ۗ ۘ ۗ
And those who do not know said: Why does The God not speak to us, or a sign come to us? Those before them likewise said something like what they said. Their hearts have become alike. We have indeed made the signs clear for a people who are certain.
A few verses earlier, in Al-Baqarah 2:113, we encountered this same description:
“Those who do not know.”
Now it appears again, but this time the verse shows another way of confronting truth:
“Why does The God not speak to us, or a sign come to us?”
The problem is not that a person asks for evidence. The Qur’an itself repeatedly calls people to see, listen, reason, and bring proof. The issue arises when someone sets aside the signs before them and says: I will accept the truth only if it comes in the form I expect. God must speak to me personally, or bring me a sign that meets my demand. In this approach, a person has set conditions for acceptance before examining the evidence.
This demand takes other forms in the Qur’an. In Al-Baqarah 2:55, a group said to Moses:
“We will not believe you until we see God openly.”
An-Nisa 4:153 recalls the same demand. In Al-An‘am 6:124, a group says:
“We will not believe until we are given the like of what the messengers of The God were given.”
In Al-Muddaththir 74:52, each expects to receive unfurled scriptures addressed to them personally. Al-Isra 17:90–93 reports a series of other demands, from opening the earth and bringing forth a spring to the descent of angels and ascending into heaven. Al-Furqan 25:21 also says:
“Why have angels not been sent down to us, or why do we not see our Lord?”
The requests differ, but the same danger appears in all of them: truth is accepted only if it appears in a form the person has already prescribed for it.
Reading this verse alongside the preceding two makes their connection clearer. Al-Baqarah 2:116 rejected the attribution of a child, and verse 117 described The God as “the Originator of the heavens and the earth.” There, we could not measure His existence and creation against the patterns of His creatures’ lives. Here, too, we cannot make our own expectations the standard and insist that He must speak to us or show us truth only through the route we have specified.
When someone sets aside what God has shown and relies on expectations of their own making, their personal conception may gradually take the place of truth. They then attribute words or a position to God that He has not expressed. Such an attribution is not always merely a slip in expression. It can reveal that, from the outset, the person has viewed truth through their own expectations.
This verse does not, however, establish that this demand directly led people to believe that a person was God’s child or God Himself. It states no such historical connection. What we can see across these discussions is a shared danger: a person does not know something, but instead of investigating, fills the gap with their own expectations and imaginings, then makes that image the standard for knowing God and truth.
The Qur’an then shows that this conduct is not confined to one generation:
“Those before them likewise said something like what they said.”
The verse does not name those earlier people. What matters is the likeness of their speech. But the verse does not stop there:
“Their hearts have become alike.”
The similarity is therefore not merely in the sentences they uttered. The Qur’an attributes it to their hearts. Generations may be far apart and use different words, yet resemble one another in how they respond to truth.
By naming their hearts, the Qur’an turns our attention from the statements to the people making them. The issue is not simply a mistake in their reasoning. A sign stands before a person, but their response does not depend only on how much information they possess. What they inwardly want, and the readiness with which they approach the sign, also affect whether they accept or reject it.
Al-An‘am 6:7 makes this particularly clear. Even if a written scripture were sent down to the Prophet and they touched it with their own hands, those who had rejected truth would still say:
“This is nothing but manifest magic.”
We therefore cannot always say that a stronger, more tangible sign, or one matching a person’s wishes, would resolve the problem. Sometimes the difficulty has gone beyond the absence of a sign.
The ending of Al-Baqarah 2:118 expresses this point with a telling distinction. They ask:
“Or a sign come to us?”
But the answer is:
“We have indeed made the signs clear.”
They ask for a single sign; the answer speaks of signs. The problem is not always the absence of evidence. Signs may already stand before a person, while they recognize as a sign only what conforms to their own expectation.
The verse began with “those who do not know” and ends with “a people who are certain.” Between these two descriptions, it spoke of hearts that had become alike.
Not knowing is one side of the matter; certainty is the other. But the journey from one to the other is not made simply by demanding more signs. The signs must be seen and understood, and a person must be ready to accept truth as it becomes apparent, not only when it agrees with their prior expectations.
Here lies the danger facing “those who do not know”: not knowing can begin a search. But if the absence of knowledge is filled with a person’s own expectations, that same lack of knowledge can become a veil before signs that have already been made clear.