8. This is an allusion to the slander against Aishah. Allah has Himself described it as ifk (false accusation, calumny) which implies its total refutation. From here begins the mention of the incident which provided the occasion of this Surah’s revelation. We have reproduced the initial part of it in the introduction as related by Aishah herself; the rest of it is reproduced below. She says:
Rumours about this slander went on spreading in the city for about a month, which caused great distress and anguish to the Prophet (peace be upon him). I cried due to helplessness and my parents were sick with mental agony. At last one day the Prophet (peace be upon him) visited us and he sat near me, which he had not done since the slander had started. Feeling that something decisive was going to happen that day, Abu Bakr and Umm Ruman (Aishah’s mother) also sat near us. The Prophet (peace be upon him) started the conversation, saying: Aishah, I have heard this and this about you: if you are innocent, I expect that Allah will declare your innocence. But it you you have committed a sin, you should offer repentance and ask for Allah’s forgiveness; when a servant (of Allah) confesses his guilt and repents, Allah forgives him. Hearing these words, tears dried in my eyes. I looked up to my father expecting that he would reply to the Prophet (peace be upon him), but he said: Daughter, I do not know what I should say. Then I turned to my mother, but she also did not know what to say. At last I said: You have all heard something about me and believed it. Now if I say that I am innocent and Allah is my witness that I am innocent, you will not believe me; and if I confess something which I never did and Allah knows that I never did it, you will believe me. At that time I tried to call to memory the name of Prophet Jacob but could not recall it. Therefore in view of the predicament that I was placed in, I said: I cannot but repeat the words which the father of Prophet Joseph had spoken: fasabrun jamil: I will bear this patiently with good grace. (Surah Yousuf, Ayat 83). Saying this I lay down and turned to the other side. I was thinking that Allah was aware of my innocence, and He would certainly reveal the truth, but I could never imagine that divine revelation would come down in my defense, which the people will read and recite till the Last Day. What I thought probable was that the Prophet (peace be upon him) would see a dream in which Allah would indicate my innocence. But in the meantime suddenly, the state of receiving revelation appeared on the Prophet (peace be upon him), when pearl-like drops of perspiration used to gather on his face even in severe winter. We all held our breath and sat silent. As for me I was fearless, but my parents seemed to be struck with fear; they did not know what the divine revelation would be. When the revelation was over, the Prophet (peace be upon him) seemed to be very pleased. Over-joyed with happiness the first words he spoke were: Congratulations, Aishah, Allah has sent down proof of your innocence and then he recited these ten (verses 11-21). At this my mother said to me: Get up and thank the Prophet (peace be upon him). I said: I shall neither thank him nor you two, but thank Allah Who has sent down my absolution. You did not even so much as contradict the charge against me. (This is not the translation of any one tradition, but the substance of many traditions which are found in the books of Hadith in connection with the incident of the slander against Hadrat Aishah).
One subtle point to be understood here is that before mentioning the absolution of Aishah, a full section of verses has been devoted to the commandments pertaining to zina, qazf and lian by which Allah means to admonish that zina is not a slight matter which may be used as a means of entertaining the people in a gathering. It is very serious. If the accuser is right in his accusation he should produce witnesses, and get a most horrible punishment inflicted upon the adulterer and the adulteress. If the accuser is false, he deserves to be given 80 stripes, so that nobody may dare to bring a false charge against the other person. And if the accuser is a husband, he will have to exercise lian in a court of law to settle the matter. So, none who utters such an accusation will have peace. The Islamic society which has been brought about for the purpose of establishing goodness and piety in the world can neither tolerate zina as a means of entertainment nor endure loose talk about it as a diversion and amusement.
9. Only a few persons have been mentioned in traditions, who were spreading the rumours. They were: Abdullah bin Ubayy, Zaid bin Rifaah (who was probably the son of Rifaah bin Zaid, the Jewish hypocrite), Mistah bin Uthathah, Hassan bin Thabit, and Hamnah bint Jahsh. The first two of these were hypocrites, and the other three Muslims, who had been involved in the mischief due to misunderstanding and weakness. Names of the other people who were more or less involved in the mischief have not been mentioned in the books of Hadith and life of the Prophet (peace be upon him).
