Al-Qalam - An Enlightening Commentary into the Light of the Holy Qur'an

Table of Contents

46. Or is it that you ask them a wage so that they are heavily burdened with debt?

47. Or that they are aware of the unseen so that they can write it down and pass it onto others?

Resuming the investigations on the wrong doings of the polytheists and sinners, the blessed Verses in question pose two more questions:

“Or is it that you ask them a wage so that they are heavily burdened with debt? Or that they are aware of the unseen so that they can write it down and pass it onto others?”

In other words, if they refrain from listening to you under the pretext that acting likewise entails bearing heavy costs and they cannot afford them, they are lying since you, like other Prophets, expect no remuneration for imparting your Prophetic Call.

The Arabic word maghram, cognate with gharama, implies the losses incurred without having committed any wrong doing. The Arabic word mathqal, derived from th-q-l, implies heaviness and gravity. Thus, beliers are denied of further pretexts.

The blessed Verse 47 proceeds with the discussion by asking: “Or that they are aware of the unseen so that they can write it down and pass it onto others?” They claim that such secrets reveal that they are on a par with the believers.

It is a remote possibility to which disbelievers may take recourse. It is in this vein that the Holy Qur’an rejects their unfounded claims as per which they say that they have access to the invisible world through soothsayers and the like of them and they are thereby aware of the secrets of the unseen and they may write them down and pass them onto others.

Thus, they falsely claim that they are on a par with the believers or even superior to them. They apparently produced no such claims and the question is rather rhetorical. Some Qur’anic exegetes maintain that it is an allusion to the Preserved Tablet (lawh mahfuth) and predestination is herein intended by “writing,” though such possibility is too remote, since they never claim to have predestination and the Preserved Tablet under their sway.