The same root appears elsewhere in the Quran in contexts that illuminate its range. In 5:33, qaṭaʿa is used in the context of crucifixion and severing of limbs as a form of capital punishment—clearly indicating amputation. But in 12:31, the same root describes the women at the governor’s wife’s feast who, upon seeing Joseph, qaṭaʿa their hands—not severing them, but cutting themselves with the knives they were holding in distracted amazement. And in 12:50, the same word appears again in a similar domestic context carrying the same non-amputative sense. The word, in other words, can mean anything from a superficial cut to complete severance depending on context—and in 5:38, the context does not resolve which is intended.
Sex Slaves
Twice the Quran addresses the permissible boundaries of sexual relations, and twice it uses the same construction to define the second permissible category beyond one’s spouse.
[23:5 & 70:29] And they guard their chastity.
[23:6 & 70:30] Only with their spouses, or “ malkat aymānuhum “ (do they have sexual relations); they are not to be blamed.
The expression mā malakat aymānuhum (مَا مَلَكَتْ أَيْمَـٰنُهُمْ) literally means “what their right hands possess”—a construction that is itself already figurative and therefore open. The expression in the Quran is used in various ways, including for servants, subordinates, and captives. But it also signifies a common-law or contractual union that falls outside the formal marriage structure. Each of these readings is linguistically defensible. None is forced on the text.
The stakes of this ambiguity are not academic. The majority interpretation throughout Islamic history has understood the expression to permit sexual relations with one’s slaves or captives, and this reading was used to justify practices with serious human consequences across centuries of Islamic civilization. Those who argue against this reading point to the numerous contradictions such an understanding creates within the Quran itself—the prohibition on aggression (2:190), the declaration that oppression is worse than murder (2:191), the command that only mutually acceptable transactions are permitted (4:29), and the explicit instruction to be kind to those under one’s care (4:36). There is also a structural problem: the verse frames the permission as a mutual one, mirroring the mutuality of the spousal relationship listed alongside it—yet if mā malakat aymānuhum means “what their right hand possesses,” the permission runs only one way, meaning the servant would be sinning even in a consensual encounter since their right hand possesses nothing. An alternative reading understands the expression through the root malaka (م ل ك), which carries the meaning of marriage and covenant alongside possession, and aymān (أَيْمَـٰنُهُمْ), which can mean oaths rather than right hands—rendering the phrase as something closer to a common-law union sealed by mutual pledge rather than a license for exploitation.
What is notable for the purposes of this article is not which interpretation is correct, but the fact that the author of the Quran selected this particular expression at precisely the point where precision would have mattered most. A text intent on foreclosing the possibility of sexual exploitation had other options available—clearer, more restrictive language that would have left no room for the slave-concubine reading. Instead, the same multi-meaning expression appears twice, in two separate surahs, in identical constructions. Whether the ambiguity is a permission, a test, or a reflection of the social realities the text was navigating, the door was left open.
Dietary Prohibition & Dedication
The Quran establishes its dietary prohibitions in four passages that are largely consistent with one another, listing the same core categories of forbidden food:
2:173 He only prohibited for you the dead animal, the blood, the flesh of swine, and what was dedicated to other than GOD.
5:3 Prohibited for you are the dead animal, the blood, the flesh of swine, and what was dedicated to other than GOD.
6:145 Say, “I do not find in what was revealed to me anything forbidden for a person who eats it, except for a dead animal, running blood, the flesh of swine—which is unclean—or a sinful offering dedicated to other than GOD.”
16:115 He only prohibited for you the dead animal, the blood, the flesh of swine, and what was dedicated to other than GOD. If one is forced to eat these, without being deliberate or malicious, then GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful.
The first three categories are concrete and unambiguous—carrion, blood, and meat of pigs leave little room for interpretive dispute. The fourth category, however, is a different matter. The Arabic expression mā uhilla bihi li-ghayri Allāh (مَا أُهِلَّ بِهِۦ لِغَيْرِ ٱللَّهِ)—literally “that over which other than God’s name has been invoked”—is specific enough to be clear in its prohibition while remaining open enough to generate genuine disagreement about its scope.
