Sad · Makki · ayah 86 of 88

Sad 38:86

قُلْ مَآ أَسْـَٔلُكُمْ عَلَيْهِ مِنْ أَجْرٍ وَمَآ أَنَا۠ مِنَ ٱلْمُتَكَلِّفِينَ

“Say, [O Muḥammad], "I do not ask you for it [i.e., the Qur’ān] any payment, and I am not of the pretentious.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The Messenger closes the surah's case by pointing at himself: he takes nothing from you, and he never pretends to more than he was given.

A reflection

Ibn Masʿud sat up

A storyteller was holding forth by the gates of Kinda. He was describing, in confident detail, a smoke that would come on the Day of Resurrection. It would seize the hearing and sight of the hypocrites, he said, and give believers something like a head cold. People were frightened. Someone went to ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud, who was reclining among his students.

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim record what happened next. He sat up, angry. Then he said: whoever knows something, let him say it. Whoever does not know, let him say: Allah knows best. For it is part of knowledge to say, of what you do not know, Allah knows best. And he recited this ayah: say, I ask you no wage for it, and I am not one of the mutakallifīn.

Notice why he reached for this ayah in particular. The storyteller was not asking anyone for money. His failing was the second half. He had filled a gap in the unseen with a vivid account nobody had handed him. Ibn Masʿud then explained what the ayah about the smoke had actually described. A famine had struck Quraysh, and hungry men saw something like smoke between themselves and the sky.

A senior Companion could easily have offered an account of his own. Instead he made 'Allah knows best' a sentence of knowledge, not of ignorance. It was not a shrug. It marked the exact edge of what had been revealed.

ʿUmar put the same principle in one short sentence, which al-Bukhari also records: we were forbidden takalluf. One lexicon explains what he meant. It was the habit of probing obscure matters that need no probing. The alternative was to hold to the plain sense of the revelation and accept what it brought.

Both took words addressed to the Messenger and treated them as a rule for anyone who speaks about the religion after him. Say what you were given. Say plainly where it stops.

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.