al-Jinn 72:5

Wa annā ẓanannā an lan taqūla'l-insu wa'l-jinnu ʿala'llāhi kadhibā

"And that: we had supposed that human beings and jinn would never speak a lie about God."

This is one of the most unexpected sentences of the sūra, and it is generally passed over quickly. Having said in the preceding verse "our fool used to say outrageous things", the jinn explain why they believed him:

Because we had not thought that anyone could lie about God.

That is, the error arose not from ill intent but from an assumption. The assumption was: on this subject nobody invents.

Root ظ-ن. In Arabic this verb is used both in the sense "to suppose, to hold possible" and in the sense "to arrive at a firm conviction" — both uses are found in the Qurʾān (in the section on al-Inshiqāq the two ends of the root were taken up: those who know for certain that they will meet Him, and those who suppose that they will not return).

The sense here is closer to the "certain supposition" end of the word: the jinn speak not of a possibility but of a settled acceptance. This increases the weight of the sentence — it was an unquestioned acceptance.

The verb occurs three times in the sūra: 5, 7, 12. And the subject of the three differs:

That is, the sūra uses the same verb three times and yields three separate results. A supposition is of itself neither true nor false; it depends on what it is directed at. The only supposition of the jinn that turned out true is the one about their own powerlessness.

The two kinds are named side by side, and the human being is put first.

This pair occurs often in the Qurʾān and the order is generally jinn first ("O company of jinn and human beings" — al-Anʿām 6/130, and many times in Sūrat al-Raḥmān). In the last verse of Sūrat al-Nās too the order is al-jinnati wa'n-nās, and in that section the point of that order was taken up.

Here the order is reversed: the human being first. Since the speakers are the jinn this is natural — they put themselves last. But the result is this: they include themselves too in the list under charge. They do not say "we supposed human beings do not lie"; they say "human beings and jinn".

The sentence, then, is not an accusation but a diagnosis. What was wrong was not "trusting human beings"; it was assuming that nobody at all would invent on this subject.

Root ك-ذ-ب: to give a report that does not correspond to reality. In the Qurʾān it occurs most often in the takdhīb (denial) pattern.

The word's position here becomes clear when compared with the preceding one: in verse 4 there was shaṭaṭ (overstepping the bound), here kadhib (a lie). In the first sentence the jinn say what the act was, in the second what that act actually was — as they came to understand it afterwards.

The order, then, is: our fool used to say outrageous things → and we supposed nobody would lie on this subject → so what was said must have been a lie. The concluding sentence is not written; the reader is expected to frame it.

This is the central matter of the verse and it needs to be expressed with care.

The error the jinn relate is not ill intent. Had it been ill intent the problem would be simple. What they relate is this: on a certain subject, because of the seriousness of that subject, they assumed nobody would invent.

This assumption is reasonable in itself and works most of the time in daily life. People speak more carefully on serious subjects; seriousness forms a kind of natural filter. What the jinn did was to trust that filter.

And the verse says the filter did not work. The greatness of a subject does not guarantee the truth of what is said about it. On the contrary: the greater the subject, the harder it is to verify; and in a field that is hard to verify the cost of inventing goes down.

This bears directly on the sūra's concern with knowledge. Here the jinn are telling the story of unchecked trust in a source of knowledge. And the sūra offers an alternative: in verses 1-2 the jinn listened to the text they heard, saw what it does, and then accepted. In the old error they relate here there is only acceptance — the stages of listening and assessing are absent.

First: the sentence "nobody would invent on this subject" is still the most productive opening. The more serious a field, the fewer questions are asked of what is said there. Health, law, religion, security, science — what these fields have in common is that they are both vital and not directly checkable. And precisely this combination leads to what is said in those fields receiving a privileged trust. This is the error the verse records.

Second: the name of the error is not "believing a liar" but "not reckoning with the possibility of a lie". These are not the same thing. The first is a deception, the second a lack of method. The jinn describe their own error in the second way — a harder and more honest description.

Third: the position of those who say this. Those who make this confession are a community that has believed in something new. So the place the sentence comes from is this: we believed in something, and at the same moment we understood why we had believed the wrong thing before. Faith has become a lens explaining a past acceptance. This is the common ground of all the confessions in the first half of the sūra: accepting and giving an account happen at the same moment.