Epigraph

وَقَالَتِ الْيَهُودُ لَيْسَتِ النَّصَارَىٰ عَلَىٰ شَيْءٍ وَقَالَتِ النَّصَارَىٰ لَيْسَتِ الْيَهُودُ عَلَىٰ شَيْءٍ وَهُمْ يَتْلُونَ الْكِتَابَ ۗ كَذَٰلِكَ قَالَ الَّذِينَ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ مِثْلَ قَوْلِهِمْ ۚ فَاللَّهُ يَحْكُمُ بَيْنَهُمْ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ فِيمَا كَانُوا فِيهِ يَخْتَلِفُونَ 

Al Quran 2:113

Abstract

Qur’an 2:113 (Sūrat al-Baqarah) records a mirror of mutual negation: “The Jews say, ‘The Christians have nothing [true] to stand on,’ and the Christians say, ‘The Jews have nothing to stand on,’ although they both recite the Scripture. Thus do those who know not speak the same as their words. But Allah will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection concerning that over which they used to differ.” (In Ahmadiyya numbering, which counts the Bismillah as verse 1, it is cited as 2:114.) This commentary reads the verse as a permanent Qur’anic diagnosis of religious exclusivism and, ultimately, as a mirror held up to Muslims themselves. Historically, the verse was occasioned by the mutual condemnation of the Jews of Medina and the Christian delegation of Najran in the Prophet’s presence; classical exegetes (Ṭabarī, Ibn Kathīr, Rāzī, Qurṭubī) uniformly note the irony that each community’s own Scripture testified to the other’s prophet. Philosophically, the verse anticipates modern insights into epistemological humility, in-group/out-group psychology, and the pluralist critiques of John Hick, alongside the Islamic universalism of Rumi, Ibn ʿArabī, and al-Ghazālī’s Fayṣal al-Tafriqa. Theologically, it belongs to a dense Qur’anic network of pluralism (2:62, 5:69, 5:48, 2:256, 22:40, 49:13, 109:6, 3:64) whose consistent refrain is that final judgment belongs to God alone — the “Master of the Day of Judgment” (1:4). The commentary’s central argument, developed from the pluralist reading of the Qur’an championed by Zia H. Shah, MD, on thequran.love and The Muslim Times, is that the verse’s logic now indicts intra-Muslim sectarianism: Sunni and Shia, Salafi and Sufi, Deobandi and Barelvi, and the mainstream takfīr of Ahmadis each declare the other “stands on nothing” — “while they recite the same Book.” The corrective, gathered in a closing thematic epilogue, is fourfold: unite on common ground (3:64, 3:103), tolerate difference, exercise humility in judgment, and leave the final verdict to the Master of the Day of Judgment, exactly as 2:113 itself concludes.

Key Findings

• The verse is a mirror, not merely a report. Its occasion of revelation (the Najran Christians disputing with the Jewish rabbis of Medina before the Prophet) is historically specific, but every classical and modern commentator reads its principle as universal: mutual, evidence-free excommunication is the mark of those who do not know, and the arbiter of religious truth is God at the Resurrection, not rival communities in history.
• The Qur’an’s deepest irony is textual self-refutation. Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr stress that the Torah affirmed Jesus and the Gospel affirmed Moses; each party “recited the Scripture” that validated the very group it was condemning. The tragedy is not ignorance of the other but ignorance of one’s own book.
• 2:113 belongs to a coherent Qur’anic theology of salvific pluralism (2:62, 5:69, 3:113–115, 22:17), in which salvation is conditioned on belief in God, the Last Day, and righteous deeds — “with a breadth of vision unparalleled in any other religious faith,” in Muhammad Asad’s phrase — not on communal label.
• The verse’s logic now falls on Muslims. The hadith of 73 sects, historically weaponized so that each group claims to be the single “saved sect” (al-firqa al-nājiya), is the intra-Muslim reenactment of 2:113. Its consequences are lethal: thousands killed in sectarian violence in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria; the constitutional excommunication of Ahmadis in Pakistan (Second Amendment, 1974; Ordinance XX, 1984).
• A corrective consensus already exists. The Amman Message (2004–2005), which gathered 552 endorsing signatures from 84 countries across Sunni, Shia, Ibadi, and other traditions, forbade takfīr among Muslims; the Marrakesh Declaration (2016), Document on Human Fraternity (2019), and Mecca Charter (2019) extend the same irenic logic — all echoing the Prophet’s own Charter of Medina and Covenant with the Christians of Najran.

