Luqman · Makki · ayah 18 of 34

Luqman 31:18

وَلَا تُصَعِّرْ خَدَّكَ لِلنَّاسِ وَلَا تَمْشِ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ مَرَحًا ۖ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ كُلَّ مُخْتَالٍ فَخُورٍ

“And do not turn your cheek [in contempt] toward people[1164] and do not walk through the earth exultantly. Indeed, Allāh does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Pride shows in a turned cheek and a strutting walk, and Allah does not love the one who admires himself and counts his gifts.

A reflection

Pride lives in the neck, not the bank balance

Most people picture arrogance as something large. A rich man boasting. A celebrity demanding special treatment. A loud voice listing achievements. Measured against those pictures, most of us feel safe.

Luqman's counsel does not start there. It starts with a cheek. Wa-lā tuṣaʿʿir khaddaka li-l-nās: do not turn your cheek away from people. The earliest commentators explain it in small, ordinary terms. Do not turn your face away when people speak to you, out of contempt for them. Another early reading: it is the one who, when greeted, twists his neck away in pride. Another: it is meeting someone you have a grudge against and turning your face aside.

The Prophet ﷺ defined pride in the same plain way. He said that no one with an atom's weight of pride in his heart will enter Paradise. Then he explained: pride is rejecting the truth and looking down on people (Muslim 265).

Looking down on people. Not a fortune. Not a title. A way of looking. Pride can live in someone with nothing, and be absent in someone with everything.

A young woman moves into a block of flats with a concierge. In her first week she says good morning to him every day. Then she notices that nobody else does. By spring she walks past him reading her phone. She has not grown rich or famous. She has only learned where not to turn her face.

That is where this ayah begins its work on the ego: not in grand gestures, but in the small turn of a neck.

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.