Az-Zukhruf · Makki · ayah 77 of 89

Az-Zukhruf 43:77

وَنَادَوْا۟ يَـٰمَـٰلِكُ لِيَقْضِ عَلَيْنَا رَبُّكَ ۖ قَالَ إِنَّكُم مَّـٰكِثُونَ

“And they will call, "O Mālik,[1449] let your Lord put an end to us!" He will say, "Indeed, you will remain."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Those who never called on their Lord now call His keeper, asking only to be ended, and are told: you remain.

A reflection

Asking only to be finished

Li-yaqḍi ʿalaynā rabbuk: let your Lord finish us. The commentators explain the request plainly: let Him make us die, so we may rest from what we are in.

The verb qaḍā carries a strong picture. The root means making a thing firm, perfecting it, carrying it through to its end. A poet described two close-woven coats of mail that Dāwūd qaḍāhumā: finished them. A debt was qaḍā when it was paid in full. A judge was a qāḍī because he cut through a dispute and closed it. Death too was qaḍāʾ, because it is the end carried out on every child of Ādam.

One commentator compares the usage to 28:15, where Mūsā struck a man fa-qaḍā ʿalayh: and finished him.

So the request is for an ending. After all the things they once wanted, wealth, status, gold, this is the only thing left to ask for. And it is refused. The Quran says it elsewhere: lā yuqḍā ʿalayhim fa-yamūtū, it will not be decreed for them to die (35:36).

There is something sobering in this for a reader in this world. Here, death is the one certainty. It finishes every pain, every illness, every wrong done to us. Many people fear it. But it is also, in a sense, a mercy: no suffering in this world is endless, because life itself ends.

Picture a man in his eighties who has been bedbound for two years. One evening he tells his granddaughter, calmly, that he is not afraid of dying. 'It's a door,' he says. 'Everything has to have a door.' She does not know what to say. He has prayed every prayer he could, lying down, for those two years.

For the believer, death is a door to the Garden. For the people of this ayah, there is no door left at all.

The practical lesson is to use the door well while it is still ahead of us. Every day before qaḍāʾ is a day in which the ending can still be made good.

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.