Ṭāhā

قَالَ لَهُمْ مُّوسَي وَيْلَكُمْ لاَ تَفْتَرُوا عَلَي اللَّهِ كَذِباً فَيُسْحِتَكُم بِعَذَابٍ وَقَدْ خَابَ مَنِ افْتَرَي

فَتَنَازَعُوا أَمْرَهُم بَيْنَهُمْ وَأَسَرُّوا النَّجْوَي

61. “Moses said to them: ‘Woe to you! Do not forge a lie against Allah, lest He destroy you with a chastisement, and indeed he who forges (a lie) fails.”
62. “Then they disputed upon their affair among themselves and kept the discourse secret.”

At last, the appointed day came. Moses (as) was standing in front of the crowd of people. A crowd among which there were some sorcerers, the number of them, as some commentators have said, was seventy two men. Some other commentators have said that they were four hundred magicians, or more than that. Another group of that crowd were companions of Pharaoh and Pharaoh himself. And, finally, the third group of them, which formed the majority of the crowd, was the ordinary people who had come to watch the event.

At this time, Moses turned his face toward the sorcerers, or the companions of Pharaoh and sorcerers, and, as the verse says:

The purpose of Moses (as) from saying:

was something or someone that was considered as a partner of Allah; or that they attributed sorcery to the Miracles of the Messenger of Allah and accepted Pharaoh as their god. This very decisive word of Moses, whose tone was the tone of the invitation of all true prophets and had no similarity to the word of the sorcerers, affected on the minds of some people and produced a kind of divergence between the beliefs of the crowd. Some of them demanded the gravity of action, while some others fell in doubt and uncertainty, and probabled that Moses was a great prophet of Allah and his warnings might be actual; in particular that his plain clothes and the clothing of his brother, Aaron, were the same simple clothing of a shepherd.

In spite of their loneliness, there was not seen any faint or weakness in their decided faces. This was counted as another evidence for the nobility of their sayings and programs. Therefore, the Qur’an says:

Thus, you ought to enjoin good and forbid evil, then if it does not affect on some people at least, in some others may create doubt. However, considering the divine miracles as sorcery, is a forging against Allah; and a calumniator against Allah both fails in this world and will be punished in the next world. Before bringing a miracle, of course, teaching people and warning them is necessary.