﴿ وَتَرَىٰ كَثِيرًۭا مِّنْهُمْ يُسَٰرِعُونَ فِى ٱلْإِثْمِ وَٱلْعُدْوَٰنِ وَأَكْلِهِمُ ٱلسُّحْتَ ۚ لَبِئْسَ مَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ ﴾

“And thou canst see many of them vie with one another in sinning and tyrannical conduct and in their swallowing of all that is evil.”

The favoured religion of God is that of taqwa (fear of God). In other words, a man should live in society in such a way that he utters no words of sin; in his activities he should avoid forbidden ways and he should behave with entire fairness towards those with whom he has dealings. But a man’s selfishness puts him on the path of world-worship; he wants to lead a life in which he is not troubled by having to distinguish between right and wrong, and in which he needs to worry only about his own worldly interests. The general run of the Jewish people mindlessly trod this path of self-centredness. This being so, it was the duty of the foremost among them to alert them to their wrongdoing and to wean them away from this course. Instead of this, they reached a tacit understanding with the common people. They started disseminating among them a particular type of religion which guaranteed their salvation and promised them a high status, without their having to change their actual way of living in any way. These prominent people did not disturb the current lives of the common people, but used to recite to them false stories of the supremacy of the Jewish community; giving a religious colour to their communal events and conveying to them the glad news that they only had to repeat a number of ritual actions and palaces would be built for them in paradise. Before God, it is the most evil deed to disseminate this type of religion among the people, in which change in their actual lives is not required, and to delude them into thinking that, by publicly performing certain showy rites, their entry into paradise will be guaranteed.