Sad · Makki · ayah 45 of 88

Sad 38:45

وَٱذْكُرْ عِبَـٰدَنَآ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ وَإِسْحَـٰقَ وَيَعْقُوبَ أُو۟لِى ٱلْأَيْدِى وَٱلْأَبْصَـٰرِ

“And remember Our servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - those of strength and [religious] vision.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Three generations of one family are remembered for two things only: hands that worked for Allah, and eyes that saw truly.

A reflection

People of hands and eyes

Ulī al-aydī wa al-abṣār: people of hands and eyes. Most translations smooth this into 'strength and vision'. That is the meaning the early explanations give: strength in obeying Allah, and insight in His religion. But the Arabic keeps the body in the sentence, and the body is part of the point.

One classical commentator asks the obvious question. Hands are limbs and eyes are organs, so how do they become strength and understanding? His answer is that it is a likeness. The hand is where a grip is felt, and grip is how the strong are known. So the Arabs called a strong man 'one with a hand'. The eye of the heart is how things are known, so a man who understands a matter is said to see it.

The lexicons show how wide the hand grew in Arabic. A kindness is a yad, because giving is handing over. What is in your hand is what you own and command. So 'people of hands' are people whose faith had moved into their grip: into what they gave, held and did.

Another commentator notices something sharper. Most work is done by hand, he says, so Arabic calls every deed 'what their hands have done', even a deed no hand touches. Then he turns the phrase round. Those who never work for the next life, and never think as people of faith think, are like people with no hands and no sight. They have both, and use neither.

That is an uncomfortable mirror. Picture a man of twenty-eight on a Saturday afternoon. His hands are strong and his eyesight perfect. He spends four hours watching a stranger play a video game online. Two doors down, a widower of eighty is trying to change a ceiling bulb from a wobbling kitchen chair.

The ayah does not praise Ibrāhīm, Isḥāq and Yaʿqūb for having hands and eyes. Everyone has those. It calls them their possessors: the limbs had become their work and their seeing. One commentator sums it up as sound deeds and useful knowledge, strength in worship and piercing insight. The question for the reader is not whether he has hands and eyes. It is whose work they are doing.

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.