As-Saf · Madani · ayah 11 of 14

As-Saf 61:11

تُؤْمِنُونَ بِٱللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِۦ وَتُجَـٰهِدُونَ فِى سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ بِأَمْوَٰلِكُمْ وَأَنفُسِكُمْ ۚ ذَٰلِكُمْ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ إِن كُنتُمْ تَعْلَمُونَ

“[It is that] you believe in Allāh and His Messenger and strive in the cause of Allāh with your wealth and your lives. That is best for you, if you only knew.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The terms of the trade are named plainly: believe, and spend your wealth and your very self in Allah's cause, which is better for you than you can yet see.

A reflection

Churning until the butter comes

Jihād grows from a root the lexicons trace to hardship and, close beside it, capacity: juhd is the full extent of a person's strength. Milk was called majhūd once its butter had finally been drawn out of it, work that takes patience and real effort rather than a single quick motion. One lexicon defines jihād and mujāhada plainly as exhausting one's own capacity against an opponent, and names three such opponents a person contends with: a visible enemy, Satan, and one's own self.

That third name, one's own self, matters far more than it first appears to at a quick reading. Most of what this root actually describes in a typical life has nothing to do with any external enemy at all. It is effort spent at a desk doing difficult, necessary work honestly; patience held in a sickroom; a temper caught and controlled before it does damage; years spent returning, again and again, to the Quran when it would be easier to drift away from it. Almost none of it is seen by anyone.

A reader who hears tujāhidūna, you strive, and immediately pictures only one of its three named opponents has understood a third of the word at most. The churning that draws butter from milk, slow, repetitive and largely invisible, is a closer picture of most of what this effort actually looks like than any single dramatic confrontation ever could be.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.