Shaykh al-Islām—may Allah have mercy on him—said:

This is an explanation of verses that have proved difficult to understand, so much so that some works of Quranic commentary offer only erroneous explanations of them.

Among these are His words:

“And what will make you realize that, when it comes, they will not believe?”

And the verse that follows it. The reading annahā, with an initial a-vowel, has puzzled many because they assumed that the following verse begins an independent sentence. This is not so; rather, it falls within the predicate governed by anna (“that”).

The meaning is: If you do not realize that, when it comes, they will not believe, and that I shall do this to them, you cannot regard their oath as truthful; rather, it may be false. This is the plain, familiar sense of the wording: anna functions as a nominalizing particle.

Had “And We turn,” and so forth, been an independent statement, it would follow that everyone to whom a sign came would have his heart turned away. Yet this is not so; many of them may indeed believe.