Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 97 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:97

تَٱللَّهِ إِن كُنَّا لَفِى ضَلَـٰلٍ مُّبِينٍ

“"By Allāh, we were indeed in manifest error”

Saheeh International

Essence

Thrown into the Fire beside the idols they served, the worshippers swear by Allah, sincerely at last, that their error had been plain all along.

A reflection

Plain all along, and invisible from inside

They do not say their error was subtle. They call it mubīn: clear, evident, showing itself. That is the strangest word in the confession. How does a person live a whole life inside something obvious and never see it?

Picture an alto who has sung in the same community choir for eleven years. At the anniversary concert someone records the evening, and a week later she listens at her kitchen table. On the third song she hears a voice a quarter-tone flat, steady and confident, through every chorus. It is her own. Inside the choir the sound had wrapped around her, and her ear simply joined in. The recording put her outside the sound for the first time, and the fault was not faint at all. It was plain.

The Day described in this passage is that recording played back. Nothing new is shown to these people that was not there before. The idols they served are thrown into the Fire beside them (26:94), and the distance that once made them look grand is gone. One commentary notes that they call their error clear to press home their regret: the truth had never been hidden, only unattended.

The word kunnā, "we were", matters too. They do not say they slipped once. They describe a state they lived in, a whole sound they had sung inside.

The mercy for the reader is that the recording exists now. The Quran is an ear outside the choir. Read honestly, it lets a person hear the flat note while there is still time to retune. So does the friend who tells you, gently, what you cannot hear yourself. The question is whether you play the tape back today, or wait for it to be played for you.

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.