Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 224 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:224

وَٱلشُّعَرَآءُ يَتَّبِعُهُمُ ٱلْغَاوُۥنَ

“And the poets - [only] the deviators follow them.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The ayah names the poets and then looks only at who follows them: a voice is weighed by the crowd walking in its track.

A reflection

You are more likely in the crowd than on the stage

Most readers meet this ayah as a sentence about other people. The poets of old Mecca. Today, perhaps, the influencers and the loudest voices online. The reader stands outside it, watching the stage.

Look at how it is built. 'The poets' is only the topic. The claim is about the people behind them: the strays follow them. The verb of the sentence belongs to the followers.

One commentary draws out what that means. The ayah makes straying the reason for the following. Remove the straying and the following stops. Another puts it plainly. Nobody follows such poets in their falsehood, enjoys it and repeats it, except those already astray.

So the ayah is less a portrait of the speaker than a diagnosis of the listener. What you follow shows where you already are.

A youth circle tries an exercise one Friday evening. Each person writes down five people whose words they repeated this week. A quote, a joke, an opinion, a turn of phrase. Then the leader asks one more question. Would you trust each of these five to look after your little brother for a weekend?

One boy stares at his list for a long time. He would not trust a single one of them. Yet he has carried their words around all week, in their voices.

That is the uncomfortable turn in this ayah. Very few readers are poets with a crowd behind them. Almost every reader is in someone's crowd. So its question for most of us is not what we are saying. It is whom we are walking behind, and what that says about us.

The stage is a small part of this ayah. The crowd is the rest of it, and most of us are standing in it.

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.