Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 143 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:143

وَلَقَدْ كُنتُمْ تَمَنَّوْنَ ٱلْمَوْتَ مِن قَبْلِ أَن تَلْقَوْهُ فَقَدْ رَأَيْتُمُوهُ وَأَنتُمْ تَنظُرُونَ

“And you had certainly wished for death [i.e., martyrdom] before you encountered it, and you have [now] seen it [before you] while you were looking on.”

Saheeh International

Essence

You had been wishing for death before you ever met it, and now you have seen it, with your own eyes, looking straight at it.

A reflection

Measured out in your own head

Eleven people finish a first aid course on a Tuesday evening. Every one of them says they would step in. Two years later a man goes down in a shop queue in front of six of them, and everybody looks at everybody.

Nobody in that queue was lying on the Tuesday.

The ayah is spoken to a group who had asked for something out loud. The commentaries are specific about who they were. Men who had missed Badr, and who had seen the standing given to those who fought there. They would say: would that we were killed as the companions of Badr were killed. One early reading records them saying: O Allah, show us a day like the day of Badr, that we may acquit ourselves well for You.

They got the day. Most of them did not hold.

An early authority puts it without softening. Men among the companions used to say that if we meet the enemy alongside the Prophet we will do this and we will do that. So they were tested with exactly that. And by Allah, not all of them were true.

Now the word for wishing, because it is the hinge.

One lexicon gives the root a single sense: measuring a thing out, and the decree taking effect. A weight used on the scales was a manā. Death itself is maniyya, the term measured out for every living thing. And tamannā, to wish, is to measure a thing out in your own mind and picture it standing there. That is established.

The same lexicon adds the sting. Most wishing is guesswork, so it sits close to lying: picturing what has no reality.

Read that back over the first aid course. The eleven were not describing themselves. They were describing a measurement they had taken in their own heads, in a warm room, with no one dying.

And it is worth being clear what is and is not being reproached, because the commentaries are careful here. One says plainly that the reproach is not for wishing for martyrdom, which carries no reproach at all. It is for wishing and then not standing.

So the honest work is not to stop wanting good things. It is to notice that a wish is a measurement taken in a warm room.

Take one thing you have told people you would do if it came to it. Then ask what you did last time something smaller came to it.

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.