قُلْ يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنِّى رَسُولُ ٱللَّهِ إِلَيْكُمْ جَمِيعًا
Qul yā ayyuha'n-nāsu innī rasūlu'llāhi ilaykum jamīʿan, alladhī lahū mulku's-samāwāti wa'l-arḍ, lā ilāha illā huwa yuḥyī wa yumīt, fa-āminū bi'llāhi wa rasūlihi'n-nabiyyi'l-ummiyyi'lladhī yuʾminu bi'llāhi wa kalimātihī wa'ttabiʿūhu laʿallakum tahtadūn
"Say: 'O people! I am the messenger of God to you all — of Him to whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. There is no god but He; He gives life and gives death. So believe in God and in His messenger, the unlettered prophet who believes in God and in His words, and follow him, that you may be guided.'"
A point of word order must be recorded, and this is the sharpest transition in the Moses block: up to the end of the hundred and fifty-seventh verse the telling was in the third person; the hundred and fifty-eighth passes with a command qul (say) directly into address.
| Earlier addresses in the sūra | Scope |
|---|---|
| Yā banī Ādam (26, 27, 31, 35) | The human race |
| Yā qawmi (59, 65, 73, 85, 79, 93) | A particular people |
| 158: Yā ayyuha'n-nāsu … ilaykum jamīʿā | Everyone, without distinction |
And the word jamīʿan reinforces this qualification further. This is a datum that can be read from the text.
And that this verse is set inside the Moses block is worth recording. I give this as my own reading and it is not binding; its ground is the place of the verse and the sentence before it: the hundred and fifty-seventh verse was speaking of a group within a community; the hundred and fifty-eighth opens the addressee out to all people. That is, the sūra passes from a narrow ring to a wide one, and does so in the middle of a story.
The exegetes disagree about what the word means in this phrase, and I give the disagreement in a table:
| Reading | What ummī means | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One who cannot read or write | The tying of the root to the sense "remaining in the state in which he was born"; and al-ʿAnkabūt 29/48, wa mā kunta tatlū min qablihī min kitābin wa lā takhuṭṭuhū bi-yamīnik |
| 2 | One belonging to a community to which no Book had come before | The use of the word ummiyyīn in the Qurʾān for those who are not people of a Book (Āl ʿImrān 3/20, 3/75) |
| 3 | One of the people of Mecca — with reference to the phrase Ummu'l-qurā (al-Anʿām 6/92) | That the name of the city is from the same root |
All three explanations are transmitted; they do not exclude one another. I do not impose a preference.
A point of word order must be recorded: the messenger who is to be followed is described as himself one who believes.
I record this as an observation, and its ground is the relative clause: the sentence does not put the messenger in a position apart from the addressee; the same act (belief) is ascribed to him too.
And this connects with the objection in the sixty-third and sixty-ninth verses of the sūra: there it was thought strange that what came should come through rajulun minkum (a man from among yourselves). The hundred and fifty-eighth verse describes the messenger in exactly that position.