Taha · Makki · ayah 125 of 135

Taha 20:125

قَالَ رَبِّ لِمَ حَشَرْتَنِىٓ أَعْمَىٰ وَقَدْ كُنتُ بَصِيرًا

“He will say, "My Lord, why have you raised me blind while I was [once] seeing?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

‘I used to see,’ he protests on that Day: and he did, keenly, everything except the one thing his eyes were given for.

A reflection

Sharp-eyed for everything but the signs

Wa-qad kuntu baṣīrā: and I used to see. The man is not lying. He did see, in this world, and probably very well.

The lexicons give baṣar a picture of reading. At root it is a thing becoming clear. A baṣīra was a spot of blood on the ground that a hunter read to track where his wounded quarry had gone. From that it came to mean evidence, and the inner sight that reads it. So baṣīr is not only having working eyes. It is being able to read what the signs on the ground are telling you.

Picture a structural surveyor in his fifties. He can walk into a house and, from a hairline crack above a doorframe, tell you the foundations are moving. He has saved buyers fortunes. For three years his teenage son has been missing school, forging notes, telling small lies at dinner. He notices none of it. His sight is extraordinary, and selective.

That is the man in this ayah. He protests: why have You raised me blind, when I could see? One commentary says he speaks as though he thinks he had no sin. And indeed, by every worldly measure, he was perceptive. He read markets, faces, opportunities. What he never read were the signs pointing to his Lord.

The next ayah gives the answer: Our signs came to you, and you forgot them (20:126). He had the eyes. He had the hunter's skill. He simply never followed that particular trail.

This is uncomfortable, because it rarely feels like blindness from the inside. It feels like being very busy seeing other things. Ask yourself honestly where your sight is sharpest: work, money, other people's faults? Then ask where you have stopped looking. That second place is where the ayah is pointing.

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.