﴿ أَوَءَابَآؤُنَا ٱلْأَوَّلُونَ ﴾

“and perhaps, too, our forebears of old?””

What! And our forefathers too?’ read a-wa-ābā’unā with the wa- being for supplement the hamza a- for the interrogative; here and in the previous instance it is used to express ‘remoteness of probability’; a variant reading has aw-ābā’unā as a supplement with aw and that to which this is supplemented is the syntactical locus of inna and its subject.