Saba · Makki · ayah 20 of 54

Saba 34:20

وَلَقَدْ صَدَّقَ عَلَيْهِمْ إِبْلِيسُ ظَنَّهُۥ فَٱتَّبَعُوهُ إِلَّا فَرِيقًا مِّنَ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ

“And Iblees had already confirmed through them[1228] his assumption,[1229] so they followed him, except for a party of believers.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Iblis only guessed that people would follow him, and Saba made his guess come true; the believers who refused proved his forecast wrong.

A reflection

He only guessed, and they made it true

Ṣaddaqa ʿalayhim Iblīsu ẓannahu: Iblis found his guess about them come true. In the reading with a doubled letter, he made his guess come true.

The word for his guess is ẓann. The lexicons give it a vivid picture. A well was called ẓanūn when nobody could be sure whether it held water. You lower the bucket and hope. Ẓann can rise to near-certainty, but it is reached by reasoning, never by sight. Iblis looked into the human heart the way a traveller peers down a dark well. He could not see the bottom. He guessed.

The commentators stress this. One early teacher said: he had a guess, and they followed his guess. Another said: it was only a guess, and Allah does not confirm a liar or belie a truthful man. Iblis did not know. He bet.

Fraudsters work the same way. A phone scammer's script assumes that when a calm voice says 'your account has been compromised', you will panic. You will not hang up and ring your bank yourself. The script cannot see you. It is a guess about human nature, and it works only on those who behave as it predicts. Every person who hangs up proves the script wrong.

That is the strange dignity in this ayah. Iblis's forecast had no power to come true on its own. It needed people to follow: fa-ttabaʿūhu, so they followed him. Its truth was supplied by the very people it was about.

So each of us is evidence in his case. Every time you follow a whisper, you add a line to the file that says 'I was right about them'. Every time you refuse, you make him, in that moment, a liar. You cannot stop him guessing. You decide whether the guess comes true.

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.