The traditional understanding confines the prohibition to animal slaughter. On this reading, the expression refers exclusively to meat from animals over which a name other than God’s was pronounced at the moment of slaughter—a practice common in pre-Islamic Arabia where animals were sacrificed to idols or other deities. The prohibition is therefore ritual in nature: it concerns the dedication of the slaughter, not the food category itself. Plant-based foods, grains, and anything not requiring slaughter fall entirely outside its scope, since there is no act of consecration attached to their production.
A broader reading, however, notes that the verb uhilla (أُهِلَّ)—from the root meaning to proclaim, declare, or raise one’s voice—is not inherently limited to the act of slaughtering animals. It can refer to any food that is formally dedicated, offered, or consecrated to a deity as part of a religious rite. On this reading, food offered at religious festivals, blessed in the name of other gods, or produced as part of a non-Islamic devotional practice could fall under the same prohibition—regardless of whether it involves meat. This would extend the restriction to, for example, food offerings at non-Abrahamic religious ceremonies, prasad distributed at Hindu temples, or any product ritually consecrated to a deity.
The practical stakes of this distinction are not trivial. In religiously plural societies, the question of whether Muslims may eat food that has been blessed or offered in a non-Islamic religious context—but that contains no meat—turns entirely on how broadly one reads this expression. The standard position has generally kept the prohibition narrow, applying it only to slaughtered animals. But the verse can be read as leaving the boundary of what was dedicated to other than God without a ceiling, and different readers have drawn the line in different places.
Biblical Clarification
The Quran states that one of its functions is to settle disputes among the Children of Israel.
27:76 This Quran settles many issues for the Children of Israel; issues that they are still disputing.
Did Israel the Man or Israel the People Restrict Food?
The Quran makes a striking historical claim about the origins of certain dietary restrictions among the Children of Israel, tracing them not to the Mosaic law but to an earlier, self-imposed prohibition:
3:93 All food was lawful for the Children of Israel, except what Israel imposed upon himself/itself before the Torah was revealed. Say, “Bring the Torah and read it, if you are truthful.”
The verse is clear in its assertion—some food restrictions predated the Torah and were not divinely mandated but self-imposed. What it leaves open is the identity of the subject. The Arabic Isrāʾīl (إِسْرَٰٓءِيل) appears without further qualification, and the pronoun that follows—”upon himself” ( ʿalā nafsihi)—is third-person singular masculine, which grammatically can point to the individual or the collective. This has led to two distinct readings that produce very different historical and theological implications.
The first reading understands Isrāʾīl as referring to the patriarch Jacob himself—the man whose name was changed to Israel after his wrestling with the angel according to the Bible. On this reading, Jacob personally prohibited certain foods for himself, likely as a vow or act of personal devotion, and his descendants subsequently adopted the restriction as a communal practice. This reading also aligns with certain rabbinic traditions that trace the prohibition of the sciatic nerve ( gid ha-nasheh) to Jacob’s injury during his nighttime struggle, as recorded in Genesis 32.
Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh. (Genesis 32:32)
The second reading understands Isrāʾīl as a collective reference to the Children of Israel as a people—that the community itself, at some point prior to the revelation of the Torah, adopted certain food restrictions of their own accord rather than by divine command.
The Quran’s response to this ambiguity is itself notable. Rather than clarifying which Isrāʾīl is meant, it immediately issues a challenge: bring the Torah and read it, if you are truthful. The implication is that the Torah itself would confirm the Quran’s claim—that the restriction preceded the divine legislation rather than originating from it. But the challenge sidesteps rather than resolves the grammatical question.
Whether it was one man’s vow or a people’s custom that the Torah later absorbed, the verse leaves undetermined—and that ambiguity carries real weight for how one understands the relationship between human practice and divine revelation in the formation of religious law.
