Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 103 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:103

وَٱعْتَصِمُوا۟ بِحَبْلِ ٱللَّهِ جَمِيعًا وَلَا تَفَرَّقُوا۟ ۚ وَٱذْكُرُوا۟ نِعْمَتَ ٱللَّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ إِذْ كُنتُمْ أَعْدَآءً فَأَلَّفَ بَيْنَ قُلُوبِكُمْ فَأَصْبَحْتُم بِنِعْمَتِهِۦٓ إِخْوَٰنًا وَكُنتُمْ عَلَىٰ شَفَا حُفْرَةٍ مِّنَ ٱلنَّارِ فَأَنقَذَكُم مِّنْهَا ۗ كَذَٰلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ ٱللَّهُ لَكُمْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ

“And hold firmly to the rope[142] of Allāh all together and do not become divided. And remember the favor of Allāh upon you - when you were enemies and He brought your hearts together and you became, by His favor, brothers. And you were on the edge of a pit of the Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus does Allāh make clear to you His verses that you may be guided.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Hold the rope of Allah together and do not come apart: He joined hearts that were at war and pulled you back from the rim.

A reflection

What a beekeeper cannot order

A beekeeper who wants to put two colonies into one hive cannot simply pour one on top of the other. They will fight until one side is dead. What he does instead is lay a single sheet of newspaper between them. By the time they have chewed through it, a few days later, they smell the same, and they let each other live.

And even then it sometimes fails, and he opens the lid to find the floor covered.

So here is a man with thirty years of skill, protective clothing, smoke and patience. He can arrange a sheet of paper. He cannot issue the order. Nothing in his kit touches the thing that has to change, which is what one colony feels about the other.

Now read what the ayah claims. Not that two tribes made peace. Not that a treaty was drafted and held. He joined your hearts. The commentaries say the enmity between these two clans of Medina ran near a hundred and twenty years. They were descended from one father and one mother, which is usually the worst kind.

And elsewhere the claim is explicit. If you had spent everything in the earth you could not have joined their hearts, but Allah joined them (8:63).

Sit with that for a moment, because most of us keep a quiet ledger of the peace we have made. The dinner we hosted. The word we said at exactly the right moment. The group that would fall apart without us holding it. There is real pride in being the glue, and it is nearly invisible, because it looks like service.

The ayah does not credit the glue.

And notice what it does ask for: remember His favour. Not because He is short of credit. He tells us plainly that He gains nothing from us (35:15). The remembering is prescribed because forgetting is what lets the old feud back through the door. That is what the rest of this ayah is about.

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.