Al-Qasas · Makki · ayah 26 of 88

Al-Qasas 28:26

قَالَتْ إِحْدَىٰهُمَا يَـٰٓأَبَتِ ٱسْتَـْٔجِرْهُ ۖ إِنَّ خَيْرَ مَنِ ٱسْتَـْٔجَرْتَ ٱلْقَوِىُّ ٱلْأَمِينُ

“One of the women said, "O my father, hire him. Indeed, the best one you can hire is the strong and the trustworthy."”

Saheeh International

Essence

One afternoon at a well was enough: a young woman saw a stranger's strength and his restraint, and named the two things worth hiring.

A reflection

Not a job advert: a portrait of the one who judged

This ayah has had a long second life on office walls: the best one you can hire is the strong, the trustworthy. It turns up on recruitment slides and in management talks. Usually it is read as a checklist for candidates: be capable, be honest, get the job.

That reading is half right, and the missing half is the more surprising one. Look at who is speaking. Not a king, not an employer, not a prophet. A young woman, one of two sisters who had stood back from a crowded well that morning. She had no office and no budget. What she had was a clear eye.

Look too at the shape of her sentence. One commentary notices that she did not say 'hire him, because he is strong and trustworthy'. She turned it into a general rule, a line with the ring of a proverb. 'The best one you can hire' comes first, though the grammar would normally place it second. The commentators read that fronting as emphasis: what mattered most to her was the word 'best'. Her verb is in the past tense, istaʾjarta, 'you have hired'. That, the same commentary says, marks a thing already tested and known.

So the ayah is less a job description than a record of judgement. It shows a person who watched, drew a conclusion, and put it into words her father could act on. A values poster in an office lift may list 'integrity' and 'drive', and nobody riding the lift is changed by it. The young woman did something harder. She saw those qualities in a dusty stranger, before anyone had vouched for him.

Read it that way and the question turns round. The first question is whether I am strong and trustworthy. The second is harder: would I recognise strength and trust standing in front of me, unannounced? Most of us hire, choose friends and pick partners by the poster. We read the CV, the confidence, the clothes. She read the well.

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.