Yet there be people who take to themselves compeers idols besides God that is other than God loving them by magnifying them and being subservient to them as God is loved that is as their love of Him; but those who believe love God more ardently than those who love their compeers because the former never reject God whereas the latter when faced with hardship soon abandon those compeers for God; If he if you O Muhammad (s) were to see those who did evil by taking to themselves compeers when idh here denotes idhā they see read either as active yarawna ‘they see’ or passive yurawna ‘they are made to see’ the chastisement you would see a grave sight that this is because the might the power and the vanquishing altogether a circumstantial qualifier belongs to God and that God is terrible in chastisement according to one reading the person listening to the verse governs the verb yarā ‘he sees’ and constitutes the subject of the clause; according to another reading it is the ‘evildoers’ who constitute the subject of the clause and govern the verb yarā; and so it yarā has the sense of ya‘lam ‘he knows’; the particle an ‘that’ and what comes after it have taken the place of the objects in both cases; the response to the initial conditional law ‘if’ has been omitted. The general meaning of the verse then is ‘If they were aware in this world of the severity of God’s chastisement and of the fact that power is God’s alone the moment they come to see it with their own eyes on the Day of Resurrection they would not take to themselves compeers’.
