Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 168 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:168

ٱلَّذِينَ قَالُوا۟ لِإِخْوَٰنِهِمْ وَقَعَدُوا۟ لَوْ أَطَاعُونَا مَا قُتِلُوا۟ ۗ قُلْ فَٱدْرَءُوا۟ عَنْ أَنفُسِكُمُ ٱلْمَوْتَ إِن كُنتُمْ صَـٰدِقِينَ

“Those who said about their brothers while sitting [at home], "If they had obeyed us, they would not have been killed." Say, "Then prevent death from yourselves, if you should be truthful."”

Saheeh International

Essence

They sat back and said of their brothers: had they obeyed us they would not have been killed; say, then push death away from yourselves.

A reflection

He changed his diet and told himself he had bought ten years

A man's father dies at sixty-one. Within a month he has changed his diet, his sleep and his walking, and has quietly told himself he has bought ten years.

The verb in the reply is worth knowing, because it is the same verb they had just been using.

The lexicons give daraʾa as pushing a thing away. A man described as of tadraʾ was strong at shoving his enemies off himself. Dāraʾtuhu is: I pushed against him, each of us shoving the other. The headline picture in the lexicons is two men at each other, each pushing the blame off himself and onto the other. That is established.

Which is exactly what the speakers were doing. Pushing the deaths of their own relatives onto those relatives' decision.

So the answer takes their verb and hands it back with a different object. You are good at pushing. Push this. Push death off yourselves, if you are truthful.

And nothing in human life is better defended than this one point. We push, constantly and skilfully: the diet, the policy, the second opinion, the thing we will not let the children do. Most of it is sensible. All of it is pushing.

Here is where pride is quietly undone, and it is not the pride of the arrogant.

It is the ordinary conviction that we are the managers of our own continuation. Not that we will never die, which everyone concedes. That the date is in our hands, adjustable by care. Nobody says this. Almost everybody lives as if it were true. That is why a death at sixty-one sends a man to the shops rather than to his Lord.

So is this challenge just a display of superior power? Look at what provoked it. They had made a claim: obedience to us keeps men alive. The sentence does not argue with the claim. It tests it, on their own terms, with the one thing they cannot deliver. One commentary reads the closing words as: if you are truthful in being occupied with warding off harms and getting what you want.

A Lord who needed the acknowledgement would have asserted His power. This hands them the instrument and lets them try.

So do the sensible things, and stop pretending they are the decision. Tonight, name the precaution you most rely on. Then say plainly that the date was never yours, and ask Him for the only thing that survives 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.