bought error at the price of guidance} is the meaning of buying that people commonly recognize, of exchanging one thing in place of another and taking a substitute for a substitute.

As for those who said: "The people were believers and then disbelieved," there is no burden upon them if the matter were as they described the people to be. Because if the matter were so, they would have left faith and taken disbelief as a substitute for guidance. And that is the understood meaning among the meanings of buying and selling. But the evidences from the beginning of the verses describing them to their end indicate that the people had never been illuminated by the light of faith, nor had they entered the religion of Islam. Do you not hear Allah—exalted be His praise—from when He began describing them until He concluded their characterization, describing them only as displaying falsehood with their tongues: by their claim of believing in our Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of God be upon him) and in what he brought, out of deception towards Allah, His Messenger, and the believers in their own minds, and out of mockery of the believers in their hearts, while concealing the opposite of what they manifested? Allah—majestic be His majesty—says (1): {And among the people are those who say, "We believe in Allah and in the Last Day," but they are not believers}, then He related their story up to His statement: {Those are the ones who bought error at the price of guidance}? So where is the indication that they were believers and then disbelieved?

So if the proponent of this view thought that His statement: "Those are the ones who bought error at the price of guidance" is the evidence that the people had been upon faith and then departed from it to disbelief, and that for this reason it was said to them "they bought"—that is an interpretation not conceded to him. This is because buying, according to his opponents, may mean taking one thing while leaving another, or it may be in the sense of choosing, or in other meanings. And when a word admits multiple meanings, no one has the right to direct its meaning to one of its senses to the exclusion of others except with a proof that must be submitted to.

Abū Jaʿfar said: The interpretation of the verse most fitting in my view is what we narrated from Ibn ʿAbbās and Ibn Masʿūd regarding their interpretation of His statement: {bought error at the price of guidance}: they took error and left guidance. That is because every disbeliever in Allah replaces faith with disbelief by acquiring the disbelief that stems from him instead of the faith he was commanded to have. Do you not hear Allah—exalted be His praise—saying concerning him who acquires disbelief in Him in place of faith in Him and His Messenger: {And whoever exchanges disbelief for faith has certainly strayed from the soundness of the way} [Sūrat al-Baqarah: 108]? And that is the very meaning of buying, because every buyer of something merely replaces that which is taken from him as an exchange with another thing as its substitute. Likewise, the hypocrite and the disbeliever replaced guidance with error and hypocrisy, so Allah caused them to stray and stripped them of the light of guidance, leaving them all in darknesses, unable to see.