Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 137 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:137

قَدْ خَلَتْ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ سُنَنٌ فَسِيرُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ فَٱنظُرُوا۟ كَيْفَ كَانَ عَـٰقِبَةُ ٱلْمُكَذِّبِينَ

“Similar situations [as yours] have passed on before you, so proceed throughout the earth and observe how was the end of those who denied.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Courses have already run before you, so walk the earth and look at how it ended for the ones who called it a lie.

A reflection

A sunna is a channel, not a rule

On a new housing estate the planners laid paths at right angles, because that is how plans are drawn. Within a year there was a brown line worn diagonally across the grass between the shops and the bus stop. Nobody organised it. The council eventually gave in and paved it. The route had already decided itself.

That is almost exactly what the word sunan carries. One lexicon traces the whole root to a single idea: a thing flowing on smoothly. Its first example is homely. Sanantu al-māʾ ʿalā wajhī is to pour water over your face and let it run. From that comes masnūn, poured out and smoothed, used in the Quran of the mud man was shaped from. And from that comes sunna: a way, named because it runs a course. These are established senses.

So the ayah is not saying that rules existed before you. It is saying that channels have already been cut and water has already run down them. You can go and look at where it came out.

The commentaries fill in which channels. One reads the sunan as Allah's ways with those who denied before. Giving them respite, drawing them out, then seizing them when the appointed term arrived. Others name peoples the first hearers knew by reputation. One early authority read the word as nations rather than ways, since sunna can mean a people. A line of poetry is quoted to show it.

And the verb used for those courses is khalat: they emptied. The lexicons use the word of a house with nobody left in it, and of generations gone by. Not merely past. Vacated.

There is something steadying in this. Your situation is not a new invention. The water has run this way before, the ground is already shaped, and the outflow has been photographed. That is a far less lonely thought than it sounds.

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.