Az-Zukhruf · Makki · ayah 62 of 89

Az-Zukhruf 43:62

وَلَا يَصُدَّنَّكُمُ ٱلشَّيْطَـٰنُ ۖ إِنَّهُۥ لَكُمْ عَدُوٌّ مُّبِينٌ

“And never let Satan avert you. Indeed, he is to you a clear enemy.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Shayṭān rarely blocks the road; he turns you off it, and his enmity is already plain for anyone who remembers.

A reflection

The mountain flank that turns a stream

Wa-lā yaṣuddannakumu al-shayṭān: and never let Shayṭān turn you aside. The commentators gloss the verb simply: let him not turn you away from Allah's religion, from obeying Him, from the straight path.

The lexicons give the verb a landscape. Most of the root ṣ-d-d, one lexicon says, comes back to turning away and swerving. A ṣadd is the flank of a valley, or a mountain. One line of poetry quoted there describes men kept off by the sword, the way water channels are turned back from a mountain pass. The streams cannot climb the slope, so they run somewhere else. One compiler doubts whether the physical words belong to the root, so hold the picture lightly. But it fits the ayah closely.

The water is not destroyed. It keeps flowing. It simply flows somewhere else.

That is how the turning usually feels from the inside. Picture a woman who decides, with real intention, to begin memorising Sūrat al-Mulk on Monday. On Monday a friend rings in a crisis, and of course she listens. On Tuesday a deadline moves. On Wednesday she is too tired, and on Thursday the children are ill. Each reason is genuine. Six months later her bookmark is still at the first ayah. Nothing stopped her. Everything turned her.

The previous ayah ended with a road: hādhā ṣirāṭun mustaqīm, this is a straight path. This ayah names what happens to people on a straight road. They are not usually blocked. They are deflected, by a slope too steep, a channel more convenient.

The verb also carries an emphatic ending, a doubled nūn. The force is: do not let him, not even once. That places responsibility gently but squarely. The slope can turn the stream only if the stream has no other force behind it.

So the defence is not only resisting temptations. It is noticing the turnings: the moment the plan quietly became next week. The woman can start again tonight, with a single ayah, before anything else in the evening happens.

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.