بَلِ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُكَذِّبُونَ · وَٱللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِمَا يُوعُونَ
Bali'lladhīna kafarū yukadhdhibūn · Wa'llāhu aʿlamu bimā yūʿūn "On the contrary — those who disbelieve are giving the lie. And God knows best what they are storing up within."
Bal in Arabic is the particle of iḍrāb: leaving the preceding sentence and passing to something else, or correcting it.
The twentieth verse had asked "What is the matter with them?" The twenty-second answers, but not in the expected way: the cause is not explained, the intent is explained.
That is, the question was "why do they not believe?"; the answer is "because they are giving the lie". This is an answer that looks circular but is not: the verse is saying that denial is not the result of a thought but an attitude.
Root: ك-ذ-ب. This distinction was treated in the section on Sūrat al-Shams; I recall the observation made there:
- كَذَبَ (Form I) — a person's own telling of a lie.
- كَذَّبَ (Form II) — a person's declaring a lie what another has said.
The verb in the verse is the second. That is, what is charged against them is not lying; it is counting as a lie what is true.
The verb is moreover in the imperfect: yukadhdhibūn — "they are giving the lie", a continuous and ongoing state. Not a one-time decision but a lasting attitude.
Root: و-ع-ي. The concrete centre of the root is an object: وِعَاء (wiʿāʾ) — a vessel, a container, a thing into which something is put.
The Qurʾān uses this concrete sense. In the account of Joseph (Yūsuf), during the search for the stolen goods:
"So he began with their vessels (awʿiyatihim) before his brother's vessel (wiʿāʾi akhīhi)." (Yūsuf 12/76)
- وَعَىٰ — to hold a thing in the mind as though putting it into its vessel; to memorise, to grasp, to keep in the memory.
- أَوْعَىٰ (Form IV) — to fill a vessel, to hoard, to stack up. The Qurʾān: "and gathered and stored up" (al-Maʿārij 70/18) — there the man who piles up wealth is described.
- وَاعِيَة — retaining, keeping (of an ear).
"…and that a retaining ear might retain it." (al-Ḥāqqa 69/12) وَتَعِيَهَآ أُذُنٌ وَٰعِيَةٌ
In this verse أُذُن (the ear) and وَاعِيَة (retaining) come side by side. That is, "ear" and "vessel" are joined in the same sentence: a good ear is the ear that takes in and keeps what it hears.
The sūra is saying this, that is: the vessel is not empty; it is only not full of the right thing. It is not that man takes nothing in; he takes something else in.
The verse does not say what they fill it with. Bi-mā yūʿūn — "whatever they are filling it with". The exegetes generally unfold this as "the denial, the rancour, the enmity they hide in their hearts"; but the word does not specify this. The indefiniteness leaves what is put into the vessel to vary from person to person.
| Verse | Word | Root | Who gathers | What is gathered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | وَسَقَ | و-س-ق | The night | What has scattered |
| 18 | ٱتَّسَقَ | و-س-ق | The moon | Its own parts |
| 23 | يُوعُونَ | و-ع-ي | People | What they hide within |
The night gathers, the moon is gathered, man fills himself. All three are the same movement; but the first two are visible, the third is not.
And this is exactly what the verse says: وَٱللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ — "and God knows best". The invisible gathering is known too.
I record this threefold pattern as my own reading. The root is different (wasq and waʿy are separate roots); the link I set up is conceptual, not a claim of derivation.
And one further link: in the fifteenth verse it was said "his Lord was seeing him". In the twenty-third it is said "God knows best what they store up".
Seeing looks to what is outside; knowing, to what is inside. The sūra sets up first the outward record, then the inward one. The man's reckoning that "no one saw" is broken twice over.