Al-Baqarah: ( 54 ) And when Moses said...

(And when Moses said to his people, "O my people, indeed you have wronged yourselves by your taking of the calf") This is a blessing of the hereafter regarding those of the Children of Israel who were killed, in that they attained the rank of martyrs, just as the pardon was a worldly blessing for those who remained. They were separated by His saying: (And when We gave Moses...), because the intent was the enumeration of blessings; if they had been connected, they would have become a single blessing. It has been said: This verse and what follows it is disconnected from the preceding reminders of blessings, but this is baseless.

The lam in (to his people) is for the purpose of conveying. The benefit of mentioning this is to alert that the address of Moses to his people was face-to-face, not through an intermediary as in the previously mentioned addresses to the Children of Israel. "People" (qawm) is a collective noun with no singular form from its own root; its singular is imru', and by rule, it should not be pluralized, yet the plural aqawim occurs as an anomaly. It is famously restricted to men, based on His saying: (Let not a people mock another people) alongside (nor women another women). Zuhair said: "I do not know, and I might know, is the qawm the tribe of Hisn, or the women?" It is said: It is not restricted to them, but applied to women as well, due to His saying: (Indeed, We sent Noah to his people). The first view is more correct; the inclusion of women is by way of consequence and dominance (taghlib), and using a metaphor is better than commonality. Men are called qawm because they stand (yaqumun) for what women do not.

Moses’ approaching them with the vocative and calling them (O my people) signals his tenderness toward them, that he is of them and they are of him, and it stirs them to accept the command of repentance after he had reproached them that they (wronged themselves). The ba in (by your taking) is causal. In "taking" here, there are the two possibilities mentioned previously.

(So repent to your Creator) The fa is for causality, because the wrongdoing is the cause for repentance. What follows it is conjoined to (indeed you have wronged). Congruence in declarative and imperative expressions is only required in conjunction with waw. Some people's expressions suggest it is for causality rather than conjunction; the investigation concludes it is for both together.

The (Creator / Bari') is He who created the creation free from disparity, lack of proportion in limbs, or incompatibility of parts—such as one hand being extremely small and thin while the other is the opposite—and distinguished one from another by characteristics, forms, beauty, and ugliness. Thus, it is more specific than the "Creator" (Khaliq). The root of the word implies the purity of a thing and its separation from other things, either by way of removal—like the recovery (bur’) of a patient—or creation—like God creating Adam, meaning He created him initially distinct from the impurities of clay. Mentioning Him in this context is a reproach for their abandonment of the worship of the All-Knowing, Wise One who created them with His subtle wisdom, until they exposed themselves to the wrath of God and the descent of His command to dismantle the creation He had assembled and scatter the forms and shapes He had organized, because they did not thank Him for that blessing and belittled it by worshiping one who is incapable of any of that—which is an example of stupidity and dull-wittedness.

(So kill your own selves) The fa is for sequence. What is suggested by "killing" is the known killing, the snuffing out of life, and upon this are a group of commentators. The verb is conjoined to its predecessor. If their repentance was the killing—either specifically for them or as the repentance of the apostate generally in the Law of Moses (peace be upon him)—then the intent of His saying (So repent) is "resolve to repent" so that the conjunction is valid. If it is regret, and the killing is one of its completions—like making restitution for grievances in our Law—then it is upon its literal meaning and there is no problem. It may be said that repentance was made synonymous with the killing for them, and there is no need to interpret "repent" as "resolve"; rather, the fa is made for explication, or the waw is used for it, as has been said regarding His saying: (So We took retribution from them, and We drowned them in the sea).

The outward meaning of the command is that each of them was ordered to kill himself. In some traditions, it is mentioned that they were ordered to kill one another. The meaning of (kill your own selves) is then "let some of you kill others," as in His saying: (And do not kill your own selves) and (and do not insult one another), for believers are as one soul. It is narrated that those who did not worship the calf were ordered to kill those who did. The meaning is "surrender your souls to be killed," and surrendering to killing is called killing by way of metaphor. The killer is either unspecified, or it was those who remained apart with Aaron (peace be upon him), or those who were with Moses (peace be upon him). Regarding the manner of the killing, there are narrations we will not prolong by mentioning. The total number of the killed was seventy thousand, and upon its completion, the repentance descended, and the swords fell from their hands.

Judge Abd al-Jabbar denied that God commanded the Children of Israel to kill themselves, saying: "That is not permitted rationally, for the command is for the benefit of the morally responsible person, and after the killing, there is no state of moral responsibility to hold any benefit." This judge did not know that our souls have a Creator, by whose command we keep them and by whose command we annihilate them, and that after this life—which is play and amusement—they have an eternal life and everlasting bliss, and that the Home of the Hereafter is truly the life. Killing them by His command delivers them to a life better than it. Whoever knows that man in this world is like a soldier stationed at a frontier guarding it, or a governor in a land managing it, and that whenever he is summoned, there is no difference between the King ordering him to leave by himself or ordering another to remove him, will understand this. This is clear to one who has conceived the states of the world and the Hereafter and knows the value of the two lives and the two deaths in them.

