Taha · Makki · ayah 2 of 135

Taha 20:2

مَآ أَنزَلْنَا عَلَيْكَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ لِتَشْقَىٰٓ

“We have not sent down to you the Qur’ān that you be distressed”

Saheeh International

Essence

The Quran was not sent down to wear you out or make you wretched, whatever those who call faith a misery may say.

A reflection

More worn out than a colt-breaker

The Arabs had a proverb for someone utterly spent: more wretched than a colt-breaker. Picture the man. A young horse that has never felt a saddle, bucking in a dusty ring. He is thrown, gets up, is thrown again. By evening his arms ache, his back is bruised, and the colt is no calmer. Two commentators quote this proverb to explain the word in this ayah.

The lexicons fill out the picture. The root means labouring against difficulty, the opposite of ease and of happiness. They say it of a camel on a long march, too weak to hurry yet refusing to fall behind. And one lexicon draws a careful line: every shaqāʾ is toil, but not every toil is shaqāʾ. This is the toil that leads nowhere. Effort without the relief of arrival.

The commentators gather three kinds of such toil around this ayah. The toil of arguing with the stubborn. The toil of grieving, again and again, that people will not believe. And the toil of punishing worship that wears the body down.

We did not send it down upon you for that, says the ayah. Not to make you the colt-breaker, wrestling wills that will not bend.

This is a strange sentence in a holy book. Most religious texts would tell a prophet to try harder. This one tells him that exhaustion was never the purpose. The Quran is a reminder, as the next ayah says, and a reminder does its work by being heard, not by being forced.

Many sincere people today live as colt-breakers. They wrestle a spouse into prayer, or an adult child into belief, or themselves into a perfection they cannot reach. The ayah does not ask them to care less. It lifts off them a weight that was never theirs to carry.

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.