An-Najm · Makki · ayah 28 of 62

An-Najm 53:28

وَمَا لَهُم بِهِۦ مِنْ عِلْمٍ ۖ إِن يَتَّبِعُونَ إِلَّا ٱلظَّنَّ ۖ وَإِنَّ ٱلظَّنَّ لَا يُغْنِى مِنَ ٱلْحَقِّ شَيْـًٔا

“And they have thereof no knowledge. They follow not except assumption, and indeed, assumption avails not against the truth at all.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A guess can get you through a Tuesday, but about God, and about other people's hearts, a guess is a well you never looked into.

A reflection

Drinking from a well you never looked into

A hiker crossing a moor on a hot afternoon runs out of water. He finds a clear stream, kneels, and fills his bottle. It looks clean. It tastes cold. He does not walk two hundred metres upstream, where a sheep has been lying dead in the water for a week. He drinks on a guess.

The first hearers had a word for that kind of water source. The lexicons record that the Arabs called a well ẓanūn when no one could be sure it held water. You could not see down into it. You lowered the bucket and hoped. A debt was ẓanūn too, when its owner might never be repaid.

That is the root of ẓann, the word this ayah uses twice. It covers a whole range. At one end it is doubt. At the other, the lexicons say, it can reach a certainty arrived at by thinking, though never the certainty of the eye. In this ayah it sits at the dark end: guesswork, assumption, a bucket lowered into a well nobody has looked into.

And notice how the ayah is built. First, wa-mā lahum bihi min ʿilmin: 'they have no knowledge of it.' The min sweeps away even the smallest scrap. Then, 'they follow nothing but ẓann'. Then the verdict, stated like a proverb: wa-inna al-ẓanna lā yughnī mina al-ḥaqqi shayʾan, 'and assumption avails nothing against the truth.' One commentary notes that the word ẓann is repeated rather than replaced by 'it', so that the sentence can stand alone as a general saying.

That is why it has travelled so far. It is not only about angels and idols. It is a rule about every well. Some questions you may act on with a guess. But the deepest questions, who God is and what comes after, deserve a well whose water you have seen.

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.