Kill Yourselves
After the Children of Israel fashioned the molten calf and were confronted by Moses, he issued the following command:
2:54 Recall that Moses said to his people, “O my people, you have wronged yourselves ( anfusakum)by worshiping the calf. You must repent to your Creator. You shall kill yourselves/your ego ( anfusakum). This is better for you in the sight of your Creator.” He did redeem you. He is the Redeemer, Most Merciful.
The verse uses the word anfusakum (أَنفُسَكُم) twice—a form of the root nafs, which carries a remarkably wide semantic range: self, soul, ego, mind, or inner being. This alone introduces interpretive latitude into the passage. But the ambiguity runs deeper than vocabulary.
The expression “kill yourselves” appears elsewhere in the Quran in meaningfully different contexts—used in 4:66 for literal self-destruction, and in 2:85 in the sense of killing some among yourselves, suggesting internal communal violence rather than individual suicide. The range of the expression is further illustrated when the Samaritan who built the calf later uses the same root to describe his own inner motivation, saying “this is what my mind ( nafsī) inspired me to do” (20:96). Whether Moses was commanding literal death, collective purging, or a kind of ego-annihilation in repentance—the text itself in isolation, as it stands, does not foreclose any of these readings.
Ismail or Isaac
One of the longstanding disputes between Muslims and the people of previous scripture concerns which son Abraham was commanded to sacrifice. The Quran never explicitly names the son in the context of the sacrifice itself, but the narrative structure can imply that it was Ismail rather than Isaac, as Isaac is only introduced after the sacrifice account concludes. However, Ismail is never explicitly mentioned in the passages, and not even once in the entire chapter.
37:99 He (Abraham) said, “I am going to my Lord; He will guide me.”
37:100 “My Lord, grant me righteous children.”
37:101 We gave him good news of a good child.
37:102 When he grew enough to work with him, he said, “ My son, I see in a dream that I am sacrificing you. What do you think?” He said, “O my father, do what you are commanded to do. You will find me, GOD willing, patient.”
37:103 They both submitted, and he put his forehead down (to sacrifice him).
37:104 We called him: “O Abraham.
37:105 “You have believed the dream.” We thus reward the righteous.
37:106 That was an exacting test indeed.
37:107 We ransomed him by substituting an animal sacrifice.
37:108 And we preserved his history for subsequent generations.
37:109 Peace be upon Abraham.
37:110 We thus reward the righteous.
37:111 He is one of our believing servants.
37:112 And we gave him the good news about the birth of Isaac, to be one of the righteous prophets.
37:113 We blessed him and Isaac. Among their descendants, some are righteous, and some are wicked transgressors.
The sequencing is deliberate but not conclusive. The Quran presents the sacrifice, completes it, and then announces Isaac as a separate glad tiding—which most Muslim interpreters read as confirmation that the son on the altar was Ismail. But the text never says so outright, and the argument rests entirely on narrative inference rather than explicit statement. The name is conspicuously absent precisely where it would settle the question.
Who Inspired the Dream: God or Satan
The identity of the son is not the only unresolved dimension of this passage. There is also the question of who gave Abraham the dream in the first place. The traditions diverge sharply here. In Genesis, the command comes directly from God. In the Book of Jubilees, it is Mastema—a figure analogous to Satan—who, much like in the prologue to Job, is permitted by God to test Abraham by planting the dream. The Quran, characteristically, takes no explicit position. It neither directly attributes the dream to God nor to an adversarial figure. Abraham acts on the vision; the text ratifies his obedience. The origin of the dream is left in silence—which is itself, depending on one’s reading, either an omission or a statement.
Crucifixion of Jesus
One of the most consequential claims in Christian theology concerns the crucifixion of Jesus—what happened, and what it accomplished. One might expect the Quran, given the significance of the dispute, to resolve the matter with precision. Instead, the passage most directly addressing it is itself a source of ongoing controversy.
4:157 And for claiming that they killed the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, the messenger of GOD. In fact, they never killed him, they never crucified him—they were made to think that they did. All factions who are disputing in this matter are full of doubt concerning this issue. They possess no knowledge; they only conjecture. For certain, they never killed him. 4:158 Instead, GOD raised him to Him; GOD is Almighty, Most Wise.
