Al-'Ankabut · Makki · ayah 38 of 69

Al-'Ankabut 29:38

وَعَادًا وَثَمُودَا۟ وَقَد تَّبَيَّنَ لَكُم مِّن مَّسَـٰكِنِهِمْ ۖ وَزَيَّنَ لَهُمُ ٱلشَّيْطَـٰنُ أَعْمَـٰلَهُمْ فَصَدَّهُمْ عَنِ ٱلسَّبِيلِ وَكَانُوا۟ مُسْتَبْصِرِينَ

“And [We destroyed] ʿAad and Thamūd, and it has become clear to you from their [ruined] dwellings. And Satan had made pleasing to them their deeds and averted them from the path, and they were endowed with perception.”

Saheeh International

Essence

ʿAd and Thamud could see clearly, yet Satan made their deeds look lovely and tilted them off the road; their empty homes still say so.

A reflection

Lovely for a season

The ayah does not say Satan forced ʿAd and Thamud into anything. It says zayyana: he adorned their deeds for them. He made what they were already doing look beautiful.

The lexicons set zayn, adornment, against shayn, disfigurement. Their picture is the earth after rain, decked in new grass. The Quran uses that very image elsewhere, and finishes it. The earth takes on its adornment and its people think they have mastered it. Then it is mown down as if it had never flourished (10:24).

One lexicon adds a test that cuts straight through this ayah. True adornment, it says, never disfigures a person in any state, in this world or the next. What beautifies only for a while is, seen from another side, a blemish.

That is the difference between what Allah adorns and what Satan adorns. Faith made beautiful in the heart (49:7) stays beautiful at death and after it. A sin made beautiful is lovely only until the season turns.

Stand in a florist's on a Friday. A bucket of cut roses, full and scented, sits beside a plain potted plant with a few green leaves. For four days, the roses win easily. By the following Friday they are brown water in a vase, and the plant has put out a new shoot.

Satan deals in cut flowers. His beauty is real, but it has already been severed from its root. It cannot last, because it was never alive in the right way.

So when a deed looks especially lovely to you, apply the lexicon's test. Will this still look beautiful on my deathbed? Will it look beautiful on the Day the deeds are shown? If its beauty depends on not asking, it is adornment for a season.

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.