Concealing and confounding

Both verses where the accusation of confounding (labasa, labs) the truth with falsehood appears in the Qurʾān (Q2:42 and 3:71) relate it to the accusation of concealing the truth purposely:

Do not confound (talbisū) truth with falsehood, nor knowingly conceal (taktumū) the truth. Q2:42

Why do you confound (talbisūna) truth with falsehood and knowingly conceal (taktumūna) the truth? Q3:71

Fadlallah’s treatment of these verses does not provide any new insights. Faithful to his verse division style, he groups verses Q2:40-44 together in order to introduce their context which he defines as the Jewish hostile stand against Muhammad and his mission. He emphasizes the purposeful animosity of the Jews and their aim “to stir up confusion and perplexity in the minds of Muslims in order to shake their faith and convictions.”¹⁰⁰⁵ This is also seen in the way he glosses the phrase talbisū: in the first case he explains it as mixing¹⁰⁰⁶ and at the second occurrence as mixing and deceiving by clothing the truth with falsehood in order to conceal the truth and deceive the believers.¹⁰⁰⁷

Fadlallah stops to contemplate on the abundant attention paid to the Jews in the Qurʾān.

The frequency of Qurʾānic narratives about the Jews, compared to those about the Christians, can be ascribed to the fact that they comprised an important religious force in the birthplace of Islam as well as to the fact that they have stood against Islam since its birth. The Christians on the other hand did not play a big role in fighting Islam.¹⁰⁰⁸ On the contrary, they had a positive role through the Ethiopian king’s reception of persecuted Muslims who took refuge with him, let alone the king’s positive reception of the Qurʾānic verses read to him about Mary.¹⁰⁰⁹

1005 MWQ2:8.

1006 MWQ2:8.

1007 MWQ6:94.

1008 MWQ2:9.

1009 MWQ2:9.

4.1.6.1. From the Israelites to the Israelis

Fadlallah not only links the Jews contemporaneous with Muhammad to “their ancestors,”¹⁰¹⁰ the Israelites, but also to modern-day Jews of whom Muslims should be wary because they will inevitably make a move:

in the future and represent a political, social, cultural and security danger for Muslims because of their ambitions to take over the Muslims’ land and wealth. Their perception and their maneuvers will lead to several serious problems for the Muslim world. This in its turn forces Muslims to think about the elements of the arrogant Jewish nature and its aggressive plans.¹⁰¹¹

Equating the Israelites with the Jews in general and with modern-day Israelis is not uncommon in modern Qurʾānic exegesis. The Lebanese exegete Muhammad Jawad Mughniyya (d. 1979), for instance, explicitly links the Jews with Israelis and openly comments on current affairs related to them.¹⁰¹² This is also the case in the exegetical work of Muhammad Metwally al-Shaarawy (d. 1998) who was clearly affected by the then-developing but unpopular Egyptian-Israeli relationship and who often used Qurʾānic verses to prove the evilness of the Israelis.¹⁰¹³ In his MWQ, Fadlallah often uses the terms Jews, Israeli and Israelites interchangeably.¹⁰¹⁴ He sometimes uses the phrase ‘Children of Israel’ in reference to the Jews contemporaneous with Muhammad and often uses the term

‘Jews’ to refer to Israelis.¹⁰¹⁵

In an introduction that aims at preparing the reader to accept the interpretation of the verses at hand, Fadlallah presents the Jews as a nation who have constantly used twisted means against the Prophet and his message,¹⁰¹⁶ who have always been ungrateful to God, and who have been vicious to the Prophet despite the latter’s kindness and patience with them. The

1010 MWQ2:8, MWQ2:16, and MWQ8:174 for example.

1011 MWQ2:9.

1012 Mughniyya’s Tafsīr al-Kāshif 2:339.

1013 Tafsīr al-Shaʿrāwy, 3194–3196, 8360–8375, and 8786–8789, passim. Al-Shaarawy held oral exegetical lectures which were broadcast on Egyptian TV. These lectures were very popular, especially because they were mostly in a simple listener-friendly style that mixed simplified Standard Arabic with Egyptian colloquial.

1014 Although the Arabic term al-Isrāʾīlī can refer to both ‘the Israeli’ and ‘the Israelite,’ it is strongly linked in the Modern Arab mind with the nationals of Israel and hence more often than not has a negative connotation related to the injustice generally felt by Arabs because of the occupation.