The verse is unambiguous that the Jews did not crucify Jesus—but what actually occurred is left open, and that opening has generated a remarkable range of interpretations. Some propose a substitution hypothesis, in which someone resembling Jesus was crucified in his place. But 3:55 complicates this by indicating that God himself terminated Jesus’s life directly.
3:55 Thus, GOD said, “ O Jesus, I am terminating your life, raising you to Me, and ridding you of the disbelievers. I will exalt those who follow you above those who disbelieve, till the Day of Resurrection. Then to Me is the ultimate destiny of all of you, then I will judge among you regarding your disputes.
Others have reached for a gnostic reading—that Jesus was a phantom and never possessed a physical body capable of being crucified. The Quran forecloses this quietly but firmly: Jesus ate food (5:75), which is offered precisely as evidence of his corporeal humanity. A third interpretation holds that the Quran is not denying the crucifixion itself but denying that it constituted a death, on the grounds that the Quran elsewhere states that martyrs cannot be considered dead—they are alive with God (2:154, 3:169). Since Jesus died in service to his mission, this reading argues, the ordinary category of death simply does not apply to him.
Jesus Second Coming
The Quran contains no verse explicitly affirming a second coming of Jesus. In fact, 5:109 establishes a general principle that the messengers themselves have no knowledge of what occurred after their departure from the world.
5:109 The day will come when GOD will summon the messengers and ask them, “How was the response to you?” They will say, “We have no knowledge. You are the Knower of all secrets.”
Jesus is then addressed specifically in 5:110-118, where he testifies about his ministry and confirms that he has no awareness of what transpired after his life ended.
5:117 “I told them only what You commanded me to say, that: ‘You shall worship GOD, my Lord and your Lord.’ I was a witness among them for as long as I lived with them. When You terminated my life on earth, You became the Watcher over them. You witness all things.”
Against this backdrop, 4:159 introduces a peculiar statement that has divided interpreters:
[4:159 — Sahih International] And there is none from the People of the Scripture but that he will surely believe in him before his death. And on the Day of Resurrection he will be a witness against them.
The majority of translators render the verse in a way that implies the death of Jesus has not yet occurred—that every person among the People of the Book will believe in him before he dies, pointing toward a future return and death. Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, and Sahih International all read it this way.
Rashad Khalifa, however, renders it differently:
[4:159 — Rashad Khalifa] Everyone among the people of the scripture was required to believe in him before his death. On the Day of Resurrection, he will be a witness against them.
In this reading, the verse is a past obligation—the People of the Book were required to believe in Jesus before his death as part of their covenant at that time, and their failure to do so will be held against them on the Day of Resurrection.
The Arabic of the verse is worth examining directly:
The key phrase is qabla mawti hi—“before his death.” The pronoun -hi means “his,” but the verse does not explicitly say whose death it refers to.
One possibility is that it refers to Jesus. On that reading, the verse means that the People of the Book will believe in Jesus before Jesus himself dies. This is why the verse is often used to support the idea that Jesus is still alive and will return before his death.
The other possibility is that the pronoun refers to each individual among the People of the Book. On that reading, the verse means that each person will be required to believe in Jesus before that person dies. In that case, the verse is about individual accountability, not about Jesus returning in the future.
Both readings are grammatically possible. The verse says “before his death,” but the Arabic itself does not explicitly identify whose death is meant.
Jesus as a Word of God
The Quran offers a striking designation for Jesus that it applies to no other prophet—it calls him kalimah (كَلِمَة), a Word of God.
3:45 The angels said, “O Mary, GOD gives you good news: a Word from Him whose name is ‘The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary.’ He will be prominent in this life and in the Hereafter, and he will be from those closest to Me.”
4:171 O people of the scripture, do not transgress the limits of your religion, and do not say about GOD except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was a messenger of GOD, and His word that He had sent to Mary, and a spirit from Him.