10. That is, you should not lose heart. Though the hypocrites, according to their own presumptions, have made the worst attack on you, it will eventually bring misfortune on them, and will prove to be a blessing in disguise for you.
As mentioned in the introduction above, the hypocrites had planned to inflict a defeat on the Muslims on the moral front, which was their real field of superiority and responsible for their victory on every other front against the opponents. But Allah turned this mischief into a means of strength for the Muslims. On this occasion, the conduct and attitude adopted by the Prophet (peace be upon him), Abu Bakr and his family, and the Muslims at large proved beyond any doubt that they were the purest people morally, tolerant and just in nature, noble and forbearing in character. If the Prophet (peace be upon him) had wished he could have gotten the people responsible for the attack on his honor beheaded immediately. But he bore everything with patience for a whole month. And when divine injunction came down from Allah, he enforced the punishment for qazf only on those three Muslims whose guilt was established, and even spared the hypocrites. Abu Bakr’s own relative, whose whole family he had been supporting all along, continued heaping disgrace on him publicly, but that noble man neither severed his family relations with him nor stopped monetary help to him and his family. None of the wives of the Prophet (peace be upon him) took the least part in the slander nor even expressed the slightest approval of it. So much so that Zainab (a wife of the Prophet), for whose sake her real sister, Hamnah bint Jahsh, was taking part in the slander, did not utter anything about her rival (Aishah) except good words. According to Aishah herself: Zainab, among the wives of the Prophet (peace be upon him), was my strongest rival, but when in connection with the incident of the slander, the Prophet (peace be upon him) asked her opinion of me, she said: O Messenger of Allah, I swear by God that I have perceived nothing in her except piety. Aishah’s own nobility of character can be judged by this that though Hassan bin Thabit had played a prominent role in the campaign of slander against her, she continued to treat him with due honour and esteem. When the people reminded her that he was the man who had slandered her, she retorted: No, he it was who used to rebut the anti-Islamic poets on behalf of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and Islam. Such was the conduct and attitude of those people who were directly affected by the slander. As for the other Muslims, their attitude can be judged from one instance. When Abu Ayyub Ansari’s wife mentioned before him the rumours of the slander, he said: Mother of Ayyub, if you had been there in place of Aishah, would you have done that? She replied: By God, I would never have done it. Ayyub then said: Well, Aishah is a much better woman than you. As for myself, if I had been in place of Safwan, I could never have entertained such an evil thought and Safwan is a better Muslim than me. Thus, the result of the mischief engineered by the hypocrites was contrary to what they had planned to achieve, and the Muslims emerged out of this test morally stronger than before.
Then there was more good to come from this. The incident became the cause of some very important additions to the social law and injunctions of Islam. Through these the Muslims received such commandments from Allah by which the Muslim society can be kept clean and protected against the creation and propagation of moral evils, and if at all they arise, they can be corrected promptly.
Furthermore, there was another aspect of goodness in it also. The Muslims came to understand fully that the Prophet (peace be upon him) had no knowledge of the unseen. He knew only that which Allah taught him. Beside that his knowledge was the same as that of a common man. For one full month he remained in great anxiety with regard to Aishah. He would sometimes make enquiries from the maid-servant, sometimes from his other wives, and sometimes from Ali and Usamah. At last when he spoke to Aishah, he spoke only this: If you have committed the sin, you should offer repentance, and if you are innocent, I expect that Allah will declare your innocence. Had he possessed any knowledge of the unseen, he would not have felt so upset nor would have made enquiries, nor counselled repentance. However, when divine message revealed the truth, he received that knowledge which he had not possessed for more than a month. Thus Allah arranged to safeguard the Muslims, through direct experience and observation, against exaggerated notions in which people generally get involved in regard to their religious leaders on account of excessive blind faith. Perhaps this was the reason why Allah withheld revelation for a month, for if revelation had been sent down on the very first day, it could not have had any beneficial effect.
