al-Baqara 2:76-77 — Behind a closed door

"When they meet those who believe they say 'we believe'. When they are alone with one another they say, 'Do you tell them what God has opened to you, so that they may argue against you with it before your Lord? Will you not use your reason?' Do they not know that God knows what they hide and what they make public?"

خَلَا — root خ-ل-و: to be emptied, to withdraw into privacy, to be left alone together. From the same root come khalwa (being alone) and khālī (empty). The picture in the verb is very concrete: the place empties, that is, third parties withdraw and only they themselves are left.

This pattern had occurred earlier in the sūra, with almost the same sentence structure:

The two verses set up the same structure: two settings, two sentences. The difference is in the content of what is said in the second setting. The hypocrites there declared their allegiance; here a piece of information management is being discussed.

And this resemblance is itself worth recording. The sūra thereby refrains from making hypocrisy peculiar to one group: the same pattern of behaviour is described for the community at the head of this section too. The measure looks not at who anyone is but at what is said when the door closes.

فَتَحَ — root ف-ت-ح: to open. The word's use here describes the knowledge given as an opening: what was closed has been opened and shown to them. The same root is used in the Qurʾān both for "to judge" (fattāḥ) and for "victory"; the shared idea is the opening of something closed.

The logic of the objection is this: the knowledge was opened to us, it belongs to us; to pass it to the other side is to give the other side a card they can play against us.

لِيُحَآجُّوكُم بِهِۦ عِندَ رَبِّكُمْ — "so that they may use it as an argument against you before your Lord?" The root ḥ-j-j — to bring a proof, to prevail in an argument; ḥujja is from the same root. What is feared, then, is not the spreading of the knowledge but the knowledge's becoming an argument against themselves.

The stance here must be read carefully. What is said is not "this knowledge is false". On the contrary, it is accepted as true — indeed it can only serve as an argument against them if it is true. The objection is not to its truth but to its being shared.

This stands in the same place as "clothing the truth in falsehood and concealing it knowingly" at verse 42 of the sūra; but it is a step beyond. There concealment was an act; here the ground of concealment is discussed and proposed to a group as good sense: a-fa-lā taʿqilūn — "will you not use your reason?"

I record this as my own reading: this is the heaviest detail in the sentence. Hiding knowledge is presented here not as a weakness or a cowardice but as intelligence. At verse 44 of the sūra the word for reason had occurred in such a place too — there those who forget themselves were asked "will you not use your reason?" The same question comes here, turned inside out, from the mouths of those who defend concealment.

The answer of verse 77 is short, and it voids the whole calculation.

سِرّ — root س-ر-ر: to hide, to hold within. إِعْلَان — root ع-ل-ن: to bring out into the open, to announce.

The two words form a pair and often come side by side in the Qurʾān. What they do is this: they leave no third field between them. Every word spoken is either hidden or open; both belong to the same knowledge.

This is the continuation of the same principle as wa'llāhu mukhrijun mā kuntum taktumūn at verse 72. There what was hidden was a murder, here what is hidden is a piece of knowledge. In both the verse says not that concealment is technically impossible but that it produces no result: what is hidden can be hidden, but it cannot stay outside the reckoning.

And its link with the subject of the section is plain. At verse 75 the bending of the text is recounted, at verse 78 the not knowing of the text, at verse 79 the fabricating of the text. These two verses give the link in between: the hiding of the text.