Muhammad · Madani · ayah 1 of 38

Muhammad 47:1

ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ وَصَدُّوا۟ عَن سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ أَضَلَّ أَعْمَـٰلَهُمْ

“Those who disbelieve and avert [people] from the way of Allāh - He will waste their deeds.[1492]”

Saheeh International

Essence

A lifetime of effort can go astray like an ownerless camel, when it was spent blocking the road it should have walked.

A reflection

Deeds that wander off with no owner

The verb at the end of this ayah is usually translated as "He made their deeds worthless". That is true, but it flattens the picture. The word is aḍalla, and its root is the root of being lost.

The lexicons are clear about its core. It is something gone astray and gone to waste, gone where it should not be. Desert Arabs said "I lost my camel" with this verb, when the animal had wandered off. They used it for milk poured into water, which mixes in and can no longer be found. They even used it for burial: the dead man is "lost" into the ground.

One classical commentator draws the picture out. Their deeds become like a stray camel in open country. There is no owner who keeps it, feeds it or brings it home. It is not that the animal never existed. It is that it now belongs to nobody.

Think of an airline's unclaimed baggage store. A case comes off a flight with its tag torn away. It sits on a metal shelf for ninety days. Nobody calls about it, because nobody can be found to call. In the end it is sold by weight to a clearance shop, its contents scattered. What was packed was real. It simply had no address left to go to.

That is the sobering edge of this opening line. A life can be crowded with activity, and the activity can still arrive nowhere. The question the ayah plants is not "did I do things?" Everyone does things. The question is whose name is on the tag.

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.