311- Ibn Ḥumayd narrated to us, he said: Salamah narrated to us, from Ibn Isḥāq, from Muḥammad ibn Abī Muḥammad, the client of Zayd ibn Thābit, from ʿIkrimah, or from Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, from Ibn ʿAbbās: "And for them, on account of their opposition to you, is a great punishment." He said: This is regarding the rabbis among the Jews, concerning the truth coming to you from your Lord that they denied after having known it (1).

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The discourse regarding the interpretation of His statement, majestic is His praise: ﴿And among the people are some who say, "We believe in Allah and in the Last Day," but they are not believers (8)﴾

Abū Jaʿfar said: As for His statement, "And among the people," there are two aspects regarding "the people":

One of them: That it is a plural with no singular form from its own word, and their singular [masculine] is "a person" (insān), and their female singular is "a female person" (insāna) (2).

And the other aspect: That its origin is "unās", from which the hamza was dropped due to frequent usage, and then the defining alif and lām entered it, so the lām—which entered with the alif for definition—was merged into the nūn, just as was said in {But as for me, He is Allah, my Lord} [Sūrat al-Kahf: 38], as we have explained regarding "the name of Allah" which is Allah (3). Some of them claimed that "al-nās" is a dialectal variant other than "unās", and that they heard the Arabs form its diminutive as "nuways" from "al-nās", and that if the origin had been "unās", it would have been said in the diminutive "unayis", being restored to its origin.

And all the scholars of interpretation unanimously agreed that this verse was revealed concerning a group among the people of Hypocrisy, and that this description is their description.