Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 6 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:6

فَقَدْ كَذَّبُوا۟ فَسَيَأْتِيهِمْ أَنۢبَـٰٓؤُا۟ مَا كَانُوا۟ بِهِۦ يَسْتَهْزِءُونَ

“For they have already denied, but there will come to them the news of that which they used to ridicule.”

Saheeh International

Essence

They turned away, then called it a lie, then laughed; but what they laughed at is real, and its news is already on the road.

A reflection

Three steps down, and the tape on the dashboard

A small orange light comes on in the dashboard. For a week he simply does not look at it. The next week a passenger points it out, and he says the sensor is faulty. Everyone knows those sensors. By the third week there is a strip of black tape over the light. He jokes about it at the lights: "my mood indicator". One wet evening on the motorway the engine seizes.

Notice the order. He did not begin by mocking the warning. He began by not looking.

Read with the ayah before it, this one keeps exactly that order. In the previous ayah, whenever a fresh reminder came from the Most Merciful, they turned away. This ayah adds two more steps: they denied, and they ridiculed. One classical commentator saw a staircase here. Turning aside comes first, then open denial, then mockery: the steps of someone climbing higher and higher in misery.

Another explained why each step leads to the next. Once you have turned away from something, you have in effect called it false. Once you have called it false, its worth grows light in your eyes. And what is light becomes a target for jokes. Whoever is open to the truth, he wrote, believes it; whoever believes it holds it in awe.

The word for denial carries an old picture. The lexicons describe kadhaba as more than a spoken lie. It is a charge held back before it reaches its target, milk that dries up, a thing that falls short of what is. Denial is the heart stopping short of a truth it could have reached.

So the dangerous step is usually the quiet first one. Nobody tapes over a light they have honestly looked at. The tape only becomes possible after the not-looking.

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.