Why does the Quran switch between He, We and I? 6 answers

The objection has a respectable history. Theodor Nöldeke, the German orientalist whose work on the Quran is still read, collected the Quran’s stylistic peculiarities in a study published in 1910. Among them he listed verses in which the speaker or the person spoken of changes without warning, and he wrote that “the grammatical persons change from time to time in the Qur’an in an unusual and not beautiful way.”^[1] Rudi Paret, in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, called 2:217 “rough”.^[2]

Neal Robinson, a British scholar of Islam who is not a Muslim, put the reader’s experience plainly. “For European readers,” he wrote, “one of the most disconcerting features of Qur’anic style is the frequent occurrence of unexpected (and apparently unwarranted) shifts from one pronoun to another.” Non-Muslim scholars, he added, “have tended either to regard these changes as solecisms or simply to ignore them.”^[3]

The experience is real and should be granted. An English translation that keeps the pronouns as they are will read awkwardly in places. The question is whether the awkwardness belongs to the Arabic or to the move from Arabic into a language that does not use the same device.

Iltifat means “turning”, from a person turning his face to the right and then to the left. The early philologists described the turn from one grammatical person to another in the second and third centuries of Islam: al-Farra, Abu Ubayda, Ibn Qutayba and al-Mubarrad all discuss it, and Ibn al-Mu’tazz, who died in 296 AH, gave it the name. Al-Zamakhshari, in the twelfth century, used it from the first pages of his commentary, and Ibn al-Athir and al-Zarkashi gave it the fullest treatment.^[4]

The poets used it before the Quran was revealed. Al-Zamakhshari quotes three lines of Imru’ al-Qays, the most famous poet of pre-Islamic Arabia, about a sleepless night. In them the poet addresses himself as “you”, then speaks of himself as “he”, then speaks as “I”. The rhetoricians called the device “the daring of the Arabic language”, and Ibn al-Athir counted the Quran’s use of it among “the remarkable things and exquisite subtleties” of the book.^[4]

The rhetoricians also set a rule. A departure from the expected form is admissible only when the situation calls for it; a departure without a purpose is a fault. So every turn of person invites the question why it falls where it does, and the commentators asked it verse by verse. Nöldeke, Abdel Haleem notes, judged his examples by grammar alone and never mentioned the term. Neither did several standard Western reference works on the style of the Quran.^[4]

Abdel Haleem counted the shifts. He found more than 140 turns from the third person to the first, nearly 100 from the first to the third, nearly 60 from the third to the second and under 30 from the second to the third. That is far more than the handful of stock examples in the rhetoric textbooks, and enough to test whether the turns fall عليه السلام at random.^[4]

They do not. Most of the verses Nöldeke cited concern rain, which he did not remark on, and in each one the turn to “We” comes at the moment God gives life to the land. “Who created the heavens and the earth, and sent down water for you from the sky, with which We caused gardens full of beauty to grow? It was not in your power to make their trees grow” (27:60). The closing words explain the turn: growth is the act God reserves for Himself, and at that point He speaks in His own voice. In 35:9 the turn comes as the clouds are driven “to a dead land”, and the verse draws the lesson: “so will the raising of the dead be.” In 13:4 the turn falls on the single point of the verse, that plots watered by the same water are made to differ in taste.^[5]

The same pattern runs through other verses on water, and the turn always lands on the point the verse is making. Abdel Haleem’s conclusion is that a longer sentence would have been needed to say as much without the shift, and that the meaning is never in doubt, because the verse speaks of God before and after the turn.^[4]

The Quran uses both the singular “I” and the plural “We” when God speaks, and the choice is not interchangeable. The plural of majesty, familiar from royal usage in many languages, appears where power is in view: creation, rain, revival, judgement. The singular appears where God’s oneness or nearness is in view. “He sends down the angels with the Spirit by His command upon whomever He wills of His servants: Warn that there is no god but Me, so be mindful of Me” (16:2). The subject is the unity of God, and so the verse turns to “Me”, in the singular. Robinson notes the same in 39:16: “My servants, be mindful of Me.”^[3][6]

