These, our people: an allusion to the commanding soul and its faculties. For every people have a deity whom they worship, [that deity] being what they desire and seek, and the soul worships vain desire, as in where He says: Have you then seen him who has taken as his god his [own] vain desire [Q. 45:23]. Or [it is an allusion] to the people who lived at the time when each of them had gone forth summoning to God, since whoever cleaves to something which he desires then he worships it. Why [if what they claim is true] do they not bring regarding them, that is, regarding their worship of them, their divinity, their effect and their existence, some clear warrantḍ, some clear proof: this is an indication of the corrupted nature of [their] practice and a rebuke to the effect that to establish a proof for the divinity of something other than God or for the effect and existence of such [a thing] is impossible, as He Himself has said: These are nothing but names which you have named, you and your fathers. God has not revealed any warrant for them [Q. 53:23]. In other words, these [things] are mere names without objects named [by those names], since they are nothing [in reality].
