Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 203 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:203

فَيَقُولُوا۟ هَلْ نَحْنُ مُنظَرُونَ

“And they will say, "May we be reprieved?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

Caught by what they denied, they ask for the one thing they had been given all along: a little more time.

A reflection

The reprieve they ask for is the one they lived in

The plea is one word: munẓarūn. Are we to be given time? It comes from a root the first hearers used for looking. Neighbouring camps close enough to see each other were called naẓar. To wait for someone was naẓara, as if your eyes were fixed on the hour he would come. The causative form, anẓara, is to give a person time: to keep looking toward him and not act yet.

So the people in this ayah ask to be looked toward a little longer. Yet that is exactly what every one of their years had been. Morning after morning they woke up inside a reprieve. A concise modern commentary explains the plea: delay us, so we can turn back to Allah from our shirk and make up what we missed. One early commentary adds: so that we may return and turn to Him in obedience.

Picture a harbour café beside a small island ferry. The first call comes over the loudspeaker, then a second, then a third. A man at the window table finishes his coffee, checks his phone, orders a pastry. Then he hears the hydraulic whine of the ramp lifting. He runs to the quay, waving and shouting, 'Can you wait?'

The crew did wait. They waited forty minutes, with the ramp down and the announcements running. What he is asking for at the edge of the quay is what he had been sitting in all along.

That is the quiet tragedy of the word. They do not ask for something new. They ask for more of what they had, at the very moment it has run out. The reprieve was never a door that would open later. It was the room they were already standing in.

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.