Details

I. Historical Commentary

The occasion of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl). The classical sources are unusually concrete about this verse. Al-Wāḥidī, in his Asbāb al-Nuzūl, states plainly: “This was revealed about the Jews of Medina and the Christians of Najran.” Ibn Kathīr, drawing on the narration of Muḥammad b. Isḥāq from Ibn ʿAbbās, preserves the scene in vivid detail: when the Christian delegation of Najran came to the Messenger of God, the Jewish rabbis came and disputed with them in his presence. “Rāfiʿ b. Ḥuraymila said [to the Christians], ‘You do not follow anything,’ and he reiterated his disbelief in Jesus and the Gospel. Then a Christian man from Najran’s delegation said to the Jews, ‘Rather, you do not follow anything,’ and he reiterated his rejection of Moses’ prophethood and his disbelief in the Torah.” Whereupon the verse was revealed. This is one of the rare instances where the Qur’an quotes, almost stenographically, a live interfaith quarrel and then renders a verdict upon the form of the quarrel itself. My Islam

The historical setting is significant. The Christians of Najran — a major seat of Arabian Christianity near the Yemeni frontier — sent, according to the account reconstructed by Craig Considine, “a delegation of sixty people to visit the Prophet in Medina,” a delegation that “consisted of about forty-five scholars and fifteen assistants,” arriving around 631 CE (10 AH). The Prophet received them in his own mosque; when their hour of prayer arrived, he permitted them to pray inside it, facing east, though the qibla lay south. This episode, recorded in Ibn Isḥāq and cited by Ibn Kathīr, is remembered as the first occasion on which Christians prayed in a mosque and the first formal Christian–Muslim theological dialogue. Though the parties could not agree on the nature of Jesus — the confrontation leading toward the proposed mubāhala (mutual imprecation) referenced in 3:61 — the Prophet extended hospitality, accommodation, and ultimately a covenant of protection. That the verse condemning mutual negation and the practice of hosting the “negated” other in the mosque belong to the same historical moment is the interpretive key to the whole passage. IslamiCity + 2

The classical tafsīr consensus. Across the great commentaries a single point recurs: the condemnation was self-refuting because each community read a Scripture that affirmed the other. Ibn Kathīr writes that “each party read the affirmation of what they claimed to reject in their Book,” since the Torah bound the Children of Israel by covenant to believe in the coming Messiah, while the Gospel affirmed Moses’ prophethood and the divine origin of the Torah. The pagans (alladhīna lā yaʿlamūn, “those who do not know”) then parroted the same style of total negation against all revealed religion — so the verse exposes a chain of ignorance descending from the People of the Book to the idolaters. Ṭabarī similarly highlights that the Torah, recited by the Jews, contained intimations of Jesus, and the Gospel, recited by the Christians, confirmed Moses; the mutual “nothing” was therefore contradicted by the very texts in the disputants’ hands. The digest Maʿārif al-Qurʾān (Muftī Muḥammad Shafīʿ) draws the moral sharply: the two communities “had forgotten the essence of religion… and had identified it with a mere affiliation to a racial or social community,” and — crucially — the passage “provide[s] a warning to the Muslims as well, lest they too should delude themselves like the Jews and the Christians” by presuming that communal membership alone secures salvation. My Islam + 3