1015 MWQ2:13. This equation is made both explicitly and implicitly in all his works.

1016 MWQ2:12–13

Jews have done nothing new but repeat their history: They have treated Muhammad with the same rebellion and deviation with which they treated the previous prophets because of their rebellious nature and because of their complexes.¹⁰¹⁷ In their struggle against Islam, the Jews use two methods: the first is confounding the truth with falsehood in order to make it impossible for people to know what is the truth and what is not. The Jews, according to Fadlallah, have used these twisted methods through the ages: “They have practiced this in the past and they are still practicing it in the present with their different means.”¹⁰¹⁸ The second method is concealing the truth altogether. By truth Fadlallah refers to the pool of information the Jews had about Muhammad and his message which they concealed because they do not wish Islam “to take its natural place as a divine power” out of jealousy.¹⁰¹⁹ Having presented these two twisted methods used by the Jews, Fadlallah proceeds to explain the difference between concealing the truth and mixing it with falsehood. The difference between them is that matters are, depending on their denotations, either confoundable or non-confoundable. If a matter allows for confounding, they confound it until people are mixed up and until the confounders (i.e., the Jews) achieve whatever profits they will. If not, they conceal it altogether.¹⁰²⁰ Second, people did not have access to the Torah for two reasons. 1. The Jewish leaders hid parts of it and kept them out of people’s reach.¹⁰²¹ 2. It was not available in Arabic (lam takun muʿarrabatan), and thus, they could not read it for themselves. The only way for people to know the content of their holy book was by asking their religious leaders.¹⁰²² These Jewish religious leaders were supposed to safeguard their Scriptures but they betrayed this responsibility.¹⁰²³ Having concentrated on the Jewish concealing and confounding nature down the ages in his exegetical treatment of Q2:42, Fadlallah takes this a step forward in the parallel verse Q3:71 through which he links the past with modern-day history including, this time, the Christians too in the confounders-category.

To do that, Fadlallah groups Q3:71 in a larger verse unit Q3:69-71 and links these verses with the previous verse unit Q3:65-68 to bring up the larger context. Here too, echoing most exegetes, Sunni and Shīʿi alike, he associates concealing the truth with concealing the information about the advent of Muhammad which is supposed to be predicted in the Torah and the Gospel.¹⁰²⁴ However, this time and although he briefly refers to al-Wāḥidī’s

1017 MWQ2:12–13. Emphasizing the evilness of the Jewish nature is repeated elsewhere in MWQ6:122 and MWQ8:174, for example.

1018 MWQ2:16.

1019 MWQ2:16–17.

1020 MWQ2:17.

1021 See more on this in 4.1.4 and 4.1.5.

1022 MWQ2:17.

1023 MWQ2:18.

1024 MWQ6:95 and MWQ6:97.

(d. 1076) Asbāb al-Nuzūl according to which the verse was revealed about the Jews who tried to convert two companions of the prophets to Judaism,¹⁰²⁵ the subject of this Qurʾānic accusation of concealing the truth and confounding it with falsehood is both Jews and Christians.¹⁰²⁶ Echoing al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), Fadlallah notes that concealing the truth and confounding it with falsehood includes presenting corrupted Torah and corrupted Gospel, claiming they are God’s revealed Scripture, and occasionally keeping the “original character of the verse” or shifting the Torah’s or the Gospel’s “words from their places, changing their original places or misinterpreting them.”¹⁰²⁷

As usual, the Ayatollah broadens his interpretation of confounding the truth with falsehood to modern-day life and seems to follow Mughniyya (d. 1979) to a great extent in his argumentation. Not only does he use the same vocabulary and the same order of thoughts as Mughniyya but also almost the same arguments. Both exegetes start with the first part of verse Q3:69 ‘some of the People of the Book’ which they both explain as the Christian missionaries who use deceptive (taḍlīl) thoughts to stir up doubts (tashkīk) in Muslim minds about their religion.¹⁰²⁸ Also, both mufassirs link concealing the truth with denying the prediction of Muhammad in the pre-Qurʾānic Scriptures as well as with the Kitābīs’

attempt to mislead Muslims and lead them out of their faith. The only difference between the two is that while Mughniyya speaks only of the Christians’ role in the above-mentioned accusations, Fadlallah emphasizes the Jews’ role without sparing the Christians. The first refers explicitly to some particular events organized in the USA to ridicule and insult Islam while the second keeps a high degree of implicitness and speaks generally of some

“people’s complexed and malevolent” hostility toward Islam.¹⁰²⁹ However, on another occasion, he returns to this idea and explicitly speaks of the methods used by orientalists, missionaries and by the Jews since the period of western occupation of Muslim lands to mislead Muslims through the spreading of lies about Islam. Among these methods, he mentions exploiting Muslims’ miserable conditions and tempting them financially as well as, in the case of orientalists, profiting from their scientific authority, distorting truths using scientific research as a disguise to confound Muslims.¹⁰³⁰

In the context of Q3:71, and in line with most exegetes, both classical and modern, Fadlallah accuses Jews and Christians of wittingly misinterpreting their Scriptures: hiding

1025 MWQ6:94 refers to al-Wāḥidī’s Asbāb al-Nuzūl, 60.

1026 MWQ6:95. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī is of the same opinion. See al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s Tafsīr al-Mīzān 3:256.

1027 MWQ6:95. Cf. Tafsīr al-Mīzān 3:256.

1028 MWQ6:94. Cf. Mughniyya’s Tafsīr al-Kāshif 3:84.

1029 MWQ6:95–96 Cf. Mughniyya’s Tafsīr al-Kāshif 3:85–86.

1030 MWQ6:97–98. The danger of Christian missionary work is highlighted in his other works as well such as Mafāhim Islāmiyya ʿĀmma, 489–490 as well in several Friday sermons such as the one held 28 December 2002, retrieved on 13 March 2017. http://arabic.bayynat.org.lb/ListingByCatPage.aspx?id=1048.

portions of them, presenting as God’s Word texts that are not, and altering the places of words here and there. Furthermore, both Kitābīs are accused of concealing the passages which predict the coming of Muhammad because of their complexes, their jealousy and their enmity towards the Muslims.¹⁰³¹