أَمْ يَقُولُونَ شَاعِرٌ نَّتَرَبَّصُ بِهِۦ رَيْبَ ٱلْمَنُونِ
Am yaqooloona shaa'irun natarabbasu bihee raibal manoon
کیا کافر کہتے ہیں کہ یہ شاعر ہے (اور) ہم اس کے حق میں زمانے کے حوادث کا انتظار کر رہے ہیں
Or do they say, "He is a poet — we await some misfortune of time to strike him"?
The phrase they reach for, rayb al-manūn, is stock pre-Islamic poetry for the blows of fate that wear a man down, so the accusation of being a poet is made in a poet's own idiom. Their word for fate appears only here, built on the stem that elsewhere describes a reward never cut off, at 41:8 and 95:6. Waiting for time to finish him is being offered as an argument.