Al-Furqan · Makki · ayah 71 of 77

Al-Furqan 25:71

وَمَن تَابَ وَعَمِلَ صَـٰلِحًا فَإِنَّهُۥ يَتُوبُ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ مَتَابًا

“And he who repents and does righteousness does indeed turn to Allāh with [accepted] repentance.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Whoever turns back and does good is not only leaving a wrong road but coming home, with more turnings promised.

A reflection

Not a reset button pressed once

Repentance is often imagined as a button. You press it once, sincerely, and the slate is clean. If you fall again, you have 'broken' your repentance, and the shame of pressing it a second time feels worse than the first. By the sixth time, many people stop pressing.

This ayah's grammar suggests something else. Its condition is in the past tense: man tāba, whoever has turned back. Its result is in the present: fa-innahu yatūbu, then he is turning. One commentary draws a striking promise from that shift. Whoever has repented sincerely in the past, it says, is promised that Allah will grant them repentance again in the future. It calls this one of the greatest glad tidings.

The commentaries also note that this ayah widens the one before. That ayah spoke of turning back from the three gravest sins. This one, they say, extends the same acceptance to every sin. It is the general after the particular.

A man has deleted and reinstalled the same prayer-reminder app six times in a year. Each time he deletes it, he feels he has failed. Each time he reinstalls it, he feels like a fraud. He has never thought that the reinstalling might itself be the thing the ayah describes.

Repentance, read this way, is not an event but a road. A person walks it, stumbles, turns back again, and walks on. The danger is not stumbling. It is deciding that turning back has stopped working.

And the turning is not a licence. The same ayah ties it to ʿamila ṣāliḥan: and does good. The road has to show in the footsteps.

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.