11. That is, Abdullah bin Ubayy, who was the real author of the false accusation and mischief. In some traditions it has been wrongly claimed that this verse refers to Hassan bin Thabit; this is actually due to a misunderstanding of the narrators themselves. As a matter of fact, Hassan bin Thabit’s only weakness was that he became involved in the mischief engineered by the hypocrites. Hafiz Ibn Kathir has rightly observed that if this tradition had not been included in Bukhari, it would not have deserved any notice. The greatest falsehood, rather a calumny, in this connection is the assertion by the Umayyads that it was Ali who had been referred to in this verse. A saying of Hisham bin Abdul Malik has been cited in Bukhari, Tabarani and Baihaqi to the effect: The one who had the greatest share of responsibility in it refers to Ali bin Abi Talib. The fact, however, is that Ali had no hand whatever in this mischief. The truth is that when Ali saw the Prophet (peace be upon him) in a perturbed state of mind and the Prophet (peace be upon him) asked for his counsel, he said: Allah in this matter has not laid any restriction on you: suitable women are plenty: you may if you like divorce Aishah and marry another woman. But this did not at all mean that Ali had supported the accusation against Aishah. His object was only to allay the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) mental anguish.
12. This may also be translated as: Why did they not have a good opinion of the people of their own community and society? The words in the text are comprehensive and contain a subtle meaning which should be understood well. What happened concerning Aishah and Safwan bin Muattal was only this: A woman belonging to the caravan (apart from the fact that she was the Prophet’s wife) was left behind, and a man belonging to the same caravan, who was also left behind, happened to see her and brought her on his camel to the camp. Now if a person alleges that when the two found themselves alone, they became involved in sin, the accusation would imply two other hypotheses: First, if the accuser himself (whether man or woman) had been there, he would certainly have availed of the rare opportunity and committed the sinful act, for he had never before chanced upon a person of the opposite sex in a situation like this. Second, the accuser’s assessment of the moral condition of the society he belongs to is that in that society there is no man or woman who could possibly have abstained from sin in similar circumstances. This will be the case when it involves any one man and any one woman. But supposing if the man and the woman happened to belong to the same place, and the woman who was left behind by chance was the wife, or sister, or daughter of a friend, or a relative, or a neighbor, or an acquaintance of the man, the matter would become much more serious and grave. Then it would mean that the one who utters such an accusation has a very poor and degraded opinion of himself as well as of his society, which has nothing to do with morality and good sense. No gentleman can imagine that if he finds a woman belonging to the family of a friend, or a neighbor or an acquaintance, stranded on the way, the first thing he would do would be to molest and dishonor her, and then would think of escorting her home. But here the matter was a thousand times more serious. The lady was no other than the wife of the Prophet (peace be upon him) of Allah, whom every Muslim esteemed higher than his own mother, and whom Allah Himself had forbidden for every Muslim just like his own mother. The man was not only a follower of the same caravan and a soldier of the same army, and an inhabitant of the same city, but also a Muslim, who believed in the lady’s husband to be the Messenger of Allah and his religious leader and guide, and had even followed him and fought in the most dangerous battle at Badr. Viewed against this background, it would seem that the person who uttered such an accusation and those who considered the accusation as probable, formed a very poor opinion not only of their moral selves but also of the whole society.
