49أَلَم تَرَ إِلَى الَّذينَ يُزَكّونَ أَنفُسَهُم ۚ بَلِ اللَّهُ يُزَكّي مَن يَشاءُ وَلا يُظلَمونَ فَتيلًاMuhammad AsadArt thou not aware of those who consider themselves pure?1 Nay, but it is God who causes whomever He wills to grow in purity; and none shall be wronged by as much as a hair's breadth.2I.e., the Jews, who consider, themselves to be "God's chosen people" and, therefore, a priori destined for God's grace, and the Christians, who believe in Jesus' "vicarious atonement" for the sins of mankind. There is also an obvious connection between this observation and the reference to shirk in the preceding verse, inasmuch as the Jews and the Christians, while not actually believing in the existence of any deity apart from God, ascribe divine or semi-divine qualities, in varying degrees, to certain human beings: the Christians by their elevation of Jesus to the status of a manifestation of God in human form and their open worship of a hierarchy of saints, and the Jews by their attribution of law-giving powers to the great Talmudic scholars, whose legal verdicts are supposed to override, if need be, any ordinance of the scriptures (cf. in this respect 9: 31). It goes without saying that this condemnation applies also to those Muslims who have fallen into the sin of worshipping saints and according them something of the reverence which is due to God alone. Consequently, the expression "those who consider themselves pure" comprises, in this context, all who think of themselves as believing in the One God (simply because they do not consciously worship a plurality of deities) but are, nevertheless, guilty of the sin of shirk in the deeper sense of this term.According to most of the philological authorities (e.g., Qamus), a 'fatil' is any "slender thread which one rolls between one's fingers" - a term which is also, but by no means exclusively, applied to the tiny fibre adhering to the cleft of the date-stone (cf. Lane VI, 2334). Idiomatically, it is best rendered as "a hair's breadth". The above passage implies, firstly, that spiritual purity is not the privilege of any particular group or community, and, secondly, that one can become or remain pure only by God's grace, for "man has been created weak" (verse 28 above). See also note on the second paragraph of 53:32.