Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 106 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:106

ذَٰلِكَ جَزَآؤُهُمْ جَهَنَّمُ بِمَا كَفَرُوا۟ وَٱتَّخَذُوٓا۟ ءَايَـٰتِى وَرُسُلِى هُزُوًا

“That is their recompense - Hell - for what they denied and [because] they took My signs and My messengers in ridicule.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The lexicons' picture for mockery is a mirage that makes fools of a party of riders, and the joke turns out to be on them.

A reflection

My signs and My messengers

There are two possessives in the second half of this verse, and they change the direction of the whole sentence.

Not the signs. Not the messengers. My signs and My messengers.

So the mockery had a target the mockers were not thinking about.

An insult shouted at a servant in a yard carries no risk at all until the owner is standing behind the gate. Nothing about the insult changes. Everything about the situation does, and the man who shouted it had no information he needed.

And this is where a very contemporary pride is undone, because the pride in question looks like intelligence.

Mocking a religious claim feels safe in a way that mocking a person does not. The claim has no feelings. Nobody is hurt. The joke costs nothing and buys a room.

That calculation is built on a silent assumption: that the thing being mocked does not belong to anyone.

The verse supplies the owner twice, in two words, without raising its voice.

And it is worth being careful here, because this cuts the other way too. The possessives are His, which means the defence of His signs is also not ours to run as a grievance.

A man who takes offence on Allah's behalf has made the same error in the other direction: he has assumed the thing belongs to him.

A long commentary notes that the recompense in this verse answers two things together. Their denial, and the fact that they did not stop at rejecting the messengers but mocked them.

Two charges on one sheet.

So the verse is not asking anybody to be insulted. It is stating, quietly, whose property was being handled, and leaving the accounting where it belongs.

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.