Al-Munafiqun · Madani · ayah 10 of 11

Al-Munafiqun 63:10

وَأَنفِقُوا۟ مِن مَّا رَزَقْنَـٰكُم مِّن قَبْلِ أَن يَأْتِىَ أَحَدَكُمُ ٱلْمَوْتُ فَيَقُولَ رَبِّ لَوْلَآ أَخَّرْتَنِىٓ إِلَىٰٓ أَجَلٍ قَرِيبٍ فَأَصَّدَّقَ وَأَكُن مِّنَ ٱلصَّـٰلِحِينَ

“And spend [in the way of Allāh] from what We have provided you before death approaches one of you and he says, "My Lord, if only You would delay me for a brief term so I would give charity and be of the righteous."”

Saheeh International

Essence

He does not beg for decades back, only for a little while, enough to finally do the one ordinary thing he kept meaning to get around to.

A reflection

Asking to be pushed back, at the border of that place

Akhkhara means to push something behind, to place it later than it would otherwise have come, the plain opposite of taqaddama, to move ahead. The lexicons illustrate it with the two ends of a saddle, muqaddamu r-raḥl at the front, muʾakhkharu r-raḥl at the back, one simple spatial image doing double duty for both place and time. From this same root the Quran names al-ākhirah, the Hereafter, quite literally the later abode, the place that comes after everything that came before it.

There is something almost unbearably exact about where this dying man's request lands. He is asking to be pushed later, akhkhartanī, at the precise threshold of entering the abode whose entire name means later. He wants more of the first arrangement before being delivered into the second, and the two are built from the identical root, as though the man's own plea is quietly arguing with the name of the very place he is about to occupy.

No part of this ayah is accusing him of asking for something irrational. A little more time, before the later place begins, is the most natural request a dying person could make. What the ayah withholds is not the reasonableness of the wish. It is the wish itself, because the root that names where he is going is also the root that names the thing he is asking, impossibly, to still receive more of.

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.