Al-Qalam · Makki · ayah 51 of 52

Al-Qalam 68:51

وَإِن يَكَادُ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ لَيُزْلِقُونَكَ بِأَبْصَـٰرِهِمْ لَمَّا سَمِعُوا۟ ٱلذِّكْرَ وَيَقُولُونَ إِنَّهُۥ لَمَجْنُونٌ

“And indeed, those who disbelieve would almost make you slip with their eyes [i.e., looks] when they hear the message, and they say, "Indeed, he is mad."”

Saheeh International

Essence

A stare can carry real force — and the only shield this ayah ever points to is Allah, not a charm against the stare itself.

A reflection

A gaze strong enough to take your footing

Yuzliqūnaka, they would make you slip, comes from zalaq, a surface where nothing holds — a mazlaqa is ground so slick a foot cannot keep its place on it, rain that slides off a beast's back rather than soaking in. The lexicons read this exact ayah through that image: a stare sharp enough to shift a man off his own ground, the way slick footing shifts a climber who has stood firm on worse holds a hundred times before.

A free solo climber who has run the same familiar route a hundred times in practice, utterly secure on holds no wider than a coin, can lose his footing on an easy section the one day a hostile heckler's stare locks onto him from the ground below — not because the rock changed, but because something in that gaze reached him in a way the rock face never could. Whatever is actually happening in a moment like that, the Qur'an's own word for it is exactly this: a slipping, a loss of ground that had nothing to do with the ground itself.

This is the ayah's own description of what Quraysh's hatred very nearly did to the Prophet ﷺ, triggered by nothing more than hearing the Qur'an recited: a stare with enough force behind it to almost dislodge a man who had stood firm through far worse. Only "almost." What stopped it is named directly in the reflection that follows. It is worth noticing what the ayah does not say happened. The verb is yakādu, they would almost, a near-miss rather than a completed fall. Whatever force their hostility carried, it did not actually succeed, and the ayah is honest enough to name both things at once: the force was real, and so was its failure to land.

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.