Al-Munafiqun · Madani · ayah 7 of 11

Al-Munafiqun 63:7

هُمُ ٱلَّذِينَ يَقُولُونَ لَا تُنفِقُوا۟ عَلَىٰ مَنْ عِندَ رَسُولِ ٱللَّهِ حَتَّىٰ يَنفَضُّوا۟ ۗ وَلِلَّهِ خَزَآئِنُ ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱلْمُنَـٰفِقِينَ لَا يَفْقَهُونَ

“They are the ones who say, "Do not spend on those who are with the Messenger of Allāh until they disband." And to Allāh belong the depositories of the heavens and the earth, but the hypocrites do not understand.”

Saheeh International

Essence

They schemed to starve a community into scattering, forgetting that the actual storehouses of everything were never in human hands to withhold at all.

A reflection

The treasurer they forgot was watching

Picture the scheme on its own terms first. A faction decides that if they simply stop a particular group of poor companions from receiving support, hunger and need will do the rest, scattering people the ordinary arguments of faith could not move. It is, within its own small logic, a coherent plan: control the supply, and you control the people depending on it. Underneath the plan sits a very specific kind of pride, the quiet conviction that one's own purse, one's own decision to give or withhold, is large enough to decide another community's fate.

The ayah answers this scheme with a single sentence that makes the entire plan look like a child's game played in front of an adult who owns the whole house. Wa-lillāhi khazāʾinu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, to Allah belong the treasuries of the heavens and the earth. Every coin these men thought they controlled, every granary, every patch of grazing land that fed a flock, sat inside a treasury they had never owned, were never going to own, and could never actually lock. Their self-importance, the sense that their own hand on the purse was the decisive hand in the story, shrinks to nothing the moment the real owner of every purse is named plainly.

A modern version of the same small arrogance is easy to recognise: someone who threatens to withdraw funding, patronage, or support from a project, convinced that this gives them final say over whether the project survives, genuinely forgetting that the money passing through their hands was never the only money in the world, nor even reliably theirs to keep controlling for long. The ayah is not an unrelated boast inserted for grandeur. It is the precise, deflating answer to a very small man's very large idea of his own economic importance. Every person who has ever felt proud of the power a purse string gave them over someone else has felt, for a while, exactly the pride this faction felt, and been just as wrong to trust 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.