From the translation by Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss)

About the translator:
Muhammad Asad, Leopold Weiss, was born of Jewish parents in Livow, Austria (later Poland) in 1900, and at the age of 22 made his first visit to the Middle East. He later became an outstanding foreign correspondent for the Franfurter Zeitung, and after his conversion to Islam travelled and worked throughout the Muslim world, from North Africa to as far east as Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. After years of devoted study he became one of the leading Muslim scholars of our age. His translation of the Holy Qur’an is one of the most lucid and well-referenced works in this category, dedicated to “li-qawmin yatafakkaroon” (For people who think).

Chapter 49, verses 12 – 13

O you who have attained to faith! Avoid most guesswork [about one another] [ 1 ] – for, behold, some of such guesswork is [in itself] a sin; and do not spy upon one another, and neither allow yourselves to speak ill of one another behind your backs Would any of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? Nay, you would loathe it! And be conscious of God. Verily, God is an acceptor of repentance, a dispenser of grace!
O men! Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another. [ 2 ] Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all-knowing, all-aware.

Translator’s Notes

[ 1 ] I.e., guesswork that may lead to unfounded suspicion of another person’s motives.
[ 2 ] I.e., know that all belong to one human family, without any inherent superiority of one over another. This connects with the exhortation, in the preceding two verses, to respect and safeguard each other’s dignity. In other words, men’s evolution into “nations and tribes” is meant to foster rather than to diminish their mutual desire to understand and appreciate the essential human oneness underlying their outward differentiations; and, correspondingly, all racial, national or tribal prejudice is condemned – implicitly in the Qur’an, and most explicitly by the Prophet: cf. his famous saying, “He is not of us who proclaims the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who fights in the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who dies in the cause of tribal partisanship”. When he was asked to explain the meaning of “tribal partisanship”, the Prophet answered, “It means helping thine own people in an unjust cause.” In addition, speaking of people’s boasting of their national or tribal past, the Prophet said: “Behold God has removed from you the arrogance of pagan ignorance with its boast of ancestral glories. Man is but a God-conscious believer or an unfortunate sinner. All people are children of Adam, and Adam was created out of dust.”

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