Sad · Makki · ayah 68 of 88

Sad 38:68

أَنتُمْ عَنْهُ مُعْرِضُونَ

“From which you turn away.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The tragedy named here is not hatred of the great news but a turned shoulder: polite, settled, and costly.

A reflection

Showing it your side

Antum ʿanhu muʿriḍūn: you are turning away from it. The verb has a picture inside it that the first hearers would have seen at once.

The root ʿ-r-ḍ is about breadth, the width of a thing as opposed to its length. To turn away, aʿraḍa, is to show someone only your side. You do not attack them. You do not even face them. You present your shoulder.

The same root gives another image. Laying a stick across the mouth of a vessel was ʿaraḍa: setting it crosswise. A thing laid across the width of a road blocks it. Turning away does both. It shows the speaker your side, and it lays something across the path between you.

Picture a man at a bus stop. A stranger approaches, clearly about to ask something, perhaps the way to the station. The man does not refuse. He simply angles his body a few degrees towards the road and studies the timetable. The stranger reads the shoulder and walks on. Nothing rude has been said. A conversation has simply been prevented.

That is what the ayah describes. The commentaries gloss it plainly: heedless, turned aside, not acting on it. One says 'not paying it attention'. Another says 'not believing the proofs it contains'. None of them describes a fight. The great news was not defeated in an argument. It was met with a shoulder.

This matters, because the shoulder is how most of us turn away too. We rarely reject the Quran. We angle ourselves slightly towards the road. We are busy with the timetable. We let it walk on.

Try a simple test this week. When an ayah, a reminder or a sermon reaches you, notice your body. Do you turn towards it, or does something in you turn its side? The first movement is small. Over a lifetime, it becomes the whole direction of travel.

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.