Saba · Makki · ayah 38 of 54

Saba 34:38

وَٱلَّذِينَ يَسْعَوْنَ فِىٓ ءَايَـٰتِنَا مُعَـٰجِزِينَ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ فِى ٱلْعَذَابِ مُحْضَرُونَ

“And the ones who strive against Our verses to cause [them] failure[1236] - those will be brought into the punishment [to remain].”

Saheeh International

Essence

Those who pour their effort into defeating Allah's signs, sure they can outrun Him, will be brought into the very punishment they raced away from.

A reflection

A race run on the pursuer's own road

The ayah describes its people with one word: muʿājizīn. It is a racing word.

The lexicons give the root a plain picture. The ʿajuz is the hindmost part of a thing, a camel's rump. In a race, aʿjaza meant to pull so far ahead that the other could not catch you. That much is established.

So these people did not only disagree. They ran. They reckoned, in the words of the short explanations, that Allah was unable to reach them and that they would slip away. One commentator adds that the racing is all on their side. It is a delusion, not a contest.

Picture a man who takes a hire car and decides to vanish with it. He drives through the night, changing roads, pleased with every mile. He does not know the company fitted a tracker to the car. Worse, the road, the fuel and the car itself all belong to the people he is fleeing.

That is the shape of every attempt to outrun Allah. The legs that run were made by Him. The breath that powers them is lent. The earth under them is His. There is no road that is not His road.

This is where the ego shrinks. Pride always believes it has a lead. It thinks a clever argument or a well-funded campaign has put distance between itself and its Lord. The ayah answers in a few calm words: those will be in the punishment, brought there.

Someone may object that a God who punishes opponents sounds insecure, as if He needed to win. The word itself answers that. Their whole crime is believing they could make Him fall behind, and they cannot. Nothing they did reached Him. One explanation names the real harm: they worked to block others from Allah's path. The loss was theirs and their listeners', never His.

A humble heart reads this and stops running. It turns round, and finds that the One it fled was never behind it, but on every side.

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.