لَقَدْ حَقَّ ٱلْقَوْلُ عَلَىٰٓ أَكْثَرِهِمْ فَهُمْ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ
The concrete sense of the root: a thing's settling into its place, coming to pass, becoming fixed. For ḥaqqa'l-amru the lexicographers give the definition "the matter became settled, became unavoidable". The root was analysed at length in al-Ḥāqqa; I do not repeat that record here.
It comes definite (al-), that is, a word whose identity is known. In the classical commentaries it is said that this is the sentence announced beforehand concerning those who persist in denial. The Qurʾān uses this pattern elsewhere too: at Fuṣṣilat 41/25, wa ḥaqqa ʿalayhimu'l-qawl — treated there in Fuṣṣilat.
In Arabic the fāʾ announces consequence and sequence. The sentence is built in this order: the word came true → they do not believe.
| Reading | Order | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The word is the cause, the unbelief the consequence | They do not believe because the sentence has been passed |
| 2 | The fāʾ here announces not consequence but explanation | Their not believing is the mark that the word has come true |
I do not impose a preference. But two data internal to the text must be recorded, and both can be verified:
1. The verse says aktharihim (most of them) — not all of them. The sentence, then, has not been passed on the whole body. In the next block (11) the person on whom the warning does work will be described. The door has been left open. 2. The same root and the same word return in the seventieth verse: wa yaḥiqqa'l-qawlu ʿala'l-kāfirīn — and there the verb is not in the perfect but in the imperfect (muḍāriʿ, future or ongoing). The word, then, is named in the seventh verse as having come true and in the seventieth as coming true.
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is these two data: the sūra says that a group has closed, but it gives that closing not as a declaration of destiny but as a statement of consequence — because it names the same word at the end of the sūra as a process still at work, and in between it describes whom the warning reaches.
And with this verse block II opens. The next two verses will be the description of the sentence "they do not believe".