وَلَا تَكُونُوا۟ كَٱلَّذِينَ نَسُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ فَأَنسَىٰهُمْ أَنفُسَهُمْ أُو۟لَٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْفَٰسِقُونَ
"And do not be like those who forgot God, so that He made them forget themselves. It is they who are the ones gone out of bounds."
The eighteenth verse was built with nafsun: let a soul look. The nineteenth verse closes with anfusahum: He made them forget themselves.
| Verse | Word | Verb | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | nafsun | ltanẓur (let it look) | A look towards the soul |
| 19 | anfusahum | ansāhum (He made them forget) | A moving away from the soul |
The two verses are the two ends of a single axis. And the command in the middle — "do not be like them" — says that there is a choice between these two ends.
1. To go out of the mind — forgetting that happens unwillingly. At al-Kahf 18/63, wa mā ansānīhu illa'l-shayṭān. 2. To abandon, to take no interest in — a deliberate leaving. In this use, forgetting is not a loss of knowledge but a breaking off of concern.
That the second sense is what is meant in this verse is widely stated in the classical commentaries, and the context supports it: forgetting in the first sense is not voluntary and so cannot be a ground of blame, whereas the verse sets up an open blame (ulāʾika humu'l-fāsiqūn).
That is, "to forget God" is not ignorance here. These people do not deny God's existence; they do not take Him into account. The knowledge stands; its function has been removed.
This diagnosis agrees exactly with the description of the hypocrites in the preceding section: in verse 13 too there was fear, but its ordering was broken; here too there is knowledge, but it has no effect.
The structure: nasū (Form I, transitive) → ansā (Form IV, causative). The same root enters the causative pattern at its second occurrence: they forgot → He made them forget.
That punishment should come from the same kind as the act is a weave often seen in the Qurʾān. But here the object changes, and this is the real point:
The expected symmetry would have been "and God forgot them" — and indeed at al-Tawba 9/67 exactly that pattern occurs (nasullāha fa-nasiyahum). Here, however, something else is being said.
And this takes the punishment out of being a requital and makes it a consequence. I record it as my own reading: a person who leaves off taking God into account also loses the most basic piece of knowledge about himself — what he is, where he came from, what he is going towards. For a person's description of himself cannot be set up independently of what he is bound to. He who leaves off the measure also becomes unable to know the thing he was measuring.
This finding is not openly in the wording of the verse; the verse reports not the mechanism but the outcome. The explanation above is my own interpretation and is not binding.
A link within the sūra: verse 18 said "let it look". The punishment set opposite the command to look is not the taking away of the faculty of sight but the disappearance of the object to be looked at. The person can still look; there is no "self" of his left to look at.
The root ف-س-ق. The concrete sense recorded by the lexicographers is this: the date's coming out of its skin. Fasaqati'l-ruṭabatu — the date split its skin and came out.
The description that comes out of this: fisq is a thing's going outside the boundary that encloses it. The word is not the name of a "sin" but the name of a position: the thing that ought to be inside being outside.
The second occurrence of the root in the sūra. The fifth verse had ended with wa li-yukhziya'l-fāsiqīn — in the matter of the cutting of the date palms. The root now returns, and this time it is used to warn those addressed.
The difference between the two occurrences is worth recording: in verse 5 fāsiqīn was the attribute of a community outside; here it is used while the believers are being told "do not be like them". That is, the attribute has been bound not to a group but to a state — whoever enters that state is included in it. This is the measure recorded again and again in this commentary.
And the structure of ḥaṣr: ulāʾika hum al-fāsiqūn — the pronoun of separation (ḍamīr al-faṣl) coming in between makes the ruling definite: "it is these who are really they".