13. That is, the accusation was not worth any consideration; the Muslims should have rejected it there and then as a lie and a falsehood. A question might be asked: Why did not the Prophet (peace be upon him) and Abu Bakr Siddiq reject it on the very first day, and why did they give it all that importance? The answer is that the position of the husband and the father is different from that of the common people. Though none else can know a woman better than her husband and a righteous husband cannot doubt the character of a virtuous and pious wife only on account of the people’s accusations, but when the wife is accused, the husband is placed in a difficult situation. Even if he rejects it outright as a calumny, the accusers will not listen. They will rather say that the woman is clever and has beguiled the husband into believing that she is virtuous and pious whereas she is not. A similar situation is faced by the parents. They also cannot remove the accusers’ slander regarding their daughter’s chastity even if they know that the accusation is manifestly false. The same thing had afflicted the Prophet (peace be upon him), Abu Bakr and Umm Ruman, otherwise they did not entertain any doubt about Aishah's character. That is why the Prophet (peace be upon him) had declared in his sermon that he had neither seen any evil in his wife nor in the man who was being mentioned in the slander.
14. “With Allah”: In the sight of Allah or in the law of Allah, or according to the law of Allah. Obviously, in Allah’s knowledge, the accusation was by itself false and its falsehood was in no way dependent on the production of witnesses by the accusers.
Here nobody should have the misunderstanding that failure to bring witnesses is being regarded as the basis and argument to prove that the accusation was false, and that the Muslims are also being told to regard it as a manifest calumny only because the accusers did not bring four witnesses. This misunderstanding can arise if one does not keep in view the background of the actual incident. As a matter of fact, none of the accusers had actually witnessed the thing which they were uttering with their tongues. The only basis of their accusation was that Aishah had been left behind from the caravan and afterwards Safwan had brought her to the camp on his camel. From this nobody with a little common sense could conclude that Aishah’s being left behind was intentional. These are not the ways of those who do these things. It cannot happen that the wife of the army commander quietly stays back with a man, and then the same man makes her ride on his camel and makes haste to catch up with the army at the next halting place in the open daylight at noon. The situation itself warranted that they were innocent. There could, however, be some justification in the charge if the accusers had seen something with their own eyes, otherwise the circumstances on which the accusers had based their accusation did not contain any ground for doubt and suspicion.
15. These verses, especially (verse 12), wherein Allah says: “Why did not the believing men and the believing women have a good opinion of themselves” provide the general principle that all dealings in the Islamic society must be based on good faith. The question of a bad opinion should arise only when there is a definite and concrete basis for it. Every person should, as a matter of principle, be considered as innocent unless there are sound reasons to hold him guilty or suspect. Every person should be considered as truthful unless there are strong grounds for holding him as unreliable.
16. The direct interpretation of the verse, in the context in which it occurs, is this: Those who cast aspersions, propagate evil, publicize it and bring Islamic morality into disrepute deserve punishment. The words in the text, however, comprehend all the various forms that can be employed for the propagation of evil. These include actual setting up of brothels, production of erotic stories, songs, paintings, plays and dramas as well as all kinds of mixed gatherings at clubs and hotels, which induce the people to immoralities. The Quran holds all those who resort to such things as criminals, who deserve punishment not only in the Hereafter but in this world as well. Accordingly, it is the duty of an Islamic government to put an end to all such means of propagating immorality. Its penal law must hold all those acts as cognizable offenses which the Quran mentions as crimes against public morality and declares the offenders punishable.
17. “You do not know”: You do not visualize the full impact of individual acts on society as a whole: Allah knows best the number of people who are affected by these acts and their cumulative effect on the collective life of the community. You should accordingly trust in Him and do all you can to eradicate and suppress the evils pointed out by Him. These are not trivial matters to be treated lightly; these have very serious repercussions and the offenders must be dealt with severely.
18. Satan is bent upon involving you in all kinds of pollutions and indecencies. Had it not been for the mercy and kindness of Allah Who enables you to differentiate between good and evil and helps you to educate and reform yourselves, you would not have been able to lead a pure and virtuous life on the strength of your own faculties and initiative alone.
19. It is Allah’s will alone which decides whom to make pious and virtuous. His decisions are not arbitrary but based on knowledge. He alone knows who is anxious to live a life of virtue and who is attracted towards a life of sin. Allah hears a person’s most secret talk, and is aware of everything that passes in his mind. It is on the basis of this direct knowledge that Allah decides whom to bless with piety and virtue and whom to ignore.