Al-Haqqah · Makki · ayah 42 of 52

Al-Haqqah 69:42

وَلَا بِقَوْلِ كَاهِنٍ ۚ قَلِيلًا مَّا تَذَكَّرُونَ

“Nor the word of a soothsayer; little do you remember.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Where a poet's words come from skill, a soothsayer's come from confident guessing dressed as secret access, and this is denied to be either.

A reflection

Confident guessing wearing the coat of certainty

A kāhin claimed access to hidden things, often through a supposed informant among the unseen, and reported what he claimed to know with total confidence. The lexicons are candid about the trade itself: it rested on guesswork that sometimes landed and often did not, dressed in language that made every guess sound like certain knowledge.

That is precisely the profile this ayah denies. The objection was never really about whether the Prophet ﷺ spoke with authority; everyone around him could hear that he did. It was an attempt to explain the authority away as the same sort of performance a soothsayer gave: confident-sounding claims about things nobody could verify, offered by someone trading on mystique rather than reliable truth.

The difference the ayah insists on is not tone but consistency. A soothsayer's hits were remembered and his many misses quietly forgotten, the ordinary survival trick of any trade built on guessing. What this passage has spent itself proving, the reality of the resurrection, the fate of two very different kinds of people, holds together as one coherent claim rather than a string of lucky guesses later edited down to the ones that worked.

Anyone offering certainty about things nobody can check deserves the same question asked of the ancient kāhin: is this consistent, checkable and accountable, or simply confident.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.