ٱلَّذِى هُمْ فِيهِ مُخْتَلِفُونَ
Root: خ-ل-ف. The original sense of the root is to be behind, to come after. The derivatives show the concreteness of the root:
- خَلْف — the back, what is behind. "What is before them and what is behind them" (al-Baqara 2/255).
- خَلِيفَة — a caliph; one who comes after another and takes his place. This word was treated in detail at al-Baqara 2/30.
- خِلَاف — remaining behind; and being at variance.
- إِخْلَاف — to break one's word; to fall behind the promise one has given.
- اِسْتِخْلَاف — to put someone in another's place.
اِخْتِلَاف is in Form VIII and its sense is this: to go behind one another, that is, not to walk on the same road, each to follow a different track.
This is a little different from what the English word "disagreement" covers. In English a disagreement is a failure to agree; in Arabic the picture the root gives is a parting of ways: a group of people are walking and some turn one way and some another, and the distance between them opens.
This concrete side of the word matters, because the outcome of disagreement is not a debate but a dispersal. And as has been recorded several times in this commentary (in detail in the section on al-Bayyina), the Qurʾān's harshest finding about disagreement is this: division most often comes not before the proof arrives but after it.
The verse says "about it"; the pronoun refers back to the nabaʾ of the preceding verse. The subject of the disagreement, then, is the great tidings.
And the disagreement over resurrection really was many-sided in Mecca. The responses the Qurʾān records are not of one type:
- Flat denial: "There is nothing but our life in this world; we die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time" (al-Jāthiya 45/24).
- Regarding it as impossible: "When we have become bones and crumbled dust, shall we be raised in a new creation?" (al-Isrāʾ 17/49).
- Demanding it in mockery: "When is this promise?" (Yūnus 10/48).
- Waiting in doubt: attitudes of the kind "we only suppose; we are not certain" (al-Jāthiya 45/32).
- Accepting it but understanding it otherwise: in some reports it is transmitted that certain groups understood the resurrection as a spiritual return.
The disagreement, then, does not reduce to the pair "is there or isn't there". It is a cloud of opinion formed around a piece of news.
| View | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Among themselves | The deniers reject the same matter in different ways; they do not even have a common answer |
| With the believers | One side accepts and the other rejects; the disagreement is between two groups |
The first view has support in the text: the verb in the first verse is تَسَاءَل — they ask one another. That the question circulates among themselves suggests that the disagreement too is among themselves.
The second view is possible as well and the two do not exclude one another: a community rejecting a piece of news can be divided both against the other side and within itself.
An observation, and my own reading. That those who reject a piece of news should be divided among themselves is a symptom of the groundlessness of the rejection. The truth of a thing is defended in one way; its falsity can be asserted in many, because there is no alternative in hand — only an objection.
ٱلَّذِى — a relative pronoun. It is in the genitive as an adjective of the al-nabaʾ of the preceding verse.
There is a striking choice of word order: the sentence is built not as مُخْتَلِفُونَ فِيهِ (those disagreeing about it) but as هُمْ فِيهِ مُخْتَلِفُونَ. That is, fīhi (about it) has been brought forward.
In Arabic an element brought forward from its normal place gains specification and emphasis. The emphasis here means: that is what they disagree about — and nothing else.
And that the sentence is a nominal sentence is meaningful too. A verbal sentence (yakhtalifūna fīhi) could have been built; it was not. As has been recorded several times in this commentary, a nominal sentence conveys continuity and settledness. The disagreement, then, is not a passing argument; it is a settled condition.
The first three verses prepare, in three steps, the ground on which the rest of the sūra will be built:
1. There is a conversation (yatasāʾalūn) — the matter is on the agenda. 2. What is being talked about is weighty (al-nabaʾu'l-ʿaẓīm) — the matter is serious. 3. But there is no settlement (mukhtalifūn) — the matter is unresolved.
This triad explains why the rest of the sūra is built as it is. Faced with a weighty and unresolved matter there are two things one can do: join the argument, or change the ground of the argument.
The sūra does the second. From the sixth verse on, the resurrection is not argued; something else is related.
And a link needs making. In the third verse there is ikhtilāf (parting); in the seventeenth will come يَوْمَ ٱلْفَصْلِ (the day of separation). The two words are from different roots, but their work runs in the same direction: the one names people's parting over a matter, the other the settling of that parting by a decision.
The sūra, that is, gives the day of separation as the answer to a matter over which people have parted. The resolution of a disagreement is not debate but a verdict.