Ghafir · Makki · ayah 49 of 85

Ghafir 40:49

وَقَالَ ٱلَّذِينَ فِى ٱلنَّارِ لِخَزَنَةِ جَهَنَّمَ ٱدْعُوا۟ رَبَّكُمْ يُخَفِّفْ عَنَّا يَوْمًا مِّنَ ٱلْعَذَابِ

“And those in the Fire will say to the keepers of Hell, "Supplicate your Lord to lighten for us a day from the punishment."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Having lost all hope in their leaders, the people of the Fire beg its keepers to ask their Lord for a single day's relief.

A reflection

Your Lord, not ours

Listen closely to how the request is phrased. Udʿū rabbakum. Call on your Lord.

Not our Lord. Not Allah. Your Lord. The people of the Fire speak of Him as though He belonged to someone else. They need a go-between to reach Him.

One narration-based commentary explains why. They knew Allah would not answer them, nor listen to their calling. He had already told them: be gone into it, and do not speak to Me (23:108). So they turned to the keepers, who stand like doorkeepers over the people of the Fire, and asked them to ask instead.

The root of the verb, d-ʿ-w, has a warm and simple picture in the lexicons. Calling someone by name so that they turn and come to you. Your voice drawing another towards you. Duʿāʾ is exactly that: calling on Allah by His name, so that He turns to you. The lexicons treat this as the root's established sense.

In the Fire, that most intimate act has become impossible for them. They cannot call Him by name. They can only ask someone else to.

Now hold that beside a sentence eleven ayat later in this same surah. Your Lord says: call on Me, I will answer you (40:60). The same verb, the same Lord, said directly to every reader. In the world, no go-between is needed. He calls Himself your Lord to each person who hears it, and invites them to call Him back.

The tragedy of this ayah is not only the pain it describes. It is the loss of a door that was open their whole lives. They walked past it every day. Every morning they could have said: my Lord. They never did, and now they cannot.

The ayah is placed here, in a surah that will soon cry out, call on Me. It is as if the Quran shows us the locked door first, so we will run through the open one.

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.