Shaykh al-Islām Taqī al-Dīn Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah Most High have mercy on him—said:

Section

Concerning the words of Allah Most High:

“These two are certainly magicians.”

This passage has puzzled many people. What appears in the Muslims’ copies of the Quran is in hādhāni, with an alif, and this is how the great majority of Quran reciters read it. Most of them read inna, with a doubled n, whereas Ibn Kathīr and Hafs—the latter transmitting from ‘Āsim—read in, without doubling. Ibn Kathīr, however, doubles the n in hādhāni, unlike Hafs.

The difficulty from the standpoint of Arabic grammar concerns the well-known reading: that of Nāfi‘, Ibn ‘Āmir, Hamzah, al-Kisā’ī, and Abū Bakr transmitting from ‘Āsim. This is the reading followed by the majority of reciters, and it is the soundest of the readings in both wording and meaning. This will become clear through a discussion of what has been said about it.

The difficulty arises because a dual noun is inflected with a yā’ in the accusative and genitive cases, and with an alif in the nominative. This is abundantly attested in the language of the Arabs: