Al-Anbya · Makki · ayah 49 of 112

Al-Anbya 21:49

ٱلَّذِينَ يَخْشَوْنَ رَبَّهُم بِٱلْغَيْبِ وَهُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّاعَةِ مُشْفِقُونَ

“Who fear their Lord unseen,[889] while they are of the Hour apprehensive.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The mindful fear their Lord when no one sees and they cannot see Him, and their hearts stay tender about the Hour.

A reflection

A heart made thin like the afterglow

Mushfiqūn: apprehensive. The first hearers knew this root as thinness. The shafaq was the thin red glow left in the western sky after the sun has gone. Cloth woven thinly was called shafaq too. Ishfāq, the lexicons explain, is a heart made thin: care mixed with fear, the way a mother frets over her child.

One classical writer on the stations of the heart draws the distinction exactly. Ishfāq is the tenderness of fear. It is fear joined with compassion from the one who fears, for the one he fears for. Its relation to ordinary fear is like the relation of gentleness to mercy: its finest and most delicate form.

Picture a young man driving his elderly mother home from hospital after a hip operation. He takes every speed bump at walking pace. At each junction he glances across at her face, then back at the road. When she winces, he pulls over without a word and adjusts the cushion behind her. He is not panicking. He is not paralysed. His heart has simply gone thin with love.

That is the feeling the ayah gives to the mindful when they think of the Hour. Not terror that freezes them, and not indifference either. A thin, alert tenderness for their own souls and for the people they love, knowing a day is coming that matters more than any junction.

This matters because many people imagine religious fear as something harsh. The ayah chooses a word for fear that is soft at its root. The believer's apprehension about the Hour is the son's watchfulness on that drive, not the prisoner's dread. It protects. It does not crush.

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.