Al-An'am · Makki · ayah 125 of 165

Al-An'am 6:125

فَمَن يُرِدِ ٱللَّهُ أَن يَهْدِيَهُۥ يَشْرَحْ صَدْرَهُۥ لِلْإِسْلَـٰمِ ۖ وَمَن يُرِدْ أَن يُضِلَّهُۥ يَجْعَلْ صَدْرَهُۥ ضَيِّقًا حَرَجًا كَأَنَّمَا يَصَّعَّدُ فِى ٱلسَّمَآءِ ۚ كَذَٰلِكَ يَجْعَلُ ٱللَّهُ ٱلرِّجْسَ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ

“So whoever Allāh wants to guide - He expands his breast to [contain] Islām; and whoever He wants to send astray[342] - He makes his breast tight and constricted as though he were climbing into the sky. Thus does Allāh place defilement upon those who do not believe.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Openness to the truth is Allah's gift to the chest; without it, faith feels like forcing a way through thorns, or climbing into the sky.

A reflection

The one room no king has ever entered

Every power on earth stops at the skin. A state can command what you do with your hands and your tongue. An employer can buy your hours. No one, however mighty, can reach inside and make a chest open to the truth. This ayah gives that inner room one owner. Yashraḥ ṣadrahu: He opens his chest. The opposite verb is His too: yajʿal, He makes it tight.

That is humbling in a direction we rarely look. Most of us are quietly proud of being open-minded. We credit our faith to our intelligence, our upbringing or our honest search. Picture twin brothers who sat in the same Saturday class for ten years, under the same teacher. One now teaches that class. The other stopped coming at sixteen and has not been back. One evening the teaching brother catches himself thinking he was simply the sharper of the two. The ayah takes that thought away. The same words reached both chests, and one was opened.

The commentaries describe the opening as Allah making Islam easy and light for a person, until it shines inside and the chest receives it gladly. Another ayah describes the one whose chest Allah has opened to Islam. He walks by a light from his Lord, unlike the hard of heart (39:22). A chest can even be opened to disbelief (16:106). So openness alone is no virtue. What matters is what it opens to, and by whose hand.

Does Allah need the credit, even for our receptiveness? He is free of all need (35:15). The claim is for our sake. If openness were our own achievement, we could never ask for it, and we could never hope for it on behalf of someone we love. Because it is His, both doors stay open.

So pride has nowhere to stand here. What is left is gratitude, and a request. Musa (as), sent to the strongest tyrant of his age, asked first for this one thing: my Lord, open my chest for me (20:25).

The full entry has 7 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.