Al-Baqarah · Madani · ayah 75 of 286

Al-Baqarah 2:75

۞ أَفَتَطْمَعُونَ أَن يُؤْمِنُوا۟ لَكُمْ وَقَدْ كَانَ فَرِيقٌ مِّنْهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ كَلَـٰمَ ٱللَّهِ ثُمَّ يُحَرِّفُونَهُۥ مِنۢ بَعْدِ مَا عَقَلُوهُ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ

“Do you covet [the hope, O believers], that they would believe for you while a party of them used to hear the words of Allāh and then distort it [i.e., the Torah] after they had understood it while they were knowing?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The believers hoped their neighbours would believe; Allah reminded them that some had heard His word, understood it, and knowingly bent it.

A reflection

Bending a word off its line

A court interpreter is translating for a witness. The witness is angry and uses hard words about the defendant. The interpreter softens each sentence slightly. Nothing she says is quite false. But by the end, the jury has heard a different witness.

The ayah's verb is yuḥarrifūnahu. Its root is ḥarf, an edge, and taḥrīf is turning something aside from its proper direction. A classical theologian quotes an earlier scholar. Taḥrīf is tilting a thing away from its due, the way a pen is called muḥarraf when its nib is cut on a slant. The words still come out. They just come out crooked.

The commentaries describe two forms. One is changing the words themselves. The other is keeping the words, but bending their meaning. A modern commentary mentions both: turning it to a meaning it does not have, or changing its wording. A major commentator glosses it as interpreting it in a way it was not meant.

An early scholar quoted in one commentary describes the second kind vividly. Those who came with a bribe, he said, were shown a reading in their favour. Those who came with nothing were simply told the truth.

Then come the hardest words in the ayah: 'after they had understood it, while they knew'. The root of 'understood' is the hobbling rope; they had tied the meaning down. A commentary says they left no doubt in their own minds. This was not confusion. It was a choice, made with full knowledge, to bend the line.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.