وَيْلٌ لِّكُلِّ أَفَّاكٍ أَثِيمٍ · يَسْمَعُ ءَايَٰتِ ٱللَّهِ تُتْلَىٰ عَلَيْهِ ثُمَّ يُصِرُّ مُسْتَكْبِرًا كَأَن لَّمْ يَسْمَعْهَا
Waylun li-kulli affākin athīm · Yasmaʿu āyāti'llāhi tutlā ʿalayhi thumma yuṣirru mustakbiran ka-an lam yasmaʿhā
"Woe to every fabricator of lies, every one sunk in sin! He hears the signs of God being recited to him, and then persists in arrogance as though he had not heard them at all."
At the centre of the verse there is a contradiction, and it is set out openly: yasmaʿu (he hears) … ka-an lam yasmaʿhā (as though he had not heard them).
The issue, then, is not that the sound fails to arrive. It arrives; then something happens. That something is named with two words:
The root ص-ر-ر was analysed in al-Wāqiʿa at 56/46 (to tie, to knot; ṣurra — a purse tied at the mouth; a sound that continues without a break). I do not repeat it here.
The comparison with the sequence in al-Wāqiʿa is worth recording: there the order was mutraf → persistence → speech — that is, abundance, resistance, denial. Here the order is hearing → persistence → self-magnification. The two sūras place the same act (iṣrār) at the centre, but one describes the cause and the other the moment.
أَفَّاك — root أ-ف-ك: to turn something from its direction, to overturn it. The word is on the faʿʿāl pattern: an intensive form — one who does it constantly and much. The root was treated in al-Aḥqāf at 46/11 and 46/28 (ifkun qadīm — ifkuhum).
وَإِذَا عَلِمَ مِنْ ءَايَٰتِنَا شَيْـًٔا ٱتَّخَذَهَا هُزُوًا — "and when he comes to know something of Our signs, he takes them in mockery."
This sentence is worth recording, because the verb is ʿalima — "he came to know". That is, the mockery does not come from ignorance; it comes after learning. The sūra's axis of knowledge appears here openly for the first time.