وَأَنَّهُ كَانَ يَقُولُ سَفِيهُنَا عَلَى اللَّهِ شَطَطًا
The structure kāna + imperfect conveys in Arabic a habit continuing in the past. Not a single event; a repeated, settled behaviour. The function of the English "used to".
That is, what is related is not an accident but an arrangement: this was being said, it was being repeated, it was in circulation.
The root س-ف-ه was taken up in al-Baqara, in the discussion of 2/13. The finding there was this: the concrete sense of the root is lightness — being light on the scale, having no weight; a safīh is one whose mind is light, who cannot govern himself. It was also recorded that the Qurʾān uses the word as a legal term for a person unable to manage his property (al-Nisāʾ 4/5). I do not repeat that analysis.
The fool is the exact opposite of rushd. In the preceding verse it was said that the Qurʾān guides to rushd. Rushd was a person's capacity to conduct his own affairs rightly — and in law a safīh is precisely the person who lacks that capacity. Al-Nisāʾ 4/5-6 already uses the two words side by side: do not hand over property to the foolish, hand it over if you perceive rushd.
So in two verses the jinn set up a contrast: the text they listened to takes them to rushd; what they had listened to before was a fool. Two sources of knowledge, two results.
The matter of who it is. In the classical commentaries it is widely said that this word means Iblīs. There is a ground for this: the Qurʾān says plainly that Iblīs was of the jinn ("Iblīs was of the jinn, and he departed from his Lord's command" — al-Kahf 18/50). Another view is that there was among the jinn a party, or a leader, who ascribed descent to God.
The Qurʾān does not answer this question and neither do I. The verse names nobody; it leaves the word definite and the identity indeterminate. This is a choice often seen in the Qurʾān: not the person but the position is named.
The sentence does not say "there was a fool"; it says "one of us". That is, the jinn locate the source of the false word inside their own community. They do not cast it outside, do not lay it on an enemy, do not attach it to an unknown cause.
This is the hardest finding a community can make about itself: the corrupt idea did not come to us from outside, it came out from among us. And this is exactly what the jinn do throughout this first half of the sūra — in verse 5 they will enumerate their own suppositions, in verse 11 their own divisions, in 14-15 those among themselves who went astray.
The most concrete residue of the root is geographical: شَطّ (shaṭṭ) — the bank, the edge of a river; the outermost line where the water meets the land. From the same root shāṭṭ — a distant place. The image of the root, then, is an edge: the place where a thing ends.
Shaṭaṭ is to pass beyond that edge. The same picture as the English "to overstep the bound" — a bound too is a limit.
The other occurrence of the root in the Qurʾān is in Sūrat Ṣād: the litigants who come to David say, "judge between us with truth and do not act unjustly (lā tushṭiṭ)" (Ṣād 38/22). There too the word relates a going outside the measure.
The pattern of the word is meaningful too. Shaṭaṭan stands in the sentence as the object of the verb yaqūlu and is a verbal noun. So it is not "he used to say an outrageous word" but, in exact translation: "he used to say outrage about God." The utterance and its content have been identified; what is said is named directly "excess itself".
And note: the sentence does not say "he used to lie." The next verse will use the word kadhib (lie) — but the word used in this verse is shaṭaṭ. The difference between the two is this:
- A lie is to say the opposite of the truth knowingly; it is a charge about intent.
- Shaṭaṭ is to go outside the measure; it is a charge about measure.
That the error made in speaking about God should be named "overstepping the bound" fits the nature of the subject. For here the matter is most often not deliberate lying but losing the measure of the thing spoken about. A person who ascribes a consort and a child to God may not, in his own view, be inventing a lie; he is applying his own measures to something that has no bound.
The finding set up in the "what this says to the present" part of the section on al-Ikhlāṣ attaches exactly here: "to absolutise our own measures of justice, mercy and reasonableness and dress God in them… is to carve an idol whose material is the mind." The word of this verse is the name of that operation.