Al-Jathiyah · Makki · ayah 32 of 37

Al-Jathiyah 45:32

وَإِذَا قِيلَ إِنَّ وَعْدَ ٱللَّهِ حَقٌّ وَٱلسَّاعَةُ لَا رَيْبَ فِيهَا قُلْتُم مَّا نَدْرِى مَا ٱلسَّاعَةُ إِن نَّظُنُّ إِلَّا ظَنًّا وَمَا نَحْنُ بِمُسْتَيْقِنِينَ

“And when it was said, 'Indeed, the promise of Allāh is truth and the Hour [is coming] - no doubt about it,' you said, 'We know not what is the Hour. We assume only assumption, and we are not convinced.'"”

Saheeh International

Essence

'We don't really know; we only have a guess': the agnostic's shrug is quoted word for word, and the Hour is still promised.

A reflection

Some things cannot be stalked

'We do not know what the Hour is.' The verb nadrī comes from a root with a hunter's picture. The lexicons say the dariyya was the animal a hunter crept behind to approach the game unseen. Tadarraytu al-ṣayd meant: I worked out where the game was before I could see it. So dirāya is knowledge reached by skill, patience and slow approach. The image is recorded in the lexicons; one dictionary entry marks the derivation as a view rather than settled.

That makes the deniers' sentence quietly revealing. They are saying: we have not tracked it down. We cannot stalk our way to the Hour.

They are right about that, and it is the whole point. Some things can be reached by stalking: by observation, experiment, patient reasoning. The surah has invited exactly that kind of looking, at the sky, the body, the rain. But the Hour itself, its time and its nature, cannot be stalked. It is unseen. It can only be known by being told.

Picture a wildlife photographer who can track a fox to its den across three miles of hillside. She reads prints in the mud and tufts on the brambles. She is brilliant at it. But no amount of tracking will tell her the day of her own death, or what lies beyond it. For that, all her skill is useless. She would have to be told by someone who knows.

The ayah's answer to 'we do not know' is not to mock the ignorance. It is to point to the One who has told. The promise of Allah is true, and of the Hour there is no doubt. The knowledge was offered as news from beyond the horizon.

Not knowing is no shame. Refusing to be told is a choice.

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.