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wa-ʾidhā qīla lahum ʾanfiqū mimmā razaqakumu llāhu qāla lladhīna kafarū li-lladhīna ʾāmanū ʾa-nuṭʿimu man law yashāʾu llāhu ʾaṭʿamahū ʾin ʾantum ʾillā fī ḍalālin mubīnin
When they are told, ‘Spend out of what Allah has provided you,’ the faithless say to the faithful, ‘Shall we feed [someone] whom Allah would feed, if He wished? You are only in manifest error.’
— Ali Quli Qarai
Surah Ya-Sin - Verse 47
47. “And when it is said to them: ‘Spend out of what Allah has provided you with the sustenance, those who disbelieve say to those who believe: ‘Shall we feed him whom, if Allah willed, He could feed (Himself)? You are not but in a manifest error’.”
Man may reach a point where he considers infidelity and stinginess as a right path, and faith and charity as a deviated way. In this holy verse, the Qur’an refers to one of the important instances of their obstinacy and renouncement and, in this regard, it says:
This is the same very vulgarly logic which is propounded from the side of self-loving and niggardly persons who usually say: If so and so is poor, he has surely done something that Allah desires him to remain poor; and if we are rich we have necessarily done something that we are in the grace of Allah; therefore, neither their poverty nor our richness is not void of wisdom. They are heedless that the world is the field of trial. Allah tries someone with poverty and the other with wealth, and sometimes He puts one person under trial in both of them in different times.
He tries him whether he performs the rites of deposit, high-mindedness of nature, and gratitude, or he neglects all of them; and at the time he is wealthy whether he spends out what he has in his possession in the way of Allah, or not. Some commentators have adopted the above verse upon some particular groups, such as: the Jews, or Arab pagans, or a group of atheists and rejecters of the religions of the Divine prophets, but the apparent is that the verse has a general concept and in any time there can be found some examples for it, though the reference of its concept at the time of the revelation of the verse had been a number of the Jews or polytheists.
This has been a common pretext in the length of centuries that they say: if the giver of sustenance is Allah then why do you want us to give sustenance to the poor persons? And if Allah has wished they remain deprived then why do we help the one whom Allah has made deprived? They are unaware that sometimes the order of creation chooses something and the order of religion another thing. The order of creation has required such that Allah, the wise, puts the earth with all its merits at the man’s disposal and lets them free in their actions in order that they pave the path of development, and in the meantime He has set some instincts in him each of which leads him toward a direction.
And the order of religion has required such that, in order to control the instincts, purification of the carnal souls, and training men by the way of donation, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, and spending out, it appoints some laws and causes man to reach, by this way, the rank of Allah’s viceroy for which he has potentiality. By the way of Zakat (alms) they may purify their selves, and by means of charity they may wipe out miserliness, and thereby they dismiss the class division, which is the source of thousands of evils in man’s life.
This is just like that some persons say that what is the necessity in this that we study or teach others? If Allah desired, He would give knowledge to us all so that none was in need of learning knowledge. Does any wise person accept this logic? The Qur’anic sentence:
which has emphasized on their disbelief, points to this fact that these superstitious logics and pretexts originate from infidelity. Upon the commentary of the sentence:
it is said that its purpose is the speech of the pagans due to the believers. In fact, they wanted to be paid in their own coin opposite the believers and to attribute them to ‘a manifest error’,