Al-Anbya · Makki · ayah 2 of 112

Al-Anbya 21:2

مَا يَأْتِيهِم مِّن ذِكْرٍ مِّن رَّبِّهِم مُّحْدَثٍ إِلَّا ٱسْتَمَعُوهُ وَهُمْ يَلْعَبُونَ

“No mention [i.e., revelation] comes to them anew from their Lord except that they listen to it while they are at play”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every fresh word from their Lord found them listening, and still playing: the ears were present, the heart was elsewhere.

A reflection

They did listen, and that is the problem

The ayah does not say they refused to hear. It says istamaʿūhu: they listened to it. The form is the one for deliberate listening, lending the ear on purpose. They were in the room. They heard every word. And they were playing while they did it.

The first hearers had a working picture for hearing. The great leather bucket of a well had a loop sewn into its middle called its misamʿ, its ear. A rope passed through it kept the bucket level as it rose, so the water did not spill. A poet boasted that his tribe straightened anyone who leaned towards them, as a bucket is straightened by its ear. The lexicons record this plainly. Hearing, in that image, is what keeps a thing upright on its way up.

A commentator explains what went wrong. The benefit of anything heard only comes through what reaches the heart: reflection and thought. If people are playing while they listen, they get only the bare hearing, and an animal shares that with a human. The sound arrives; nothing is carried up.

A later scholar of the heart is sharper still. Hearing like this gives the hearer nothing except that the proof now stands against him. He walks out and asks the person beside him a question. "What did he say just now?" That question is itself quoted from the Quran, about people who sat with the Prophet ﷺ and left with nothing (47:16).

Picture a man on a work video call with his camera on. He nods at the right moments and says "Absolutely" twice. On a second screen, out of view, he is three levels into a game. At the end, he cannot say what was decided. Everyone saw him there, and nobody could tell.

The ayah exposes a kind of presence that is really absence. The question is not whether you attended the recitation. It is whether the bucket came up full.

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.