Taha · Makki · ayah 84 of 135

Taha 20:84

قَالَ هُمْ أُو۟لَآءِ عَلَىٰٓ أَثَرِى وَعَجِلْتُ إِلَيْكَ رَبِّ لِتَرْضَىٰ

“He said, "They are close upon my tracks, and I hastened to You, my Lord, that You be pleased."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Musa's answer is a lover's confession: they are just behind me, and I hurried to You, my Lord, so that You would be pleased.

A reflection

Hurrying towards a face

And I hurried to You, my Lord, so that You would be pleased. The last word, tarḍā, comes from riḍā. The lexicons define it by its opposite. Riḍā is the reverse of sukhṭ, the displeasure that turns its face away. So its picture, established in the lexicons, is a face turning towards you. One lexicographer explains a poet's line this way: when a tribe is pleased with a man, they love him and come towards him.

That is what Musa was running for. Not a reward, not a tablet of law, not even the honour of being spoken to. He was running towards a face turning towards him.

A spiritual commentary records an early reading of the phrase that goes further still. So that You would be pleased, it says, means: out of longing for You. Musa veiled his longing in the word pleasure. The same work defines longing as the heart's journey in search of the one it loves. Whoever denies that a servant longs for his Lord, it says, has denied that he loves Him, because love carries longing within it.

Read that way, the ayah is less an excuse than a confession. Musa had been promised a meeting with his Lord. A note on a rhetorical commentary says that anyone promised what delights him wishes for the wings of a bird to reach it. Musa did not have wings. He had legs, and he used them.

Most people know what it is to hurry towards a face. A man at the arrivals gate who keeps walking forward until the barrier stops him. A child running down a school corridor to the parent at the door. Nobody needs to explain that kind of haste.

The question for us is what our own haste runs towards. Ask, honestly, whose face you most want turned towards you. Then ask whether you have ever hurried to Allah the way you hurry to that face.

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.