An-Naml · Makki · ayah 4 of 93

An-Naml 27:4

إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ زَيَّنَّا لَهُمْ أَعْمَـٰلَهُمْ فَهُمْ يَعْمَهُونَ

“Indeed, for those who do not believe in the Hereafter, We have made pleasing to them their deeds, so they wander blindly.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Deny the final reckoning and your own deeds start to look lovely, until you are turning in circles in a desert without waymarks.

A reflection

Even your taste is on loan

The verb is in the plural of majesty: zayyannā, We made fair. Allah speaks of Himself as the One in whose hand even a person's sense of what looks beautiful rests.

That sentence lands hard on the ego. Most of us treat our tastes as the last private territory. My opinions can be argued with, my habits can be judged, but what I like is simply mine. 'I know what I like' is said as if nothing could be more independent.

A food critic is proud of his palate. He can name a vinegar's region with his eyes shut, and his reviews have closed restaurants. Then a heavy cold takes his sense of taste for a week. The finest dish in the city tastes of wet card. Nothing about his pride survived that week, because the pleasure was never under his command. It was lent.

The Quran says the same of the deeper liking that steers a life. What seems attractive to you, what feels right and natural and good, is not outside His dominion. That should make a person humble about his own sense of rightness. Feeling sure is not the same as being right.

Some hear this and object that it sounds domineering, as if God were flexing power over human hearts. But He gains nothing by saying it. He does not need our tastes, our praise or our agreement. The sentence is told to us, for our sake, so that we stop trusting a compass we did not build.

The same verb appears for the believers: Allah 'made faith beloved to you and adorned it in your hearts' (49:7). So the humble response is not despair. It is a request. Ask the One who adorns hearts to make the right things beautiful to 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.