109 sura al-Kafirun, Mecca 18 [early Meccan]
The Quranic text and Ali’s version
قُلْ
يَا أَيُّهَا
الْكَافِرُونَ
(١)
1. Say: O ye that reject Faith!
C6289. Faith is a matter of personal conviction, and does not depend on worldly motives.
Worship should depend on pure and sincere Faith, but often does not: for motives of worldly gain, ancestral custom, social conventions or imitative instincts, or a lethargic instinct to shrink from enquiring into the real significance of solemn acts and the motives behind them, reduce a great deal of the world's worship to sin, selfishness, or futility.
Symbolic idols may themselves be merely instruments for safeguarding the privileges of a selfish priestly class, or the ambitions, greed, or lust of private individuals.
Hence the insistence of Islam and its Prophet on the pure worship of the One True God. The Prophet firmly resisted all appeals to worldly motives, and stood firm to his Message of eternal Unity.
لَا
أَعْبُدُ مَا
تَعْبُدُونَ
(٢)
2. I worship not that which ye worship,
وَلَا
أَنتُمْ عَابِدُونَ
مَا أَعْبُدُ
(٣)
3. Nor will ye worship that which I worship.
C6290. Verses 2-3 describe the conditions as they were at the time when this Surah was revealed, and may be freely paraphrased:
'I am a worshipper of the One True God, the Lord of all, of you as well as of myself; but you on account of your vested interests have not the will to give up your false worship, of idols and self'.
وَلَا
أَنَا عَابِدٌ
مَّا عَبَدتُّمْ
(٤)
4. And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship,
وَلَا
أَنتُمْ عَابِدُونَ
مَا أَعْبُدُ
(٥)
5. Nor will ye worship that which I worship.
Verses 4-5 describe the psychological reasons: I, being a prophet of Allah do not and cannot possibly desire to follow your false ancestral ways; and you, as custodians of the false worship, have not the will to give up your ways of worship, which are wrong'.
The "will" in the translation represents less the future tense than the will, the desire, the psychological possibility: it tries to reproduce the Arabic noun-agent.
لَكُمْ
دِينُكُمْ
وَلِيَ دِينِ
(٦)
6. To you be your Way, and to me mine
C6291. 'I, having been given the Truth, cannot come to your false ways: you, having your vested interests, will not give them up. For your ways the responsibility is yours: I have shown you the Truth. For my ways the responsibility is mine: you have no right to ask me to abandon the Truth. Your persecutions will be vain: the Truth must prevail in the end'.
This was the attitude of Faith then: but it is true for all time. Hold fast to Truth, "in scorn of consequence".
Asad’s version
109:1 SAY: "O you who deny the truth! (2) "I do not worship that which you worship, (3) and neither do you worship that which I worship! 1 (4) "And I will not worship that which you have [ever] worshipped, (5) and neither will you [ever] worship that which I worship. 2 (6) Unto you, your moral law, and unto me, mine !" 3
[[ Asad’s notes : -
1 In the above rendering, the particle ma ("that which") alludes, on the one hand, to all positive concepts and ethical values - e.g., belief in God and the believer's self-surrender to Him - and, on the other, to false objects of worship and false values, such as man's belief in his own supposed "self- sufficiency" (cf 96:6-7), or his overriding, almost compulsive "greed for more and more" (surah 102).
2 Sc, "so long as you are unwilling to abandon the false values which cause you to deny the truth
3 Lit., "unto me, my moral law". The primary significance of din is "obedience"; in particular, obedience to a law or to what is conceived as a system of established - and therefore binding - usages, i.e., something endowed with moral authority: hence "religion", "faith. 1 or "religious law" in the widest sense of these terms (cf. first half of note 249 on 2:256); or simply "moral law", as in the above instance as well as in 42:21, 95:7, 98:5 or 107:1.