The turns run in both directions. In 20:124 a verse about “My reminder” turns to “We shall raise him blind on the Day of Resurrection”, where the power to raise the dead is in view. In the story of Adam the turn goes the other way: “We said, ‘Go down from it, all of you. When guidance comes to you from Me, whoever follows My guidance will have no fear’” (2:38). Robinson reads this as a turn from majesty to intimacy at the point where guidance is promised.^[3][6]

Robinson points to a further purpose in the openings of sura 75 and similar suras. “No, I swear by the Day of Resurrection, and no, I swear by the self-reproaching soul. Does man think that We will not gather his bones?” (75:1-3). The oaths in the singular establish direct speech. The turn to the plural, he argues, guards the reader against supposing that it is Muhammad (peace be upon him) who swears.^[3][6]

This answers the question “who is speaking?” more directly than any other feature. In 69:40-47 the Quran answers those who called it the work of a poet or a soothsayer: it is “a revelation from the Lord of the worlds.” Then the voice changes: “Had he invented some sayings in Our name, We would have seized him by the right hand, then cut his life-artery, and none of you could have shielded him.” Robinson observes that the turn from talk about “the Lord of the worlds”, which makes Him seem distant and transcendent, to God’s own speech in the first person is meant to shock, and that it sets the Messenger outside the speech as its object.^[3][7]

The opening of sura 17 does the same. “Glory be to Him who took His servant by night” is the language of worship, and the words “His servant” show that the speaker is not the servant. The verse then turns to “We”: “whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him some of Our signs.” In 20:113-114 a passage in the first person plural, “So We have sent it down as an Arabic Quran”, turns to praise in the third person: “Exalted is God, the King, the Truth.” Robinson reads the turn as a statement that it is God, and not the Messenger, who is to be exalted.^[3][7]

Even the best-known case works this way. The opening chapter praises God as “Lord of the worlds, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy, Master of the Day of Judgement”, and then turns: “You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help” (1:2-5). The worshipper who has spoken about God turns to face Him. In 39:53 the Messenger is told to say, “My servants who have wronged yourselves, do not despair of the mercy of God.” The servants are God’s, and the Messenger is the one who conveys the words. On this point al-Faruqi’s first principle and the grammar of the Quran agree: Creator and creature are kept apart, and no line of the text lets the Messenger take the speaker’s place.^[7]

Some shifts involve more than pronouns. Robinson ends his survey with 10:22-23, a passage he says “non-Muslim scholars have frequently treated with scorn.” It begins by addressing people at sea in the second person, “until, when you are in ships”, turns to “they” as the storm comes and they pray, and returns to “you” and then to “We” for the warning: “to Us is your return.” Robinson argues that the turn to “they” lets the hearers see themselves from outside, as God sees them, and that the turn back marks God’s rebuke. Al-Zarkashi gave the same reason centuries earlier.^[3][8]

Mustansir Mir took on 2:217, the verse Paret called rough. “They ask you about fighting in the sacred month. Say: Fighting in it is a grave matter, but barring people from the path of God, and disbelief in Him, and the Sacred Mosque, and expelling its people from it, are graver in the sight of God.” The difficulty is that “and disbelief in Him” stands between “the path of God” and “the Sacred Mosque”, which belong together. Al-Tabari, al-Zamakhshari, al-Farra, al-Razi and Abu Hayyan each proposed a grammatical solution, and Mir argues that none is fully satisfying.^[9]

His own answer is rhetorical. Elsewhere the Quran names disbelief as the cause of barring people from the path of God and from the Sacred Mosque (8:36; 48:25). In 2:217 the cause is placed in the middle of the list of its effects, as a parenthesis with something of a sardonic edge: you ask why these things were done; this is why. Any other order, Mir argues, would lose that emphasis. He adds a general caution: a seeming departure from the rules of grammar should alert the reader to rhetoric before it is called an error.^[9][10]

Abdel Haleem applies the same reasoning to 4:162, where one phrase in a list takes an unexpected case ending. The report that A’isha blamed the scribes for it, he notes, comes through a chain that includes Abu Mu’awiya, whom Ahmad ibn Hanbal and al-Tirmidhi faulted, and none of the six canonical hadith collections includes it. Al-Zamakhshari held that only someone who did not know how the Arabs single out a phrase with the accusative could call the verse an error. The site’s article on the claim of grammatical errors in the Quran takes that verse in full.^[4]