Ali Quli Qarai, The Qur’ān with a Phrase-by-Phrase English Translation (2005)
14 When they meet the faithful,
they say, ‘We believe,’
but when they are alone with their devils,
they say, ‘We are with you;
we were only deriding [them].’
15 It is Allah who derides them,1
and leaves them bewildered in their rebellion.
16 They are the ones who bought error
for guidance,
so their trade did not profit them,
nor were they guided.
17 Their parable
is that of one who lighted a torch,
and when it had lit up all around him,
Allah took away their light,
and left them sightless in a manifold darkness.2
18 Deaf, dumb, and blind,
they will not come back.
19 Or that of a rainstorm from the sky,
wherein is darkness, thunder, and lightning:
they put their fingers in their ears
due to the thunderclaps, apprehensive of death;
and Allah besieges the faithless.3
20 The lightning almost snatches away their sight:
1 That is, by letting them imagine that they are mocking the faithful.
2 The one who lights the torch in the parable is the Prophet [ṣ], who illuminated the spiritual horizons of the Arabia of those days with the message of Islam. But the hypocrites, with their inward blindness, did not benefit from its light and continued to remain in the darkness of their faithlessness.
3 This is another parable for the condition of the hypocrites. In it the Prophet’s mission, with its downpour of Divine knowledge, the accompanying light of guidance, along with the hardships of struggle against polytheism and injustice, is likened to a rainstorm.
