Al-Mumtahanah · Madani · ayah 7 of 13

Al-Mumtahanah 60:7

۞ عَسَى ٱللَّهُ أَن يَجْعَلَ بَيْنَكُمْ وَبَيْنَ ٱلَّذِينَ عَادَيْتُم مِّنْهُم مَّوَدَّةً ۚ وَٱللَّهُ قَدِيرٌ ۚ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ

“Perhaps Allāh will put, between you and those to whom you have been enemies among them, affection. And Allāh is competent,[1674] and Allāh is Forgiving and Merciful.”

Saheeh International

Essence

After describing real enmity without flinching, the surah turns and says the estrangement is not necessarily the end of the story.

A reflection

A kind of power you cannot borrow

Having just named, without softening, how deep the hostility between the believers and some of their own people had run, the ayah turns and says Allah is qadīr, able, over precisely this: joining hearts that have genuinely come to hate one another. The root behind qadr pictures a measure given in its exact amount by someone with the power to give it, and here the measure being given is reconciliation itself, portioned out by the only One able to supply it.

This matters because reconciliation is one of the places people most quietly overestimate their own power. A person who spends years trying to engineer peace with an estranged relative through the right words, the right gesture, the perfectly timed apology, can exhaust themselves assuming the outcome is entirely a function of their own effort and cleverness. When it finally happens, the same person can just as easily take private credit for having finally said the right thing, as though their own skill, rather than something given, had done it.

The ayah quietly removes both the despair and the pride from this. If a change of heart is genuinely too hard for human effort to guarantee, that is not a reason to stop trying sincerely; it is a reason to stop carrying the outcome as though it rested on your shoulders alone. And if it does happen, the credit belongs to the One who is qadīr over it, not to whichever gesture happened to land last.

There is real relief in handing something this heavy to a strength actually equal to carrying it.

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.