Modern and Ahmadiyya commentators. Muhammad Asad, commenting on the closely related 2:62, calls the Qur’anic formula of salvation “a fundamental doctrine of Islam,” adding that “with a breadth of vision unparalleled in any other religious faith, the idea of ‘salvation’ is here made conditional upon three elements only: belief in God, belief in the Day of Judgment, and righteous action in life” — a reading that directly disarms the exclusivism 2:113 rebukes. Maulana Muhammad Ali (Lahore Ahmadiyya), who numbers the verse 2:113 and places it in a section he titles “Perfect Guidance is only in Islam,” glosses the immediately preceding claim thus: “The Jews say that none shall enter the Garden except a Jew and the Christians say that none shall enter the Garden except the Christians. Both degraded religion to a belief in a set of doctrines, and leading a life of righteousness was not considered as of the essence of religion.” The official Ahmadiyya commentary in the tradition of Malik Ghulam Farid’s Five Volume Commentary (numbering the verse 2:114) makes an observation of unusual moral weight: in this verse, it says, “the Quran has been scrupulously fair towards both Jews and Christians” — refusing to take a side in the mutual condemnation, and thereby modeling the very even-handedness the verse commends. This Ahmadiyya emphasis on the Qur’an’s impartiality among rival communities is especially poignant given the community’s own later experience as the target of takfīr. IslamiCity

The longer history of exclusivism — and of intra-Islamic sectarianism. The verse’s dynamic did not end in seventh-century Medina. Within Islam, disputes over the succession to the Prophet hardened into the Sunni–Shia schism; jurisprudence crystallized into the four Sunni schools (Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī) alongside the Jaʿfarī, Zaydī, and Ibāḍī; theology divided into Ashʿarī, Māturīdī, and Atharī camps, with the earlier Muʿtazila and the militant Khārijites (the first practitioners of systematic takfīr) as cautionary poles. Later movements — the Salafī/Wahhabī reform, the Sufi orders, and in South Asia the Barelvī–Deobandī rivalry — each generated their own boundaries of orthodoxy. The Ahmadiyya community, founded in 1889, became the object of the most far-reaching modern takfīr: in 1974 Pakistan’s Second Amendment constitutionally declared Ahmadis non-Muslims, and in 1984 General Zia-ul-Haq’s Ordinance XX criminalized their public practice of Islam, prohibiting them from calling their places of worship mosques, using the call to prayer, or “posing as” Muslims — penalties of up to three years’ imprisonment. In each case, one community says of another, in effect, “you stand on nothing,” while both recite the same Qur’an and turn to the same Kaaba. house + 2

II. Philosophical Commentary

Epistemological humility. The verse’s deepest philosophical claim is embedded in its structure: two communities, each certain, each reciting Scripture, each wrong about the other — and the resolution deferred to a knower outside history. This is a scriptural argument for what epistemologists call fallibilism. As the pluralist reading developed on thequran.love repeatedly stresses, one may hold that the Qur’an is perfect while conceding that “our understanding of the Quran, given our human limitations, can be flawed.” The distinction between a perfect text and imperfect readers is the hinge on which humility turns: it permits total commitment to revelation without totalizing one’s own interpretation of it. Thequran

Religious exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Modern philosophy of religion maps three stances toward the diversity of faiths. John Hick’s “pluralist hypothesis” — leaning on a Kantian distinction between the noumenal “Real” (unknowable in itself) and its phenomenal manifestations across traditions — argues that the world religions are culturally conditioned responses to a single ultimate Reality, none holding a monopoly on truth. Hick’s proposal has drawn serious criticism (Plantinga, Mavrodes, and others question whether the noumenal/phenomenal move is coherent or collapses into a covert relativism), and a Qur’anic reader need not adopt its most reductive form. Indeed, a more disciplined “principled universality,” articulated in the Ibn ʿArabian tradition, insists that access to the sacred comes precisely through the concrete forms of one’s own revealed tradition, not by dissolving them into a “rootless syncretism.” The Qur’an’s own position is neither relativism nor exclusivism: it affirms the truth of its own revelation and the possibility of salvation beyond the community of Muḥammad (2:62, 5:69), locating final adjudication in God. This is closer to a theocentric, judgment-deferring inclusivism than to Hick’s homogenizing pluralism — but it shares Hick’s fundamental target: the arrogance of the exclusive claim. EncyclopaediiaInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The psychology of dogmatism and the in-group. The verse’s phrase “thus do those who know not speak the same as their words” is a precise description of what social psychology calls in-group/out-group bias: the tendency to attribute total validity to one’s own group and total emptiness (“nothing”) to the other. The pagans of Arabia, who possessed no Scripture, reproduced the style of the People of the Book — proof that the mechanism is social and psychological before it is theological. The pluralist writings on thequran.love describe the intra-Muslim version of this as a “Mutually Assured Sectarian Cold War,” in which each sect, “self-righteously happy with what they have” (echoing Qur’an 23:53 and 30:32), treats its interpretive tradition as the whole of the faith.

