Adh-Dhariyat · Makki · ayah 37 of 60

Adh-Dhariyat 51:37

وَتَرَكْنَا فِيهَآ ءَايَةً لِّلَّذِينَ يَخَافُونَ ٱلْعَذَابَ ٱلْأَلِيمَ

“And We left therein a sign for those who fear the painful punishment.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The ruined town was deliberately left standing as a sign, but only a heart that can still fear will stop and read it.

A reflection

A camp the poets would have wept over

Wa-taraknā fīhā āyatan: and We left in it a sign. Both key words carried strong pictures for the first hearers.

Āya, sign, comes from a root one lexicon ties to looking and lingering. An old poet says: stop at the ruined dwellings like a visitor, and pause and look. The first hearers knew the āya of an abandoned camp. Time had left nothing of it but the hearthstones and the ash. The opening of countless Arabic poems is a rider stopping at such a camp to weep. The lexicons establish this image.

Taraka, to leave, has its own picture. One lexicon makes its heart letting a thing go, as with an ostrich egg left bare in the open desert. The bird walks away from it and does not return. The lexicons establish this too.

So taraknā fīhā āyatan joins two desert images. Allah left that town as the poets' abandoned camp. It was walked away from, never to be lived in again, and kept as a place to stop and look. One commentator explains that the town itself, overturned with its people, is the sign.

Picture a family on a coastal walk who come across the shell of a village. Roofless stone cottages are half-buried in sand, the old well capped with concrete. A small sign says the village was abandoned after a storm, two centuries ago. The children run in and out of doorways. Their father stops at a hearth where a fire was lit every evening for generations, and stands there a long time.

The poets stopped at ruins to mourn lost love. The Quran asks you to stop at this ruin for a different reason. It is not a love song. It is a message that was left on purpose, for whoever will pause.

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.