Al-Hujurat · Madani · ayah 7 of 18

Al-Hujurat 49:7

وَٱعْلَمُوٓا۟ أَنَّ فِيكُمْ رَسُولَ ٱللَّهِ ۚ لَوْ يُطِيعُكُمْ فِى كَثِيرٍ مِّنَ ٱلْأَمْرِ لَعَنِتُّمْ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ حَبَّبَ إِلَيْكُمُ ٱلْإِيمَـٰنَ وَزَيَّنَهُۥ فِى قُلُوبِكُمْ وَكَرَّهَ إِلَيْكُمُ ٱلْكُفْرَ وَٱلْفُسُوقَ وَٱلْعِصْيَانَ ۚ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلرَّٰشِدُونَ

“And know that among you is the Messenger of Allāh. If he were to obey you in much of the matter, you would be in difficulty, but Allāh has endeared to you the faith and has made it pleasing in your hearts and has made hateful to you disbelief, defiance and disobedience. Those are the [rightly] guided.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The guide among you does not follow your impulses, and your love of faith was never your own achievement: it was placed there.

A reflection

A love you did not manufacture

A man in his forties has not missed a prayer since he was fifteen. He is quietly proud of it. His younger brother, raised in the same house with the same lessons, drifted away years ago. One night the man catches himself thinking: I stayed because I was stronger. Then he reads this ayah, and the thought collapses.

Wa-lākinna Allāha ḥabbaba ilaykumu al-īmān: but Allah has made faith beloved to you. One commentator spells out what this means. Making something beloved to another person, when people do it, means describing it attractively. When Allah does it, He places the love itself inside the heart. That, he says, no one but Allah can do. Your love of faith was not your own counsel or your own effort. Had He not endeared it to you, your soul would never have yielded to it.

The ayah goes further. He made it beautiful in your hearts, and made hateful to you disbelief, defiance and disobedience. Even the aversion to wrongdoing, the recoil that keeps a person from certain things, is His gift.

This is where the ego has nowhere to stand. The one thing a believer might feel most entitled to boast of, his faith, turns out to be the clearest gift of all. The ayah closes the matter in the next verse: a favour from Allah, and a blessing.

That does not make the brother who drifted less responsible, or the man who stayed less sincere. It changes the posture of the one who stayed. Pride gives way to gratitude, and contempt gives way to prayer.

The man does not stop praying. He starts praying for his brother by name. He has realised that the love which keeps him on the prayer mat was put there. He asks the One who put it there to put it in his brother too.

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.