al-Baqara 2:7

Khatama'llāhu ʿalā qulūbihim wa ʿalā samʿihim, wa ʿalā abṣārihim ghishāwah, wa lahum ʿadhābun ʿaẓīm "God has sealed their hearts and their hearing; and over their eyes there is a covering. For them there is a great punishment."

Root kh-t-m: to come to the end of a thing, and to set a seal. From the same root comes khātam — a signet ring; and this is also the word in khātam al-nabiyyīn, used of the Prophet.

A seal does two things: it closes and it confirms. When an envelope is sealed it both becomes impossible to enter and is declared to have its contents settled. The use here carries both: the situation has been closed and registered.

There is a detail in the grammar of the verse that is lost in most translations. The sentence divides thus:

• The heart and the hearing → khatm (sealing). Both are attached to the same verb.
• The eye → ghishāwa (a covering). This is a separate sentence: "over their eyes there is a covering."

Two different operations, two different weights. The seal is lasting and closes from within; the covering is a cloth drawn over the top — lighter, giving the impression that it could be lifted. There is a logic in the order too: the centre is the heart, and that is where it begins; the ear is the channel nearest to it; the eye is the outermost.

An observation about the language: in the verse "samʿ" (hearing) comes singular and "abṣār" (eyes) plural. This is a consistent pattern across the Qurʾān — hearing is almost always singular, seeing always plural. The explanation the classical exegetes give for it is this: hearing is of one kind, everyone in the same place hears the same sound; seeing varies, each person looks in a different direction and sees from a different angle. In hearing there is unity, in seeing multiplicity.

This verse stands at the centre of one of the heaviest debates in the exegesis of the Qurʾān, and it cannot be passed over. The question is this: if God has sealed the heart, how can that person be held responsible?

The key to the answer is in the order. Elsewhere the Qurʾān recounts this sealing not on its own but together with a cause, and it gives the sequence plainly:

• "God sealed their hearts because of their unbelief" (al-Nisāʾ 4/155). The seal is the consequence, the cause is the unbelief.
• "When they swerved, God made their hearts swerve" (al-Ṣaff 61/5). Their straying first, then its requital.
• "No! What they were doing has laid rust over their hearts" (al-Muṭaffifīn 83/14). Rust is not something applied from outside; it arises from the metal's own reaction.

The seal, then, is not a barrier placed in front of a person's choice, but a locking that comes as the consequence of choice. A person covers first; as the covering is repeated the cover thickens; in the end the possibility of return is effectively closed. The Qurʾān attributes this last stage to God, because it is He who creates outcomes.

And this is something observable. That repeated choices become character, and that character in time becomes unalterable, is one of the most familiar of human experiences. The longer a habit lasts, the harder it is to leave; the more a stance is defended, the more impossible it becomes to turn back from it — because turning back now means declaring the whole of one's past wrong. The locking the verse describes looks at the same place as this well-known mechanism of moral life.

The theological debate. The great dispute that runs through this verse — who creates a person's acts, how much power of choice a person has — is among the fundamental divisions between the Muʿtazila and Ahl al-Sunna, and it went on for centuries. The Muʿtazila gave priority to preserving the independence of the human will, the Ashʿarī line to preserving the dependence of everything on God's power; the Māturīdī line looks for a way between the two. I take no side in this commentary; but this has to be said: none of the parties held that the human being is without responsibility. The dispute is about how responsibility is established, not about whether it exists.