Al-Qalam · Makki · ayah 35 of 52

Al-Qalam 68:35

أَفَنَجْعَلُ ٱلْمُسْلِمِينَ كَٱلْمُجْرِمِينَ

“Then will We treat the Muslims like the criminals?”

Saheeh International

Essence

A question asked only to be refused: of course the two are not the same, and treating them as if they were would itself be the injustice.

A reflection

Cut off from the harvest

Mujrimīn, criminals, comes from jarama, a root whose everyday sense was cutting — picking fruit, severing a branch from the tree that fed it. Grape pickers in that world would have called a vine cut below its fruiting cane ruined, not merely pruned: one wrong cut and the whole harvest for that branch is gone, not reduced.

From that physical cutting, the word extended to committing a deed — but the image it carries along is not neutral. A mujrim is someone who has cut themselves off, severed their own branch from the source that would have fed it. Jurm, the related noun for crime, keeps the same undertone: a wrongdoing is a kind of self-severing, not just a rule broken on a list somewhere.

This is worth sitting with because it changes what the ayah is actually contrasting. It is not comparing two equally positioned groups who happened to make different choices. It is comparing someone still attached to the source of their sustenance with someone who has cut their own branch away from it. Asking whether these two should be treated identically is not really a question about fairness between equals. It is a question about whether a severed branch should fruit the same as one still joined to the vine.

The word does not describe a fixed category of person, closed off for good; the branch, Islamically, can in principle be regrafted through sincere return. But while the cutting stands uncorrected, calling it the same condition as being attached is simply not describing the same thing.

A glazier scoring a pane before snapping it along the line understands this instinct well: a single clean score down the glass decides, in advance, exactly where the whole sheet will separate — and a careless, wandering score does not just mar a line, it can send a crack running the wrong way through the entire pane. The lexicons preserve exactly this sense of a decisive, consequential severing behind jarama — not a small nick easily repaired, but a cut that changes what the whole piece can now become. That is the weight the word mujrim was always carrying, long before it settled into its familiar sense of "criminal."

The full entry has 4 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.