Al-Munafiqun · Madani · ayah 2 of 11

Al-Munafiqun 63:2

ٱتَّخَذُوٓا۟ أَيْمَـٰنَهُمْ جُنَّةً فَصَدُّوا۟ عَن سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّهُمْ سَآءَ مَا كَانُوا۟ يَعْمَلُونَ

“They have taken their oaths as a cover, so they averted [people] from the way of Allāh. Indeed, it was evil that they were doing.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A shield built to protect the body was taken up to protect a lie instead, and the deception itself became the thing it blocked other people from.

A reflection

A shield meant for something else

Junnah is a very concrete word before it is anything else. The lexicons describe it as anything a person holds up between their body and a blow, a shield in the most literal, battlefield sense, and build an entire family of words on the same root around the idea of covering and concealment: jannah, the garden whose own thick branches hide the ground beneath them, janīn, the child concealed inside the womb, jinn, beings concealed from ordinary sight, junūn, a mind whose reason has become hidden from it. What unites all of them is one picture: something placed between a thing and the world, so the world cannot reach it directly.

A shield is not, in itself, a dishonest object. It is one of the most defensible tools a person can carry, built for exactly one purpose, to take a blow aimed at something more vulnerable behind it. The ayah's accusation is not that the hypocrites possessed a shield. It is what they chose to shield.

Their false oaths, sworn whenever suspicion closed in around them, functioned precisely like armour on a battlefield: a hard surface placed between their real position and anyone trying to reach it. Say the oath, absorb the accusation, and the questioner moves on, exactly as a blade is turned aside by a breastplate rather than reaching the chest.

The Prophet ﷺ is reported in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim to have called fasting itself a junnah, a shield: hunger and thirst held up, deliberately, between a person and their own worst impulses for a day. Both shields share the same root and the same basic shape, something interposed to absorb a strike. One is raised to protect a soul from itself. The other was raised to protect a lie from the people it was harming.

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.