Tafsir of Ash-Shu`ara' 26:224

"And the poets—the deviators follow them."

This is presented to further exonerate him (peace and blessings be upon him) from being one of the poets, God forbid, and to invalidate the claim of the disbelievers that the Quran is a form of poetry. The obvious meaning derived from this is rhymed, metered speech. For this reason, many exegetes have said: They accused him (peace and blessings be upon him) of producing rhymed, metered poetry, to the extent that they interpreted parts of the Quran that happened to be rhythmic—with the slightest alteration—as such.

Examples include His saying: "And do not kill the soul which Allah has forbidden" (17:33), which, by this consideration, constitutes a hemistich of the Tawil meter; and His saying: "Indeed, Qarun was from the people of Moses" (28:76), which would be from the Madid meter; and His saying: "So they became such that nothing could be seen except their dwellings" (46:25), which would be from the Basit meter; and His saying: "Unquestionably, away with 'Aad, the people of Hud" (11:95), which would be from the Wafir meter; and His saying: "Invoke blessings upon him and ask [Allah to] send him peace" (33:56), which would be from the Kamil meter, among others which they extracted from the Quran across all poetic meters. They even extracted what resembles a complete verse, such as His saying: "And He will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people" (9:14).

This has been criticized by noting that they did not intend this specific meaning when they leveled this accusation against him (peace and blessings be upon him). It is not hidden from the most obtuse of non-Arabs, let alone the eloquent Arabs, that the Quran brought by him (peace and blessings be upon him) does not follow the styles of poetry. They only called him a poet because of the Quran he brought. The extraction of the aforementioned examples and their like is merely a testament to the Quran's extreme eloquence and fluidity; it was not brought with the intention of versification. If the potential to extract metered speech were the criterion for something being poetry, then many children would be poets, as much of their speech allows for such extraction.

The evident interpretation is that they intended to accuse him (peace and blessings be upon him)—God forbid, and again God forbid—of producing imaginative speech that has no basis in truth. Since this is characteristic of poets who produce metered speech, they referred to him (peace and blessings be upon him) as a "poet" and to what he brought as "poetry."

The meaning of the verse is: "The poets—the ghawun (deviators), those who stray from the right path, are confused in what they do and what they leave, and do not persist upon a single course in their actions, words, and states—follow them," and not the people of rectitude who are guided to the path of truth and remain steadfast upon it.

According to al-Zamakhshari, the limitation (exclusivity) is derived from the syntactic construction of "the poets—the deviators follow them," just as he established in the interpretation of His saying: "Allah mocks them" (2:15), and His saying: "And Allah determines the night and the day" (73:20). Those who do not perceive a limitation in this type of construction derive it from the appropriate attribute; that is, "deviation" is made the cause of the following, so when [the cause] is negated [in others], [the effect] is negated.