Islamic philosophical resources for tolerance. The Islamic tradition contains its own powerful antidotes. Al-Ghazālī, in Fayṣal al-Tafriqa bayna al-Islām wa’l-Zandaqa (“The Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Masked Infidelity”), placed strict limits on takfīr: no one who affirms the shahāda may be branded an unbeliever over a secondary matter, and a person may be declared a kāfir only for denying something the Prophet taught that was transmitted by tawātur (mass, diffusely congruent transmission) — never on the basis of isolated (āḥād) reports or contested interpretations. Sherman Jackson, translating the work, reads it as a landmark of “theological tolerance.” The mystical tradition went further still: Ibn ʿArabī’s celebrated verse — “My heart has become capable of every form: a pasture for gazelles, a monastery for monks… the tables of the Torah, the book of the Qur’an. I follow the religion of Love, whichever way its camels turn” — and Rumi’s “the sect of Love is other than all religions; for lovers, the religion and the creed is God” locate the essence of faith beneath the level of communal form. These are not calls to abandon Islam but to grasp what the Ashʿarī–Ghazālian tradition called the inner reality of tawḥīd: the divine presence in all things, from which “a deep-rooted and far-reaching tolerance” organically follows. Blogger + 4

III. Theological Commentary

The Qur’anic network of pluralism. Verse 2:113 does not stand alone; it is one node in a dense theological web. The salvation verses (2:62 and 5:69) promise that “those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians — whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does righteous deeds — shall have their reward with their Lord.” The liberty of conscience is guaranteed in 2:256 (“no compulsion in religion”), 10:99 (“would you compel people to believe?”), and 18:29 (“let whoever wills believe, and whoever wills disbelieve”). Divinely willed diversity is affirmed in 5:48 (“for each of you We have appointed a law and a way… so vie with one another in good works”) and 49:13 (“We made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another”). Sacred spaces of all faiths are placed under protection in 22:40, which names “monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, wherein the name of God is much mentioned.” Mutual coexistence is sealed in 109:6 (“to you your religion, and to me mine”) and the invitation to common ground in 3:64 (“come to a word common between us and you”). IslamiCity

Judgment belongs to God alone. The refrain that unifies these verses is 2:113’s own conclusion: “Allah will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection concerning that over which they used to differ.” The identical formula recurs at 22:17, 32:25, 39:46, 45:17, and 42:15 (“God will bring us together, and to Him is the homecoming”). This is not evasion but theology: to arrogate final judgment of hearts is to usurp a divine prerogative reserved to the “Master of the Day of Judgment” (Māliki yawmi’l-dīn, 1:4). Human beings judge acts; God judges souls. The whole architecture of Qur’anic eschatology depends on this reservation — which is precisely why takfīr, the human declaration that another’s faith is void, is a theological trespass.

The Prophetic model. The Prophet Muḥammad’s own conduct embodied the verse’s ethic. The Charter (Ṣaḥīfa) of Medina constituted the Jewish tribes and the Muslims as a single umma (political community) with mutual defense and freedom of religion. The Covenant with the Christians of Najran — and the broader covenants extended to Christian communities, of which the charter to St. Catherine’s Monastery is the most famous — guaranteed protection of churches, clergy, and worship. And, as noted, he let the Najran Christians pray in his own mosque. Here the theological principle and the historical practice converge: the community that received 2:113 was taught not to say “you stand on nothing,” but to host, protect, and dispute honorably with the very people it disagreed with. Al JumuahWalkwithmuhammad

IV. Application to Muslim Sects Today

The mirror turns. The most searching contemporary reading of 2:113 — and the animating thesis of Zia H. Shah’s work on thequran.love — is that the verse now reflects Muslims to themselves. Sunni and Shia each accuse the other of standing on nothing; Salafis condemn Sufis and Barelvis as innovators and grave-worshippers; Deobandis and Barelvis anathematize one another; and the mainstream sects have, in law and fatwa, declared Ahmadis outside Islam — “all while they recite the same Book” and face the same Kaaba. As Shah observes, all Muslim sects “revere exactly the same Arabic Qur’ān text — unlike Christians who have multiple Bible versions — and perform the same basic rituals of prayer,” yet “the interpretation of different verses and declaring different verses foundational separates them.” Thequran

