Al-Mujadila · Madani · ayah 2 of 22

Al-Mujadila 58:2

ٱلَّذِينَ يُظَـٰهِرُونَ مِنكُم مِّن نِّسَآئِهِم مَّا هُنَّ أُمَّهَـٰتِهِمْ ۖ إِنْ أُمَّهَـٰتُهُمْ إِلَّا ٱلَّـٰٓـِٔى وَلَدْنَهُمْ ۚ وَإِنَّهُمْ لَيَقُولُونَ مُنكَرًا مِّنَ ٱلْقَوْلِ وَزُورًا ۚ وَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَعَفُوٌّ غَفُورٌ

“Those who pronounce ẓihār[1639] among you [to separate] from their wives - they are not [consequently] their mothers. Their mothers are none but those who gave birth to them. And indeed, they are saying an objectionable statement and a falsehood. But indeed, Allāh is Pardoning and Forgiving.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A sentence cannot make someone your mother; Allah answers the old insult with a plain fact, not just a rebuke.

A reflection

An argument answered with a fact, not a feeling

Imagine someone trying to settle a paternity question by simply announcing it. No test, no record, just a declaration treated as if saying it were the same as it being true. Most people would call that absurd on its face. Yet this is exactly what the old dhihar formula asked everyone to accept: that calling a wife "like my mother" could make the comparison real.

Allah's answer is not primarily emotional. It is logical, almost blunt: in ummahātuhum illā llāʾī waladnahum — their mothers are only those who gave birth to them. Motherhood here is anchored to one fact that cannot be spoken into existence or spoken out of it: who actually carried and bore the child. A man can say whatever he likes about his wife. He cannot, by saying it, make her the woman who gave birth to him.

This is a strikingly modern kind of argument for a seventh-century revelation to make. It does not simply say the custom is cruel, though it is. It says the custom is false, and therefore cannot carry the legal weight everyone had assumed it carried. A wrong built on a lie does not become more binding the longer people have believed it. It stays exactly as untrue as it was the day someone first said it.

This matters beyond one marriage custom. Plenty of harm persists today for no better reason than that a form of words has been repeated long enough to sound like a fact. Here Allah's first move is not to appeal to compassion, though compassion is due. It is to check whether the claim behind the custom was even true, and to say plainly: it never was.

There is a reason the refutation comes before anything else in the passage. A custom this old, repeated across enough households for enough generations, starts to feel less like an opinion and more like a law of nature, simply how things are. The fastest way to break that spell is not an appeal to kindness, which a determined man can always find a reason to set aside. It is a single sentence that will not budge: ask anyone, from any generation, who their mother actually is, and the answer was never going to be a man's passing remark.

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.