Al-Falaq · Makki · ayah 4 of 5

Al-Falaq 113:4

وَمِن شَرِّ ٱلنَّفَّـٰثَـٰتِ فِى ٱلْعُقَدِ

“And from the evil of the blowers in knots[2014]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Some harm is worked in secret, knot by knot; meet it not with fascination or panic, but with the Lord of daybreak.

A reflection

Isn't magic just superstition?

Say 'magic' to a modern sceptic and the eyebrows rise. Surely this is the pre-scientific world talking, the kind of fear that turns neighbours into suspects?

Start with what is reported, not imagined. Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim record that a man named Labīd ibn al-Aʿṣam worked sorcery against the Prophet ﷺ. For a time he would think he had done something he had not. He prayed, was shown the cause, and was cured. Scholars stress that it touched him like an illness, in worldly matters, and never the message he delivered.

That raises a second doubt. If a prophet can be affected by sorcery, how can his message be trusted? His enemies did call him 'a man bewitched' (17:47). But they meant a man whose mind had gone, whose words could not be followed. The Quran rejects that charge outright. What the Sahihs describe is different in kind: a bodily affliction, like a fever or a wound.

The prophets were not spared hardship; they were given more of it. 'The most severely tested of people are the prophets, then the next best, then the next' (al-Tirmidhi, who grades it ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ). Once, while the Prophet ﷺ lay in prostration, enemies dumped a slaughtered camel's entrails on his back (Sahih al-Bukhari). No one concludes from that his message was compromised. Affliction is not abandonment.

So the Quran rejects both extremes. Against the sceptic, it names this harm as real enough to seek refuge from. Some early theologians, such as al-Zamakhsharī, denied it any real effect; the mainstream disagreed. Against the superstitious, it gives magic no glamour and no independence: 'they cannot harm anyone by it except by Allah's permission' (2:102).

What remains open is how it works. The sources do not say, and we need not pretend to know. A believer can hold both truths at once. This harm is real, and it is small beside the One who permits or prevents it.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.