Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 69 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:69

وَدَّت طَّآئِفَةٌ مِّنْ أَهْلِ ٱلْكِتَـٰبِ لَوْ يُضِلُّونَكُمْ وَمَا يُضِلُّونَ إِلَّآ أَنفُسَهُمْ وَمَا يَشْعُرُونَ

“A faction of the People of the Scripture wish they could mislead you. But they do not mislead except themselves, and they perceive [it] not.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Some long to lead believers astray, yet every such effort loses only the one who makes it, and they cannot even feel it happening.

A reflection

The misleader is the first one lost

A father coaches his teenage son to exaggerate a claim to the insurers after a small burglary. Add the laptop, he says, nobody checks. Six years later the son lies to him about a debt, smoothly, without blinking. The father cannot understand where he learned it.

'They mislead none but themselves.' The ayah reverses what the schemers expect. They thought they were the ones doing the misleading. In fact, they were the first ones lost.

The root of the verb paints this vividly. The Arabs said ḍalla al-laban fī al-māʾ: the milk was lost in the water, swallowed up and impossible to find. An early commentator reads the verb here as 'destroy'. They ruin no one by their efforts but themselves. A modern commentary adds that their striving to mislead others only deepens their own straying.

There is a hard psychological truth here. You cannot practise deceiving others without changing yourself. Each manipulation trains the manipulator. Each half-truth told to someone else makes the next one easier to tell to yourself. Over time, the person who began by misleading others can no longer find the truth even when he wants it. The milk has gone into the water.

This is a warning for anyone who uses words to steer people, which is most of us. Marketing, persuasion, family politics, religious argument. Before you bend a fact to move someone else, ask what it is bending in you. The first victim of every deception sits on the deceiver's own side of the table.

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.