Adh-Dhariyat · Makki · ayah 10 of 60

Adh-Dhariyat 51:10

قُتِلَ ٱلْخَرَّٰصُونَ

“Destroyed are the misinformers[1537]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Ruin to the guessers: those who estimate the unseen like a man eyeing dates on the palm, and speak of the gravest truths without knowing.

A reflection

The man who eyes the dates

Before the harvest, a man walks slowly through a palm grove. He stops under each tree and looks up at the heavy clusters of fresh dates. He does not climb or pick or weigh. He tilts his head, narrows his eyes, and names a number: this tree will give so many measures of dried dates.

That man was a khāriṣ, and what he did was kharṣ. The lexicons and commentaries give this as the root's picture. It is estimating the fruit on a palm before harvest, judging by eye what the fresh dates will yield. It is a reckoning by guess, not by full knowledge. The picture is established.

From that grove the word travelled. Any speech built on guesswork became kharṣ. And because guesswork presented as knowledge is a kind of falsehood, the word came to mean lying. One commentary glosses the ayah simply: cursed are the liars. Another: those who estimate what cannot be right. A writer on the heart defines it as speaking without knowledge, by conjecture, flinging words without proof.

Now picture the kharrāṣūn of this ayah, the form that means habitual, professional guessers. They look up at the greatest questions there are: Is there a life after death? Is this man a prophet? Is this book from Allah? And instead of climbing, picking, weighing, they tilt their heads and name a number. He is a poet. There is no resurrection. It is all old tales.

The tragedy is not that they guessed. It is what they chose to guess about. Some things in life can only be estimated. The meaning of your own existence is not one of them, because Allah has sent word.

Before you settle any great question in your own life, ask: am I weighing this, or just eyeing the tree?

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.