Al-Mu'minun · Makki · ayah 1 of 118

Al-Mu'minun 23:1

قَدْ أَفْلَحَ ٱلْمُؤْمِنُونَ

“Certainly will the believers have succeeded:”

Saheeh International

Essence

Three words open the surah with a verdict, not a hope: the believers have already reached a lasting success, worked for like broken ground.

A reflection

Success that has to break the ground first

The verb here, aflaḥa, comes from a root whose first sense, according to the classical lexicons, is splitting. Iron splits iron, ran an old saying, and a lip with a cleft in it was called by the same letters. The farmer who cut open the soil to sow was the fallāḥ, named for the splitting. This is an established sense, stated plainly in the dictionaries, not a modern guess.

The same letters also carried a second meaning, side by side with the first: lasting, staying on in good. A poet could lament that the world holds no falāḥ, meaning nothing in it stays. The pre-dawn meal before a fast was even called falāḥ, because it lets the fast last until sunset.

Put the two senses together and a picture forms. Picture a woman who has just moved into a new-build house. Under a thin skin of turf she finds builders' rubble, hard as a pavement. For a whole autumn she breaks it up with a fork, one stubborn square at a time. Her neighbours buy instant lawn. Two summers later theirs has browned and lifted at the edges. Hers is a garden with roots a foot deep.

That is the kind of success this word names. It is not a lucky win that arrives from nowhere. It is the result of ground being broken, often slowly and against resistance, so that something can take root and stay. The lexicons define falāḥ as winning what one seeks and being saved from what one fears, and some add remaining in that good for ever.

The opening of this surah could have used a word for a prize or a lucky escape. It chose instead a word with soil and effort and permanence inside it. The qualities that follow in the next ten ayat are the breaking of the ground. The word in this first ayah is the harvest that does not wither.

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.