The designation sits in considerable tension with itself. On one hand, the surrounding context of both verses is explicitly corrective—addressed to Christians who have elevated Jesus beyond what the Quran considers appropriate, warning against transgressing the limits of religion and asserting that God is one. The intent appears to be a reduction of Christological claims, not an endorsement of them.
On the other hand, the title itself is remarkable. The Quran calls Jesus God’s word—not a word, but His word—and adds in 4:171 that he is also a spirit from Him. No other human being in the Quran receives either of these designations. Moses is not called God’s word. Abraham is not called a spirit from Him. The titles are unique to Jesus, and their uniqueness is difficult to explain away entirely.
Interpreters have generally understood kalimah to mean that Jesus was brought into existence by God’s spoken command— kuun (كُن), “Be”—and that calling him a Word simply means he was the product of divine speech rather than human reproduction. On this reading, the title is about the mechanism of his creation, not his ontological status. The same logic applies to rūḥ min hu—spirit from Him—which is read as a reference to the divine breath that animated him, consistent with how the Quran describes the creation of Adam.
Christian interpreters, by contrast, have read these titles as Quranic confirmation of the Logos theology of the Gospel of John—where the Word is not merely a command but a divine person, pre-existent and sent into the world. On this reading, the Quran inadvertently preserves a high Christology even while arguing against it, deploying titles whose theological weight the text cannot fully contain.
A third reading focuses on the word kalimah itself, noting that in the Quran it is used elsewhere to mean a decree, a promise, or a divine declaration—suggesting that Jesus as kalimah may signify that he represents a fulfillment of God’s covenantal word to Israel rather than anything about his personal nature.
Each of these readings is defensible. The Quran provides the title and then moves on, offering no elaboration of what it means for Jesus—and only Jesus—to bear it. Whether that silence is an invitation or a boundary is, characteristically, left to the reader.
If God Had a Son, Who Would One Worship?
Another verse makes a striking conditional statement while leaving its object deliberately unresolved.
43:81 Proclaim: “If the Most Gracious did have a son, I would still be the foremost worshiper.”
The ambiguity here is compact but significant. The verse states that the speaker would be the foremost worshiper—but worshiper of whom? If God had a son, one could read this as: I would be the foremost worshiper of that son, an acknowledgment that a divine son would himself be worthy of worship. Or it could be read in the opposite direction: even if God had a son, I would still be the foremost worshiper of God—my devotion to the Most Gracious is unconditional and would not be redirected regardless. Both readings are grammatically sound, and neither requires forcing the Arabic. The verse leaves the object of worship unnamed, and that silence is the point. Whether it is a rhetorical affirmation of pure monotheism or a hypothetical concession to the logic of divine sonship, the text holds both possibilities open without resolving them.
The use of “We”
One of the most immediately striking features of the Quran to a first-time reader is that God frequently refers to himself in the first-person plural. The text that opens with the declaration that there is no god but God—the most uncompromising monotheistic statement in any scripture—then proceeds to have that same God say “We created,” “We sent down,” “We commanded,” throughout. The tension is obvious, and the Quran never explicitly resolves it.
The Arabic plural of divine self-reference— naḥnu (نَحْنُ) and its associated verb forms—appears hundreds of times across the text. What it signifies has generated no shortage of interpretation. The major positions can be summarized as follows.
The most common traditional explanation is that the plural is a royal we—the same majestic plural used by monarchs and rulers throughout the ancient world to convey authority, sovereignty, and grandeur rather than numerical multiplicity. On this reading, the plural carries no implication of more than one being; it is a grammatical convention of power, and God employs it for the same reason that kings did. This is the position of the majority of classical Muslim scholars, and it requires no modification to the Quran’s strict monotheism.
A second interpretation holds that the plural reflects God’s address through agents such as angels—that when God says “We,” he is speaking as the source of a divine action that is carried out by intermediaries. The plurality is real, but it is a plurality of agency rather than of divine persons. God wills; the angels execute; the action is attributed to both. This reading finds some support in verses where divine actions are described in the plural in one place and attributed to angels elsewhere in the text.
