وَلَا أَقُولُ لَكُمْ عِندِي خَزَائِنُ اللَّهِ وَلَا أَعْلَمُ الْغَيْبَ وَلَا أَقُولُ إِنِّي مَلَكٌ وَلَا أَقُولُ لِلَّذِينَ تَزْدَرِي أَعْيُنُكُمْ لَن يُؤْتِيَهُمُ اللَّهُ خَيْرًا ۖ اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِمَا فِي أَنفُسِهِمْ ۖ إِنِّي إِذًا لَّمِنَ الظَّالِمِينَ (31)
(11:31) I do not say to you that I possess Allah's treasures, nor that I have access to the realm beyond the ken of sense-perception, nor do I claim to be an angel. *37 Nor do I say regarding those whom you look upon with disdain that Allah will not bestow any good upon them. Allah knows best what is in their hearts. Were I to say so I would be one of the wrongdoers.'
*37). This is a rejoinder to the Prophet Noah's opponents. His opponents tried to discredit him by saying that he appeared to them to be merely an ordinary human being just like any one of them. In response to this Noah acknowledges that he is indeed nothing more than a human being, and that he has never claimed to be anything other than that. Hence, any attack on him on the grounds that he was merely a human being was pointless.
Noah (peace be on him), like other Prophets, had claimed no more than what God had intimated to him about the Straight Way comprising right beliefs and sound principles of behaviour. His people were free to test him in regard to that claim. It was strange, however, that they asked him about a matter which lay beyond the ken of human perception, something which he had never claimed to know They also made strange demands of him which suggested that he possessed the keys to God's treasures. They even taunted him on the grounds that like other human beings he also ate and drank and walked around.
All this was meaningless for Noah (peace be on him) had never claimed to he an angel and that as such he could dispense with necessary physical and biological requirements. All that Noah (peace be on him) had claimed was that he possessed the knowledge needed to guide human beings in matters of belief, moral conduct, and social behaviour. Now, what sense did it make to ask such a person what gender a cow's calf would be? By what stretch of the imagination can one establish a nexus between the pregnancy of a cow and sound principles of individual and social conduct? (See also Towards Understanding the Qur'an, vol. II, al-An'am 6, nn. 31-2, pp. 234-5.)