Critics point to two verses about the city of Mecca and claim the Quran contradicts itself - in one place seeming to refuse to swear by the city, in another swearing by it. The objection rests entirely on a mistranslation of a famous and well-understood Arabic oath formula.
The alleged contradiction
Two verses are set against each other:
Laa uqsimu bi-haadha al-balad - rendered woodenly as "I do not swear by this city."
Quran 90:1
And by this secure city.
Quran 95:3
The claim: 95:3 swears by Mecca, while 90:1 supposedly refuses to. A contradiction, the critic says, within the same book about the same city.
"Laa uqsimu" is an emphatic oath, not a refusal
The construction in 90:1 is laa uqsimu (لَا أُقْسِمُ). Read as isolated dictionary words, laa is "no/not" and uqsimu is "I swear." But this exact phrase is a recognized rhetorical oath formula in classical Arabic. The laa here is not a genuine negation of the swearing; grammarians explain it in one of two well-established ways:
- It is a particle of emphasis that strengthens the oath that follows - the sense being "Nay! I do swear by this city."
- Or it is a rhetorical opener that negates a prior implied claim before affirming the oath - again yielding an emphatic affirmation, not a refusal to swear.
Either way, the verse is an oath by Mecca. This is why the Quran uses the same laa uqsimu formula elsewhere to swear by weighty things - for example "Laa uqsimu bi-yawm al-qiyaamah" (Quran 75:1), which every reader understands as a solemn oath by the Day of Resurrection, not a refusal to mention it. Nobody claims 75:1 means "I decline to swear by the Day of Judgement."
What the commentators say
The major mufassirun are unanimous that 90:1 is an oath by Mecca:
- Ibn Kathir reads it as "Nay! I swear by this city," identifying the city as Mecca. The laa functions rhetorically while uqsimu introduces the oath - so Allah is swearing by Mecca in both 90:1 and 95:3.
- Al-Jalalayn likewise takes 90:1 as an oath - "I swear by this land," meaning sacred Mecca - and explicitly not as "I will not swear by Mecca."
- The commentary attributed to Ibn Abbas also reads it as Allah swearing by Mecca, not refusing to.
Far from contradicting 95:3, verse 90:1 says the very same thing with added emphasis. Both honour Mecca with a divine oath.
The objection ignores how the language works
The mistake here is treating a fixed idiomatic construction as if it were a literal word-by-word sum. Every language has these. In English, "I couldn't care less" and (the illogical but common) "I could care less" are both used to mean the same thing; "no way am I missing this" is emphatic agreement, not a refusal. Lifting laa out of a set oath-formula and translating it as a flat "not" produces a sentence the Arabic never meant - and then the manufactured sentence is blamed on the Quran.
Conclusion
There is no contradiction between Quran 90:1 and 95:3. Both are oaths by the sacred city of Mecca; 90:1 simply uses the emphatic laa uqsimu formula, understood as such across the entire tafsir tradition and paralleled elsewhere in the Quran (e.g. 75:1). The objection is a translation artifact, not a flaw in the text.
For more on the standing of Mecca and the Quran's linguistic character, see the related topics below.