بَلْ عَجِبُوٓا۟ أَن جَآءَهُم مُّنذِرٌ مِّنْهُمْ فَقَالَ ٱلْكَٰفِرُونَ هَٰذَا شَىْءٌ عَجِيبٌ
"But they were astonished that a warner came to them from among themselves. And those who denied said: this is an astonishing thing."
In Arabic bal (بل) is a particle of iḍrāb: leaving the previous clause and passing to something else. It works in two ways — either it cancels what preceded, or it leaves what preceded and jumps to the real matter.
Here it is the second. An oath was sworn, its answer was not given, and with bal the subject shifts all at once to the state of the other side. The effect is this: the text does not set about defending its own claim; it takes the objection itself as its subject.
And note: bal comes twice in a row in this sūra — in verse 2 (bal ʿajibū) and in verse 5 (bal kadhdhabū). Both do the same work: putting the real name to the objection. First "they were astonished", then "they denied". The second bal rises above the first as well.
Its concrete sense: a thing's bringing a person to a halt because its cause is not known. The lexicographers describe ʿajab as "the state the soul feels before something whose cause is not known". Astonishment, that is, is a halting that arises from not knowing.
- عَجِيب — the thing wondered at.
- عُجَاب — wondered at still more; an intensive form. In the Qurʾān: "This is truly an astonishing thing" (Ṣād 38/5).
- أُعْجُوبَة — an astounding event.
- إِعْجَاب — a thing's pleasing someone; and self-admiration (uʿjiba bi-nafsihī).
- إِعْجَاز — is from a different root (ع-ج-ز); the two must not be confused.
The most instructive side of the root is this double use: the same root carries both "to be astonished" and "to be pleased". What links them is that in both a person loses hold of himself before something — in one case in a negative direction, in the other in a positive one.
In the treatment of al-Jinn this occurrence of the root was already mentioned, and the comparison made there is worth attention: in Sūrat al-Jinn the jinn hear the Qurʾān and say "qurʾānan ʿajabā"; the Meccans, with the same root, say "hādhā shayʾun ʿajīb". The same word, two opposite outcomes. The finding in the treatment of al-Jinn was this: the word is the same, the verb that follows it is different — one believed, the other denied.
In transmitting the objection of the other side the verse transmits no proof. What it transmits is a reaction: they were astonished, and they said "an astonishing thing".
| A proof | Astonishment | |
|---|---|---|
| What it rests on | A premise | Habit |
| Can it be argued with | Yes — the premise can be tested | No — there is nothing to test |
| What it says | "It cannot be, for this reason" | "There is no such thing" |
| Can it be falsified | Yes | Not on its own |
Astonishment has no probative value, because astonishment is a measure not of knowledge but of familiarity. A person is astonished at what he is not used to. And habit says nothing whatever about whether a thing is possible.
And because the sūra knows this, it does not answer with a proof. What it will do from the sixth verse on is to call the addressee to look at the things he sees every day — that is, to step into the field of the familiar and show how astonishing the familiar thing actually is.
I record this as my own reading, but its support is the text's own arrangement: the objection is named "astonishment", and the answer is given by "looking". Both belong to the same field of sense.
| View | What the astonishment is at | Ground |
|---|---|---|
| At the warner's coming | At a prophet's having been sent at all | This is the primary sense of the expression an jāʾahum mundhir |
| At the warner's being one of them | Not an angel, but a person they knew | The qualification minhum has been set down deliberately; the Qurʾān transmits this objection explicitly elsewhere |
| At the content of the warning | At the resurrection; verse 3 opens this out | Verse 3 is directly an objection to the resurrection |
The three do not exclude one another, and the arrangement of the verse seems to give all three in order: he came → from among us → and he says this (verse 3).
مُنذِر — root ن-ذ-ر. This root was treated in a number of sections (al-Mulk, Nūḥ, al-Muddaththir, al-Mursalāt); I do not repeat it. Its summary: indhār is to give notice of an approaching danger in time; the root also contains nadhr (a vow — a word pledged in advance), so the idea of being beforehand stands at the centre of the root.
مِنْهُمْ — "from among them". The word carries the heaviest weight of the verse. That the warner is from the same community is something the Qurʾān stresses in many places, and it works in two directions: on the one hand it makes him intelligible (he speaks the same language, knows the same life), on the other it makes acceptance harder (what is familiar is not held in awe).
Something in the word order is striking. At the beginning of the sentence the subject is a pronoun: ʿajibū — "they were astonished". In the second clause an explicit noun comes: fa-qāla'l-kāfirūn.
The same people, that is, are named in two clauses by two different names: first an indefinite "they", then "those who deny".
This is a structure called in Arabic iẓhār fī maḥalli'l-iḍmār: bringing in the explicit noun where a pronoun would do. Its function is to bring forward the attribute that noun carries.
Its effect here is this: astonishment by itself is not denial; astonishment is a human reaction. But to turn astonishment into a verdict — to say "this is an astonishing thing" and close the matter — is something else. The verse names those who take the second step.
I give this as my own reading; its support is that the difference of naming between the two clauses stands in the text.