{And the Day He will gather them all...}

{And the Day He will gather them all}—meaning the arrogant and the oppressed, or both groups, and what they used to worship besides Allah, the Almighty and Majestic. "The Day" is an adverbial modifier for an implicit verb that either precedes it—meaning "And remember the Day"—or follows it—meaning "And on the Day We shall gather them all."

{Then He will say to the angels}—the rest of the verse—there will be states and terrors that the scope of speech cannot encompass. The apparent implication of the conjunction "then" (thumma) is that the address to the angels is delayed relative to the gathering. There are traditions that attest to this; it has been narrated that after the creation is gathered, they will remain standing at the station for seven thousand years without being spoken to, until our Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—intercedes for the commencement of judgment. Perhaps it is at that time that He, the Exalted, will say to the angels—peace be upon them—{Is it you that these used to worship?}, for the purpose of rebuking the polytheists, silencing them, and causing them to despair of the empty hopes they attached to the intercession of the angels—peace be upon them—because He, the Exalted, knows what they will answer, in the manner of His saying to Jesus, peace be upon him: {Did you say to the people, 'Take me and my mother as deities besides Allah?'}.

They are singled out for mention because they are the most noble of the partners worshiped by the polytheists who possess no scripture, and they are usually the ones fit to be addressed. Their worship was the origin of polytheism, based on what Ibn al-Wardi mentioned in his history: that the cause of the emergence of idol worship among the Arabs was that 'Amr ibn Luhayy passed by a people in the Levant and saw them worshiping idols. He asked them, and they said, "These are lords we take in the likeness of the celestial structures, seeking their aid and their rain." So he followed them and brought an idol back with him to the Hejaz and tempted the Arabs, so they worshiped it, and idol worship continued among them until Islam came. The worship of Jesus—peace be upon him—occurred long after that. Thus, by demonstrating their inability to attain the status of divinity and their dissociation from being worshiped, the state of the other partners is revealed through the principle of priority (a fortiori).

{These} is the subject (mubtada'), and {used to worship} is its predicate. {You} is the object of {worship}, placed before the verb for the sake of the verse ending, although it is also more important for the purpose of rebuke. The placement of the object has been used as evidence for the permissibility of advancing the predicate of kana if it is a sentence, as Ibn al-Sarraj maintained; for the advancement of the governed element (ma'mul) signals the permissibility of advancing the governor ('amil). Abu Hayyan critiqued this, saying that this rule is not universal. He then said: "It is better to forbid this unless there is evidence of its permissibility heard from the Arabs." The majority of the reciters read {We will gather them, then We will say} with the letter Nun in both verbs.