When the verse is directed to those persons actually engaged in backbiting, its meaning is the following.

As is well-known, the hamza at the beginning of the verse has an interrogative sense. This interrogative sense penetrates all the words of the verse like water, so that each word acquires an additional meaning. Thus the first word asks, with its hamza:"Is it that you have no intelligence capable of discrimination, so that you fail to perceive the ugliness of this thing?"

The second word like asks:"Is your heart, the seat of love and hatred, so corrupted that it loves the most repugnant of things?"

The third word any among you asks:"What befell your sense of social and civilized responsibility that you are able to accept something poisonous to social life?"

The fourth word to eat the flesh asks:"What has befallen your sense of humanity that you are tearing your friend apart with your fangs like a wild animal?"

The fifth word of his brother asks:"Do you have no fellow-feeling, no sense of kinship, that you are able to sink your teeth into some wretch who is tied to you by numerous links of brotherhood? Do you have no intelligence that you are able to bite into your own limbs with your own teeth, in such lunatic fashion?"