The hadith of the 73 sects. The favorite instrument of this mutual negation is the narration that the umma will divide into seventy-three sects, seventy-two in the Fire and one saved (al-firqa al-nājiya). Historically, every faction has claimed to be the saved one: Sunni heresiographers (al-Baghdādī, al-Isfarāʾīnī, al-Shahrastānī) identified it with Ahl al-Sunna; Muʿtazila with themselves; Shia traditions with the followers of ʿAlī; and Salafī authorities to this day with “those upon what I and my Companions are upon.” Critical scholarship notes that the “seventy-two in the Fire” clause is absent from Bukhārī and Muslim and is, in the judgment of scholars such as those surveyed at Hawramani.com and in the Dawn analysis, likely fabricated or corrupted; Sufi readings (following figures like al-Ḥallāj and later Ottoman commentators) refused to tie salvation to sect membership at all, locating the “saved” among those who reach gnosis. The hadith is thus the intra-Muslim reenactment of 2:113: each community, reciting the same Book, tells the others they “stand on nothing.” Abu Khadeejah + 4

The lethal consequences of takfīr. Where 2:113’s mutual negation is fused with political power, it kills. In Pakistan, the South Asia Terrorism Portal documents at least 5,602 sectarian-violence fatalities across some 3,072 incidents between 1989 and mid-2018, the great majority Shia victims of Deobandi militant groups such as Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Mass-casualty atrocities include the January 2013 Quetta bombings — the 10 January Alamdar Road twin blasts (about 96 Hazaras killed, with a second bomb targeting rescuers) and the 16 February Hazara Town tanker bombing (at least 91 killed) — and the 4 March 2022 suicide bombing of the Kocha Risaldar Shia mosque in Peshawar, in which at least 57 worshippers were killed and nearly 200 injured, claimed by the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province. Intra-Sunni violence has targeted Barelvi shrines — the 2010 Data Darbar bombing in Lahore (37 killed) and the 2005 Bari Imam bombing (some 20 killed). Ahmadis, stripped of legal Muslim identity, face what Human Rights Watch calls “almost wholly legalized” persecution. The same dynamic scarred post-2003 Iraq and civil-war Syria. Shah’s blunt title captures the only defensible Muslim response: “Shias Are Definitely Muslims, Because I Abhor Inter-sectarian Violence.” Crisis Groupglobalsecurity

The corrective. Against this, the pluralist reading proposes what Shah calls “scientific commentary as a neutral, unifying common ground” — the observation that “a Sunni and a Shia can agree on the embryology of the Quran or the physics of the cosmos… Nature does not have sects” — alongside the plain Qur’anic commands to unity: 3:64 (“come to common terms”) and 3:103 (“hold fast, all together, to the rope of God, and be not divided”). The institutional expression of this corrective is already on record. The Amman Message (2004–2005), initiated by King Abdullah II of Jordan, gathered 200 leading scholars from 50 countries at its July 2005 conference and, per its official Grand List of Endorsements, ultimately 552 signatures from 84 countries — including the Shaykh al-Azhar, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi. It recognized the validity of the eight major schools of law (four Sunni, Jaʿfarī, Zaydī, Ibāḍī, plus Ẓāhirī) together with Ashʿarī theology, Sufism, and true Salafism, defined who is a Muslim, and on that basis forbade takfīr between Muslims. The Marrakesh Declaration (January 2016), made by more than 250 Muslim religious leaders, heads of state, and scholars — convened by Shaykh Abdullah Bin Bayyah under King Mohammed VI, gathering delegates from some 120 countries — invoked the Charter of Medina to affirm equal citizenship and the rights of religious minorities; the Document on Human Fraternity (2019), co-signed by Pope Francis and Grand Imam Ahmad al-Ṭayyeb, and the Mecca Charter (2019) extended the same ethic to interfaith and civic life. Each is, in effect, a modern institutional reading of 2:113: stop telling one another “you stand on nothing,” and leave the verdict to God. Thequran + 2