Some people permitted it but deemed its occurrence unlikely, saying: The meaning of (kill your own selves) is "humble yourselves." Among this is the saying: "The one you gave me, and I returned it... you killed it, you killed it, so bring it, for it was not killed." If the narrations were not to the contrary, I would have adopted this as an interpretation. It is reported from Qatada that he read (fa-aqilu anfusakum) [meaning: "relieve your souls"] and the meaning is that your souls have become embroiled in the punishment of God through this great deed you committed and have perished, so relieve them through repentance, adhering to obedience, and removing the traces of those sins by manifesting acts of obedience.

(That is best for you with your Creator) This is a parenthetical sentence to incite repentance or to provide the reason for the signifier of the source implied by what preceded. "Best" (khayr) is a superlative whose hamza has been elided. They pronounce it in poetry; the Rajaz poet said: "Bilal is the best of people and the son of the best." It sometimes comes without the meaning of comparison. The meaning is that "that is better for you" than disobedience and persisting in sin, or better than the fruit of disobedience, which is eternal destruction. The speech is on the same order as "honey is sweeter than vinegar," or it is "best of the best" for you. "Withness" here is metaphorical. He repeated the "Creator" (Bari') with a noun to show concern for urging total submission to Him in every state and receiving what comes from Him with acceptance and compliance. For just as He saw creation as favorable and so created, He saw annihilation as favorable and so commanded it, and He is the All-Knowing, the Wise.

(So He accepted your repentance) This is the answer to a conditional clause that is elided, with the estimation "it has been," if it is from the speech of Moses (peace be upon him) to them; its estimation is: "If you do what you were commanded, then He has accepted your repentance." It is conjoined to an elided clause if it is an address from God to them, as if He said: "You did what you were commanded, so He accepted your repentance." It contains a shift in person (iltifat) because of the preceding reference to them in the speech of Moses (peace be upon him) using the word "people," which is of the category of third-person reference, or from the first person to the third in "accepted" (taba), as He did not say: "We accepted your repentance." Conjunction is favored because it is safe from the omission of the particle and the condition while keeping the answer, and there is controversy among the Arabs regarding the establishment of this. The outward meaning of the verse is that it is a report about those commanded to kill who complied with it.

Ibn Atiyyah said: God made the killing of those who were killed a testimony, and He "accepted" the repentance of those who remained and "pardoned" them. Thus, the meaning of (upon you) according to him is "upon your remainder." (He is the Oft-Forgiving, the Merciful) This is a suffix to His saying: (So repent), for since repentance through killing was arduous upon the soul, He, Glorified be He, eased it by being the One who grants success toward it, facilitates it, and exaggerates in bestowing blessings upon those who perform it. Or it is a suffix to His saying: (So He accepted your repentance), and "repentance" from Him, Exalted be He, is then interpreted as the acceptance of the repentance of the sinners. The emphasis is for the sake of the preceding allusion or for the sake of the concern for the content of the sentence. If the pronoun in the objective case is for the "matter" (sha'n), then the nominative pronoun is the subject, which is more suitable as it indicates perfect concern for the content of the sentence. If it returns to the Creator, Glorified be He, then the nominative pronoun is either a separator or the subject.

This is it, and the portion of the Gnostic from this story is to know that his soul/desire is in the status of the calf of the Children of Israel, so he should not take it as a god—"Have you seen the one who takes his desire as his god?"—and that God, Exalted be He, has created his soul in an original nature ready to accept the influx of God and the upright religion, and prepared to follow the straight path and ascend to the Presence of Sanctity and the Court of Intimacy. This is the Book that was given to the heart of Moses, and the Furqan (Criterion) by which one is guided by its light in the nights of the journey to the Divine Presence. So whenever the soul clings to the earth, follows its desire, and prefers its passions over its Lord, it is commanded to be killed by crushing its passions and uprooting its desires, so that its survival after annihilation and its waking after erasing may be valid. True repentance is nothing but the erasing of humanity by affirming Divinity. This is the Greater Jihad and the "Red Death."

"He who dies and is thus put to rest is not truly dead; the dead is he who is dead among the living." This is difficult and only possible for the elect of the Truth and the men of sincerity, and to this is the reference: "Die before you die." It is said: The first step in servitude is the destruction of the soul and its killing by abandoning desires and cutting it off from pleasures; so how can one reach any of the stations of the truthful and the ascents of those brought near? Far, far from us! That is isolated from us, and the Pleiades are the object of our desire. Come, let us hold a funeral for our sorrows, for the sad one consoles the sad.