Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 115 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:115

وَمَا يَفْعَلُوا۟ مِنْ خَيْرٍ فَلَن يُكْفَرُوهُ ۗ وَٱللَّهُ عَلِيمٌۢ بِٱلْمُتَّقِينَ

“And whatever good they do - never will it be denied them. And Allāh is Knowing of the righteous.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Whatever good they do will never be buried unpaid, and Allah knows exactly who is guarding himself.

A reflection

Four reasons a due goes unpaid, none of them His

A first-time author sits down to write the acknowledgements page. He has two hundred words and a list of thirty-one people. When he finishes, three names are missing, and he knows precisely why each one is gone.

He could not remember the name of the woman who read the first draft. He had lost all contact with the man who lent him a quiet room for a year. And the third he left out deliberately, because the idea everyone now calls his was partly hers.

Forgetting. Inability. The refusal to share credit. Add a fourth we are quieter about: sometimes we withhold because we need the thing ourselves.

The closing clause of this ayah is read by one classical commentator as a proof rather than a decoration. He asks what could possibly cause a due reward to be withheld. Only one of four things: inadvertence and forgetting; incapacity; miserliness; or need. Then he removes them one by one. ʿAlīm, Knowing, rules out forgetting and ignorance. The name Allāh, the God of everything that has been brought into being, rules out incapacity, miserliness and need. With every reason gone, the withholding itself becomes impossible.

So the sentence is not reassurance offered to a nervous servant. It is an argument with no remaining exit.

Now notice where that leaves the ego. We picture our account with Allah as a negotiation between two interested parties, each watching the other. That picture is borrowed entirely from dealing with creatures exactly as limited as we are: forgetful, stretched, slightly tight-fisted.

Pride has a stake in keeping that picture, because an unreliable record leaves room for self-promotion. If nobody is really counting, then it matters enormously who hears about it.

The word for knowing helps here. The lexicons note that the Arabs called a tall mountain an ʿalam: the landmark that tells a traveller where he is. ʿIlm belongs to that family. Knowledge, in this language, is not a stored file. It stands up and points.

He does not need your good deed, and He is incapable of mislaying it. Both halves of that are humbling, and the second one more than the first.

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.