A third reading, advanced by some scholars of comparative religion, notes that the Quran was revealed into a cultural and linguistic environment steeped in Ancient Near Eastern literary conventions, where divine plurality was a standard feature of sacred speech—from the Elohim of the Hebrew Bible to the council-language of Mesopotamian religious texts. On this view, the plural is not theologically significant but stylistically inherited—a convention the Quran adopted without endorsing its original polytheistic implications.
Moreover, Christian interpreters have historically pointed to the divine plural as an implicit opening toward Trinitarian theology—evidence, they argue, that even the Quran’s own language gestures toward a plurality within the Godhead. Muslim scholars have rejected this reading uniformly, but its persistence as an interpretation demonstrates that the plural genuinely sustains it as a grammatical possibility, even if not a theological one the Quran intends.
What is notable for the purposes of this article is that the Quran—a text that goes to extraordinary lengths to establish divine unity—never pauses to explain why it uses the plural. It simply does. The reader is left to interpret, and the interpretations, as we have seen, diverge considerably. A text committed to foreclosing misunderstanding about the nature of God would have had every reason to clarify. The fact that it does not is, by now, a familiar pattern.
Conclusion
The examples collected in this article span jurisprudence, theology, history, and ritual practice. They touch on questions as intimate as how to wash before prayer and as consequential as whether Jesus will return to earth. They involve single words, pronoun antecedents, case endings, and the placement of pauses that no written punctuation can fix. What they share is a common structure: a text that is pellucid in its expression and irreducibly open in its meaning.
This is not the profile of a careless text. A book produced by accident or haste would generate ambiguity randomly—clustered in difficult passages, absent from simple ones. What we find instead is something more deliberate: the ambiguity appears precisely at the points that matter most, in the vocabulary that carries the heaviest legal and theological weight, in the constructions that would require only a single additional word to resolve. The Quran had other options available at every turn. It did not take them.
The Quran itself told us this from the beginning. As we saw in 3:7, the text openly declares that it contains two categories of verse—the clear and foundational, and the multiple-meaning—and then issues a warning about what the latter will reveal about the reader. Those with doubt and perversity in their hearts, the verse says, will pursue the ambiguous passages not in search of truth but in search of division—to extract a particular meaning, to win an argument, to justify a position already held. The multi-meaning verses are not a flaw in the design; they are a diagnostic tool built into it. The disputes that have erupted over every example in this article—over feet and ablution, over the timing of prayers, over the identity of a son and the nature of a prophet—are not incidental to the Quran’s ambiguity. They are its anticipated consequence, and the text predicted them.
What one makes of this is, fittingly, a matter of interpretation. For some, the open-endedness is a divine mercy—a text flexible enough to speak across centuries, cultures, and circumstances without becoming the prisoner of any single moment in history. For others, it is precisely the test that 3:7 describes: a trial of the reader’s moral and intellectual integrity, separating those who approach the text with humility from those who mine its ambiguities to extract conclusions the foundation of the scripture does not support.
But perhaps the deepest lesson 3:7 offers is contained in the response it prescribes for those well-founded in knowledge: not a declaration of the correct interpretation, but a declaration of surrender. “We believe in this—all of it comes from our Lord.” The verse suggests that the appropriate posture before the ambiguous passages is not conquest but relinquishment—that the true meaning belongs to God, and that the reader who acknowledges this limitation may, paradoxically, be the one most prepared to receive understanding. Certainty closes; humility opens. The reader who insists they have resolved what fourteen centuries could not may have already demonstrated, by that very insistence, that they have not.
What this article has not done—and has deliberately not done—is adjudicate between these readings. The purpose here has been only to trace the pattern: to show that the Quran’s self-description as a clear book is entirely accurate, and that clarity of expression and clarity of meaning are two different things entirely. The text says what it says with precision and economy. What it means is another matter—and the fact that it remains another matter, across centuries and civilizations and oceans of scholarship, may be the most deliberate design of all.