The Story
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[28:63]
[whereupon] they against whom the word [of truth] shall thus stand revealed will exclaim: "O our Sustainer! Those whom we caused to err so grievously, we but caused to err as we ourselves had been erring. We [now] disavow them before Thee: it was not us that they worshipped!"

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* v.63 : I.e., in the very fact of God’s calling them to account (cf. 27:82 and the corresponding note 73). As the sequence shows, the persons thus addressed are the “leaders of thought” supposed to have set the community’s faulty standards of social behaviour and moral valuation; and since they are primarily responsible for the wrong direction which their followers have taken, they will be the first to suffer in the life to come.
* I.e., “we did not lead them astray out of malice, but simply because we ourselves had been led astray by our predecessors.” This “answer” is, of course, evasive, but it is quoted here to show that man’s attachment to false – but, nevertheless, almost deified – values and concepts based on stark materialism is, more often than not, a matter of “social continuity”: in other words, the validity of those materialistic pseudo-values is taken for granted simply because they are time-honoured, with every generation blindly subscribing to the views held by their forebears. In its deepest sense, this passage – as so many similar ones throughout the Qur’ān – points to the moral inadmissibility of accepting an ethical or intellectual proposition as true on no other grounds than that it was held to be true by earlier generations.
* In other words, they were but wont to worship their own passions and desires projected onto extraneous beings. See in this connection 10:28 and the corresponding notes, especially note 46; also 34:41 and note 52.