but to draw a wisdom from every order makes the method unfalsifiable. Here we have four possibilities and no evidence that would make one of them certainly preferable to another. I record the order; I leave the interpretation to the reader.
بَصِير — root ب ص ر: to see, and beyond seeing, to distinguish, to grasp. The analysis of this root was done in al-Mulk (in connection with the chain 67/3-4, 19, 23); I do not repeat it here.
The function of the verse-ending here is this: the verse named two groups — kāfir and muʾmin. These two names are names that people stick on one another all too easily. And immediately after the naming, the verse says to whom the authority of seeing belongs: wa'llāhu bimā taʿmalūna baṣīr.
That is, the classification was made, but the authority to apply the classification was not given to the one addressed.
And note: the sentence does not say "God sees what you are"; it says "He sees what you do" — bimā taʿmalūn. The measure has been tied to deed. This is another face of the point treated in al-Māʿūn as the whole backbone of that sūra: the evidence of belief is laid down as deed.