Al-Baqarah · Madani · ayah 44 of 286

Al-Baqarah 2:44

۞ أَتَأْمُرُونَ ٱلنَّاسَ بِٱلْبِرِّ وَتَنسَوْنَ أَنفُسَكُمْ وَأَنتُمْ تَتْلُونَ ٱلْكِتَـٰبَ ۚ أَفَلَا تَعْقِلُونَ

“Do you order righteousness of the people and forget[25] yourselves while you recite the Scripture? Then will you not reason?”

Saheeh International

Essence

Urging goodness on others while leaving yourself out, with the Book open in your hands, defies reason itself.

A reflection

The toffee tin in the drawer

A dentist lectures every patient about sugar. He shows them diagrams of decay and hands out leaflets. In his desk drawer, out of sight, he keeps a tin of toffees, and works through most of it each week.

'Do you command people to righteousness and forget yourselves, while you recite the Book?' The early authorities describe several versions of this. One report says some rabbis of Madinah privately told Muslim relatives: hold firm, his message is true. They did not follow it themselves. Others said they urged prayer and charity and practised neither. One early authority drew the lesson plainly. Whoever commands a good thing should be the quickest to do it.

The word birr is wide. Classical linguists connect it with barr, open land, for its breadth. It takes in every kind of good. That makes the rebuke wide too. It is not about one hypocrisy but about any gap between what we urge and what we do.

A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari gives the most chilling picture of that gap. A man is thrown into the Fire, and his insides spill out. He goes round and round like a donkey at a mill. The people of the Fire gather and say: weren't you the one who told us to do good and avoid wrong? He answers that he told them to do good, and did not do it himself. He told them to avoid wrong, and did it.

One Companion gave a searching rule. A person does not understand faith fully until he dislikes wrongdoing in others for Allah's sake. Then he should turn to himself and dislike it there even more.

The dentist's patients will never see the drawer. The ayah reminds us that the Book we recite sees every drawer we have.

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.