[Commentary]
The author—may Allah have mercy on him—states, transmitting the words of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (may Allah be pleased with him):

“Now then, O people! You recite this verse: ‘O you who believe, guard yourselves; those who have gone astray cannot harm you once you have been rightly guided’ (Q 5:105).”

At first glance, the verse seems to say that if a person has guided himself aright, the misguidance of others will not harm him, for he himself is already upright, and once he stands firm, the fate of others rests with Allah. Some people, however, extract from it a distorted meaning, imagining that this is what the noble verse intends; it is not. Allah made immunity from the harm of those who stray conditional on our own guidance when He said, “those who have gone astray cannot harm you once you have been rightly guided.”

Part of that guidance is to enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong. Since this is an essential element of guidance, our safety from harm depends on performing that duty. For this reason he (may Allah be pleased with him) added, “I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) say: ‘When people see wrongdoing and do not change it, or fail to restrain the oppressor, it is close to the time that Allah will encompass them all with a punishment from Himself.’” In other words, those who stray will indeed harm us if we witness their deviation yet neither command them to do right nor forbid them from wrong; Allah is then near to blanket with punishment both the perpetrator of the evil and the heedless onlooker—the doer of the sin and the one who did not condemn it.

This clearly proves that a person must exert great effort to understand the Book of Allah correctly, lest he construe it in a way Allah never intended. People may imagine a verse means something contrary to Allah’s purpose and thus go astray by misinterpreting the Quran. Hence it has been reported