As-Sajdah · Makki · ayah 20 of 30

As-Sajdah 32:20

وَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فَسَقُوا۟ فَمَأْوَىٰهُمُ ٱلنَّارُ ۖ كُلَّمَآ أَرَادُوٓا۟ أَن يَخْرُجُوا۟ مِنْهَآ أُعِيدُوا۟ فِيهَا وَقِيلَ لَهُمْ ذُوقُوا۟ عَذَابَ ٱلنَّارِ ٱلَّذِى كُنتُم بِهِۦ تُكَذِّبُونَ

“But as for those who defiantly disobeyed, their refuge is the Fire. Every time they wish to emerge from it, they will be returned to it while it is said to them, "Taste the punishment of the Fire which you used to deny."”

Saheeh International

Essence

They made a refuge of what led to the Fire, and the Fire became their refuge: every reach for the door brings them back.

A reflection

A shelter that burns

A woman buys something online every time her mother rings to criticise her. A jumper, a lamp, a set of pans. The parcels stack up unopened in the hall. The buying is her refuge. The bills are slowly becoming her cage.

People often picture Hell as a random torture chamber, a medieval scare story bolted onto religion. This ayah describes it with an unexpected word. Fa-maʾwāhumu al-nār: their refuge is the Fire.

Maʾwā is the word of the ayah before, where the believers were given Gardens of Refuge. The root pictures camels coming home at nightfall. One commentary notes that the word had come to mean a shelter where a person rests from heat and cold. To call fire a shelter from heat is a bitter irony, it says, like 'give them glad tidings of a painful punishment'. Another commentary puts it plainly: their 'garden of refuge' is the Fire.

Why that word? One answer is the pairing with the ayah before. Another lies in what a refuge is: somewhere you run to. The Prophet ﷺ said that the Garden is surrounded by things the self dislikes, and the Fire by things it desires (Sahih Muslim). From the outside, the road to the Fire looks like shelter: comfort, appetite, distraction, denial. People run there to escape something harder.

The woman with the parcels is not wicked. But she shows the mechanism in miniature. The refuge we choose to escape a hard thing becomes, in time, the place we live.

That is why the ayah's sentence is so severe, and so precise. Those who broke out of the skin of faith took refuge in what they desired. In the end, the refuge is what they took refuge in.

The alternative refuge is offered at the end of every prayer. The question this ayah leaves is simple. Where do I run when something is hard?

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.