Al-Haqqah · Makki · ayah 26 of 52

Al-Haqqah 69:26

وَلَمْ أَدْرِ مَا حِسَابِيَهْ

“And had not known what is my account.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He does not say the knowledge was hidden from him; he says he never did the work of hunting it down while it was still there to find.

A reflection

Knowledge a hunter has to stalk

The lexicons picture a hunter creeping up on his game from behind a screen, a tame animal walked slowly forward as cover, working out exactly where the real target is before he is close enough to even see it clearly, let alone take the shot. That patient, deliberate approach is dirāya, knowledge reached by skill and effort, named directly for the hunt it describes.

This ayah's lam adri, I did not know, comes from that same root. It is not the word for information that never arrived, a letter lost in the post, a fact genuinely withheld. It is the word for knowledge that has to be stalked, approached with care and deliberate effort, the way a hunter closes the distance on game that will not simply walk up and present itself. Saying lam adri is not claiming the knowledge was hidden somewhere unreachable. It is admitting the hunt itself was never actually undertaken.

That distinction changes the entire shape of this confession. A person who says "nobody ever told me" is describing an absence of information. A person whose own word choice echoes a hunter's patient stalking, but who never did any stalking at all, is describing something closer to a choice: the target was there, reachable by the same effort anyone else might have made, and the effort itself simply never happened.

That is a harder admission than it first sounds, and this ayah's speaker makes it anyway, in their own words, without being pressed for it. Not "I was never shown." Not "it was impossible to find." Simply, and more honestly than either excuse would have been: I never did the work of finding 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.