Ar-Ra'd · Madani · ayah 32 of 43

Ar-Ra'd 13:32

وَلَقَدِ ٱسْتُهْزِئَ بِرُسُلٍ مِّن قَبْلِكَ فَأَمْلَيْتُ لِلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ ثُمَّ أَخَذْتُهُمْ ۖ فَكَيْفَ كَانَ عِقَابِ

“And already were [other] messengers ridiculed before you, and I extended the time of those who disbelieved; then I seized them, and how [terrible] was My penalty.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every messenger before this one was mocked, not only denied, and every mockery was met in the same order: patience first, a reckoning after.

A reflection

Mockery is its own kind of weight

Ayah 30 answered denial. This one names something sharper: istuhziʾa, they were mocked, ridiculed, made the target of jokes. Denial can be argued with. Mockery is built to make arguing look foolish before it even starts.

Most people can rehearse an answer to an honest objection. Fewer have a ready answer to laughter, because laughter does not ask to be refuted. It asks to make you feel smaller than your answer could ever restore you to.

A young teacher introduces a new grading method at a staff meeting, carefully researched over a whole summer. A senior colleague repeats her exact phrase back in a comic voice, loud enough for the room to laugh. Her method was not refuted. She was.

The ayah's comfort here is specific rather than general. It does not merely say other messengers were opposed. It says they were mocked in exactly the way this one now is. It names a repeating pattern old enough to have a settled ending, patience then a reckoning, stated two words later in the same ayah.

Someone carrying ridicule for an honest stand, or a faith kept quietly, or a decision a room found funny, is not carrying something new. Nor is it uniquely humiliating, whatever it feels like at the time. The weight has a long history of being carried, and of being answered, eventually, by something other than a better joke in return.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.