Al-Baqarah · Madani · ayah 10 of 286

Al-Baqarah 2:10

فِى قُلُوبِهِم مَّرَضٌ فَزَادَهُمُ ٱللَّهُ مَرَضًا ۖ وَلَهُمْ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌۢ بِمَا كَانُوا۟ يَكْذِبُونَ

“In their hearts is disease, so Allāh has increased their disease;[13] and for them is a painful punishment because they [habitually] used to lie.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A heart can fall ill like a body, dimming like a hazy sun; fed on its own sickness and habitual lies, the illness only grows.

A reflection

When the sun is sick

On certain summer days, dust from far away hangs over a city. The sun becomes a pale disc you can look straight at. Nothing is wrong with the sun itself. Something has come between it and the ground, and the light arrives weak and sickly.

The Arabs had a word for that sun: marīḍa, sick. A cloudy night in which 'no star or moon gives light' had 'fallen ill'. A faint breeze was a sick wind. This is the word the ayah uses for what is in the hypocrites' hearts: maraḍ. The lexicons define it as anything by which a person leaves the bounds of health. One classical reflection says the word turns on four things: corruption, weakness, deficiency and darkness.

The same reflection gives a clear definition of a healthy heart. It knows the truth, loves it, and prefers it to everything else. So a heart falls ill in one of two ways. It can doubt the truth. Or it can know the truth and prefer something else. The first is the sickness of doubt; the second, the sickness of desire. The hypocrites of this ayah suffered from the first. The early explanations say simply: in their hearts is doubt.

A sick body shows one more symptom that helps us understand the heart. Watch a feverish child refuse the soup that would help her and ask for ice cream. One lexicon makes the comparison directly. A sick soul inclines towards harmful beliefs just as a sick body craves what harms it. The illness is not only weakness. It is a wrong appetite.

That is why this ayah is worth reading as a diagnosis, not only as a condemnation of others. Most of us have some haze between our hearts and the light. A doubt we keep feeding. A desire we keep preferring. The first step in any cure is to admit the symptoms. Ibrāhīm's words are the address of the doctor: 'when I fall ill, He heals me' (26:80).

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.