﴿ فَلَوْلَا نَصَرَهُمُ ٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّخَذُوا۟ مِن دُونِ ٱللَّهِ قُرْبَانًا ءَالِهَةًۢ ۖ بَلْ ضَلُّوا۟ عَنْهُمْ ۚ وَذَٰلِكَ إِفْكُهُمْ وَمَا كَانُوا۟ يَفْتَرُونَ ﴾

“But, then, did those [beings] whom they had chosen to worship as deities beside God, hoping that they would bring them nearer [to Him], help them [in the end]? Nay, they forsook them: for that [alleged divinity] was but an outcome of their self-delusion and all their false imagery.”

So why did they not help them by averting from them the chastisement those whom they had chosen besides God that is to say other than Him as a means of nearness through whom they may secure nearness to God to be gods? alongside Him and these are the idols the first object of ittakhadhū ‘they had chosen’ is the omitted pronoun referred to by the relative clause alladhīna ‘those who …’ and it is hum ‘they’; qurbānan ‘nearness’ is the second object with ālihatan ‘gods’ as its substitution. Nay but they forsook them when the chastisement came down on them and that that is to say that choosing of theirs of idols as gods as a means of nearness to God was their lie and what they used to invent — the lies they used to speak mā ‘what’ either relates to the verbal action ‘their lying’ or it indicates a relative clause with the referential pronoun omitted this being fīhi ‘about’.