The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 2) — Page 437
PT. 7 AL-AN'ĀM CH. 6 وَمَا عَلَى الَّذِيْنَ يَتَّقُونَ مِنْ حِسَابِهِمْ مِنْ And those who are righteous. 70 are not at all accountable for "6:53. 153, 201. means, remembering or recollecting; remembrance; the presence of a thing in the mind; mentioning or relating a thing; accepting of an exhortation; reminding or causing to remember; admonition. Thus the word is used both intransitively and transitively (Lane & Aqrab). Commentary: When the disbelievers, in reply to their demand for punishment, were told that there was a time fixed for every prophecy and that the punishment of God could not come before its time, they began to laugh at the prophecy. So the Quran calls upon the Holy Prophet and, through him, the believers to turn away from them, i. e. to quit their company and depart from the place, so that they might not provoke the further wrath of God by indulging in their vain and insolent discourse. Believers are told not to afford disbelievers an occasion to commit further excesses by sitting in their company but to leave them at once on such occasions, so that they may be induced to turn to other talk. The words, turn thou away from them, may also be taken figuratively, signifying that you should overlook and treat as unnoticed their action of ridiculing and should not dispute with them about it, so that they might drop the subject and turn to some other topic. 877 "Satan", for which see 2:15, does not always mean the Evil Spirit; the word is also applied to other harmful things. It has even been applied to "anger" and "jealousy" in some of the sayings of the Holy Prophet. Here, also, it is used in the sense of "anger" and the sentence would thus mean, "if anger or wrath should cause you to forget the injunction to leave the company of such persons and to quit the place. . . " This interpretation, however, will hold good only in the case of men who stand on a high level of righteousness. In the case of ordinary men, the word would be taken to mean "evil suggestion" or "negligence". The word ; (recollection), as shown under Important Words, means both "recollection", i. e. remembering, and "reminding. " Taking it in the intransitive sense, the sentence would mean that when you recollect the injunction to quit the place, you should do so forthwith. Taking the word in the sense of "reminding," the sentence would mean that before quitting the place, you should remind the scoffers of their mischievous conduct and tell them that it is an evil and dishonourable course which they follow and that it is calculated to excite against them the wrath of God. It should also be remembered that really it is not the Holy Prophet but every believer that is addressed in this verse.