Grammatical Errors? (91:5)

91:5 uses the Arabic word ma - the impersonal "what" - in reference to God. The claim is that God should be referred to with mann (who/whom), the personal form, and that using ma constitutes a grammatical error in the Quran.

The false claim: 91:5 contains a grammatical error by using the impersonal ma for God instead of the personal mann.

The claim assumes that referring to God with the impersonal ma (what) rather than the personal mann (who) is a mistake. It is not - and understanding why requires understanding what the Quran actually teaches about the nature of God.

The Quran is explicit that God transcends human comprehension:

[39:67] They never valued GOD as He should be valued. The whole earth is within His fist on the Day of Resurrection. In fact, the universes are folded within His right hand. Be He glorified; He is much too high above their claims.

God is not a person in the way human beings are persons. He does not have a body, a gender in the human sense, or a nature that fits within any category human language was built to describe. Human language evolved to describe created things - objects, people, relationships, experiences within the physical world. None of its categories are adequate to describe the Creator of that world. Every word applied to God is, at some level, an approximation.

The Quran reflects this reality by using both personal and impersonal language for God - sometimes huwa (he), sometimes mann (who), and sometimes ma (what) - without treating any of these as more correct than the others. This is not inconsistency and it is not error. It is theological precision of the highest order. No single pronoun captures what God is, so the Quran uses multiple forms to signal that God exceeds every category.

The insistence that only the personal mann is appropriate for God almost certainly reflects the influence of the Christian conception of God as a divine person - indeed, as three persons. This is a conception the Quran explicitly rejects. God in the Quran is not a person among persons, not a being with a human-like personality who happens to be more powerful than other persons. He is the Creator of existence itself, whose nature no created mind can encompass:

[42:11] Initiator of the heavens and the earth. He created for you from yourselves, mates, and also mates for the livestock, to multiply you thereby. Nothing resembles Him in any way. He is the Hearer, the Seer.

If there is nothing like God, then no word designed to describe created things can be fully accurate when applied to Him. The use of ma in 91:5 is not a grammatical failure - it is an acknowledgment of this truth. God is beyond the personal and the impersonal as human language defines them. The Quran's deliberate use of both types of language in reference to God is not an error to be corrected. It is a feature that reflects the Book's consistent teaching that God cannot be confined within the categories of human thought or speech.