Ya-Sin · Makki · ayah 62 of 83

Ya-Sin 36:62

وَلَقَدْ أَضَلَّ مِنكُمْ جِبِلًّا كَثِيرًا ۖ أَفَلَمْ تَكُونُوا۟ تَعْقِلُونَ

“And he had already led astray from among you much of creation, so did you not use reason?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The size of the crowd that went astray is a warning, not a reassurance, and the failure it names is not intelligence but thinking.

A reflection

A crowd the size of a mountain

There is a sentence most people have said to themselves at some point. So many people do it. It cannot be that wrong. Numbers feel like evidence. A packed restaurant must be good. A popular opinion must be reasonable. A crowd going one way must know the way.

This ayah takes that instinct and turns it inside out.

The word for the multitude is jibill. The lexicons place it in a root of things gathered up high and unmoving. It gives the mountain, the vast crowd, and the nature a person is made with. One classical lexicographer, quoted in the commentaries, says the great company is called this because it is like a mountain in its size. Another commentator notes that the root never escapes the idea of gathering. Clay is jibill because water and earth have come together in it. One early authority even put a number on it: a jibill is ten thousand at the least. The commentator who records that adds, honestly, that he is not sure it is right.

Then look at what the ayah does with this mountain of people. It does not say: so many followed, so it was understandable. It says: he has already misled a great multitude of you. Then it asks: did you not use reason?

The crowd is presented as a record of the enemy's success, not as a reason to trust the road. Every face in it was once someone who thought, so many people cannot be wrong.

There is even an old reading of the word as jīl, a generation. One generation after another, walking the same wrong valley, each reassured by the size of the one in front.

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.