تَحْرِيف
"Do you hope that they will believe you? A group of them used to hear the word of God and then, after they had understood it well, distort it knowingly."
The root حرف: an edge, a tip, a border. Not the middle of a thing but its margin. From the same root come ḥarf (the smallest unit of writing) and inḥirāf (swerving from the road). Elsewhere the Qurʾān uses this word very concretely: "Among the people is one who serves God upon an edge (ʿalā ḥarfin)" (al-Ḥajj 22/11) — that is, standing not at the centre of it but at its margin.
On this, taḥrīf is, in the word's own logic: to bend a thing from its edge. Not to tear the text down the middle; to draw it slightly aside from its margin, to shift its direction. A small crookedness produces a great deviation further off.
| What is done | How it is detected | |
|---|---|---|
| Distortion of the wording | The text itself is altered | It can be seen by comparing copies |
| Distortion of the meaning | The text stays, its interpretation is shifted | Far harder to see |
The second is the more widespread and the more dangerous, because it leaves no trace at all. The text stands there; what has changed is the ruling drawn from it.
مِنۢ بَعْدِ مَا عَقَلُوهُ — "after they had understood it well". The verse records this deliberately. The verb is from the root ʿ-q-l — as we saw at verse 44, "to bind". They understood, they grasped, they made the connection; and then they bent it.
This is a place where the definition set up in the sixth verse of the sūra works once more: the issue is not ignorance but what is done with what is known.