Al-Anbya · Makki · ayah 65 of 112

Al-Anbya 21:65

ثُمَّ نُكِسُوا۟ عَلَىٰ رُءُوسِهِمْ لَقَدْ عَلِمْتَ مَا هَـٰٓؤُلَآءِ يَنطِقُونَ

“Then they reversed themselves,[893] [saying], "You have already known that these do not speak!"”

Saheeh International

Essence

Their moment of clarity flipped over like a relapse, and their defence became their confession: you know perfectly well these cannot speak.

A reflection

Turned upside down: the picture of a relapse

Thumma nukisū ʿalā ruʾūsihim: then they were turned over on their heads. The first hearers knew naks as a vivid set of pictures. To turn a thing over so its top becomes its bottom. A naks was an arrow whose notch had broken, so it was reversed and useless; a man's ankās were the feeblest arrows in his quiver. A breech birth, feet first, was mankūs. A horse too weak to hold its head up was munakkis. And when an illness came back after recovery, that too was a naks: a relapse. One commentary uses exactly that image here: as one says the sick man relapsed, returning to his former state.

That is the tragedy of this ayah. In the previous one they were upright: they had returned to themselves and admitted the truth. Now the whole posture flips. One commentator says they had been set straight when they came back to sound thinking, and then they were overturned.

Picture a member of an archery club practising at dusk. Tired, she picks up an arrow without checking it. The nock is cracked; it sits wrongly on the string. She draws and looses. Instead of flying to the target, the arrow wobbles, turns end over end and buries itself in the grass ten metres short. Everything looked right. One broken point at the back reversed the whole flight.

Relapse rarely announces itself. It often begins with one small break: a comfortable habit, a familiar voice, the pull of the group. Then the whole person turns over. The Quran gives this ayah a single word for it, and the first hearers would have pictured an arrow flying backwards. It is a warning to check the notch while the moment of clarity still holds.

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.