Adh-Dhariyat · Makki · ayah 17 of 60

Adh-Dhariyat 51:17

كَانُوا۟ قَلِيلًا مِّنَ ٱلَّيْلِ مَا يَهْجَعُونَ

“They used to sleep but little of the night,[1538]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The first sign of their beautiful living: they slept only a little of the night, in light snatches, and gave the rest to their Lord.

A reflection

Sleep taken in snatches

In lambing season, a shepherd hardly goes to bed. He lies down on straw in a corner of the barn, sleeps for forty minutes, wakes at a sound, checks a ewe, lies down again. By dawn he has slept perhaps three hours, in pieces. He is not sleepless. He is sleeping lightly, with one ear open, because something matters more.

The ayah's verb, yahjaʿūn, holds that kind of sleep. The lexicons say hujūʿ is sleep at night, and a hajʿa is a light sleep in the early part of the night. Tahjāʿ is a brief nap. It can even mean lying down without sleeping. One commentary quotes a warrior poet: my helmet has worn my head bare, and I taste no sleep except a light doze. This picture is established.

A classical commentator points out how much the ayah stacks into a few words. The word chosen is the light kind of sleep. It is called little. And it is placed in the night, the very time made for rest. Every detail emphasises how lightly they held their beds.

That is not a picture of grim, exhausted people. It is a picture of people who had something they wanted more than sleep, the way the shepherd wants the lambs alive by morning. Their nights had a purpose, and their sleep fitted around it.

Most of us organise the opposite way. The night belongs to sleep, or more often to screens, and anything else must fit around them. The ayah does not demand that we copy its people overnight. It shows what it looks like when the heart's priorities rearrange a night.

Tonight, notice what your night is organised around. Then give one small corner of it, even ten minutes, to the One who never sleeps.

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.