Al-Hajj · Madani · ayah 46 of 78

Al-Hajj 22:46

أَفَلَمْ يَسِيرُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ فَتَكُونَ لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌ يَعْقِلُونَ بِهَآ أَوْ ءَاذَانٌ يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا ۖ فَإِنَّهَا لَا تَعْمَى ٱلْأَبْصَـٰرُ وَلَـٰكِن تَعْمَى ٱلْقُلُوبُ ٱلَّتِى فِى ٱلصُّدُورِ

“So have they not traveled through the earth and have hearts by which to reason and ears by which to hear? For indeed, it is not eyes that are blinded, but blinded are the hearts which are within the breasts.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The eyes that pass the ruins are usually healthy; what goes blind is the heart in the chest, the blindness that costs everything.

A reflection

The blindness you assumed was the real one

Most of us carry a settled reading of this ayah, worn smooth by repetition. It goes something like this. Blindness of the eyes is the real thing. 'Blind hearts' is a figure of speech, a poetic way of describing people who will not listen. The ayah, on this reading, borrows the language of blindness to make a moral point.

The ayah says the opposite.

One classical commentator saw this centuries ago. People take it as settled, he wrote, that blindness truly lives in the eye, and that blindness of the heart is a borrowed image. The ayah sets out to overturn that belief. It denies blindness to the eyes and gives it, in earnest, to the hearts. Beside heart-blindness, eye-blindness barely counts as blindness at all.

That is why the ayah adds four words that look unnecessary: allatī fī al-ṣudūr, which are in the breasts. Every listener knew where hearts are. Another commentator explains the addition with an example. Imagine saying: the sharpness is not in the sword, but in your tongue, the one between your jaws. 'Between your jaws' is not information. It is insistence: I said tongue, and I meant it. The ayah pins blindness to an address so no one can call it a metaphor.

Now picture a man at the optician's on a Monday morning. He reads the bottom line of the chart without squinting. Perfect vision, he is told. He drives home past the bank, where three letters about his debts sit unopened on his kitchen table. His eyes are flawless. Something else is not.

Notice too who is being addressed. Not the blind. The ayah speaks of people with excellent eyesight who had walked past ruins. Their eyes did their job. The failure happened further in.

So the first step with this ayah is to unlearn the comfortable reading. It is not saying hearts can be 'a bit like' blind. It is saying that the blindness you fear most is the lesser one. The one to fear is already possible in a body with perfect sight. It may be possible in yours.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.