Ar-Ra'd · Madani · ayah 19 of 43

Ar-Ra'd 13:19

۞ أَفَمَن يَعْلَمُ أَنَّمَآ أُنزِلَ إِلَيْكَ مِن رَّبِّكَ ٱلْحَقُّ كَمَنْ هُوَ أَعْمَىٰٓ ۚ إِنَّمَا يَتَذَكَّرُ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلْأَلْبَـٰبِ

“Then is he who knows that what has been revealed to you from your Lord is the truth like one who is blind? They will only be reminded who are people of understanding -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The opposite of knowing the truth is not ignorance but blindness, and only people of the kernel let a reminder reach them.

A reflection

Blind is the heart, not the eye

You would expect the sentence to say: is the one who knows like the one who does not know? Instead it says: like one who is blind. One classical commentator noticed the swap. It was chosen to show how much uglier that state is. Not knowing becomes not seeing.

The root of aʿmā means covering. The Arabs said the waves ʿamat when they threw foam and debris over the face of the water. Read straight after the parable of the torrent (13:17), that is a striking picture. The water is there. The foam has covered it.

It matters what kind of blindness this is. The commentators say it is blindness of the heart. The Quran says so outright elsewhere: it is not the eyes that go blind, but the hearts within the breasts (22:46).

That matters because the Quran also honours a blind man who saw. Sūrat ʿAbasa opens with a blind man who came to the Prophet ﷺ striving, in awe of Allah, hoping to be purified (80:1–10). His eyes saw nothing. His heart was awake.

Picture a woman who lost her sight in her twenties. Each morning she plays the Quran on a small speaker by the kitchen window and recites along. She knows by heart where each reciter pauses. Her neighbour, with perfect eyes, drives past the mosque every day and has not looked at it in years.

By this ayah's measure only one of them is aʿmā.

So the word is never an insult to anyone with a white cane. It is a warning to the rest of us. The eyes may be perfect while the water is covered with foam. The cure is not new glasses. It is clearing what lies over the heart, and the next ayat begin to say how.

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.