Al-Baqarah · Madani · ayah 24 of 286

Al-Baqarah 2:24

فَإِن لَّمْ تَفْعَلُوا۟ وَلَن تَفْعَلُوا۟ فَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱلنَّارَ ٱلَّتِى وَقُودُهَا ٱلنَّاسُ وَٱلْحِجَارَةُ ۖ أُعِدَّتْ لِلْكَـٰفِرِينَ

“But if you do not - and you will never be able to - then fear the Fire, whose fuel is people and stones, prepared for the disbelievers.”

Saheeh International

Essence

You have not matched it, and you never will; so guard yourselves from the Fire fed by people and the stones they worshipped.

A reflection

A prediction that could have failed

A security firm launches a new lock and offers a large reward to anyone who can open it without the key. Every year the reward is renewed. Hobbyists and professionals try. For a decade, no one claims it. The company's confidence was a risk: one clever attempt would have ended its reputation overnight.

The ayah takes a far greater risk. Having challenged its hearers to bring a single surah, it adds a short parenthesis: wa-lan tafʿalū, and you will never do it. A concise commentary explains that this interrupts the sentence to state a fact about the future. They would never be able to, because the Quran's inimitability was plain. One classical commentary notes that the particle lan denies something for all time. It calls this a second miracle on top of the first. The Quran foretold that it would never be matched, and so it has turned out, from that day to the commentator's own time.

A sceptic may object that such a claim is easy to make and hard to test. But consider what it staked. The challenge was aimed at people with every motive to answer, and the means to try. It was repeated over years, in Makkah and in Madinah. A single convincing surah would have discredited the whole message at a stroke. The prediction invited its own refutation, and waited.

What remains open is that no one can prove a negative for the future by argument alone. Each generation can test the claim for itself, and the ayah invites exactly that. Its confidence is not the bluster of a boast that avoids examination. It is the calm of a statement that has already been examined for fourteen centuries.

There is something here for a believer's heart as well. The Book you hold was not afraid of its critics. You need not be afraid of honest questions either. The truth that said 'and you never will' can bear being looked at closely.

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.