Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 103 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:103

قُلْ هَلْ نُنَبِّئُكُم بِٱلْأَخْسَرِينَ أَعْمَـٰلًا

“Say, [O Muḥammad], "Shall we [believers] inform you of the greatest losers as to [their] deeds?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The superlative is not the greatest losers; it is the greatest losers in respect of deeds, which means the deeds were there.

A reflection

The loss is in the deeds, not instead of them

The grammar of this verse is doing something that English flattens.

The superlative is not the greatest losers. It is the greatest losers, in respect of deeds. A legal commentary names the construction: the word for deeds stands in the accusative of specification.

So the losing is measured against a column that has entries in it.

This is not a verse about people who did nothing. A man who did nothing has nothing to lose. These are people with a full account and a negative balance.

And the root of the word for loss makes it exact. The lexicons picture a trader watching his capital shrink until nothing is left. The loss of what you came with: your wealth, your way, your very self.

Not a bad year. The capital.

A trader who has never traded has merely failed to grow. The man in the lexicons' picture had stock, moved it, worked, and is poorer than when he started. Every transaction was real. Every one of them cost him.

Which is the most uncomfortable category in religion, and the one almost nobody checks themselves against, because self-examination is nearly always a search for absence.

We look for what is missing. The prayer not made, the charity not given, the habit not broken. A list of gaps.

This verse looks at the entries, not the gaps.

And there is one question that gets to it. Not what have I failed to do. What have I been doing a great deal of, with effort, for years, that may not be credited to me at all.

The next verse will say that these people thought they were doing well. So the account looked healthy from inside, and the man kept trading, and the capital was going.

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.