You do not know them; We know them
تَعْلَمُهُمْ نَحْنُ نَعْلَمُهُمْ
taʿlamuhum naḥnu naʿlamuhum — You do not know them; We know them
In (9:101) the verb ʿalima appears twice in one clause-pair, with the same object (the hypocrites) but different subjects: the addressee's negative knowledge is set directly against the speaker's affirmed knowledge of the same persons.
The expression is a mirror construction: the root ع ل م occurs twice in immediate sequence, each time as an imperfect verb with a third-person masculine plural object pronoun referring to the same group. The first verb, تَعْلَمُهُمْ, is second masculine singular with a preceding negative particle (لَا), addressed to a single addressee: 'You do not know them.' The second, نَعْلَمُهُمْ, is first person plural, intensified by the pronoun نَحْنُ standing before it: 'We know them.' The object pronoun is identical in both, so what changes is only the subject and the polarity—negated human knowledge versus affirmed divine knowledge. The verse itself supplies the object: hypocrites among the desert-Arabs around the addressee and among the people of the City, who 'have persisted upon hypocrisy' (9:101). The mirror thus marks a limit: the addressee cannot identify these persons, while the speaker can. The verse then moves from this knowledge-contrast to consequence: 'We shall punish them twice, then they will be turned back to a tremendous punishment' (9:101). The construction does not describe how the speaker knows them; it states only the asymmetry of knowledge and lets the punishment clause follow from it. The emphatic نَحْنُ before the second verb sharpens the contrast, placing the two subjects—you and We—in direct parallel.
Where it occurs
- 9:101 Sets the addressee's inability to identify the hypocrites directly against the speaker's knowledge of them, as the basis for the punishment that follows.
All Qur'anic expressions