Al-Haqqah · Makki · ayah 50 of 52

Al-Haqqah 69:50

وَإِنَّهُۥ لَحَسْرَةٌ عَلَى ٱلْكَـٰفِرِينَ

“And indeed, it will be [a cause of] regret upon the disbelievers.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Someone who spent a lifetime covering the truth will eventually have every cover lifted at once, and regret is simply what that uncovering feels like.

A reflection

The coverer, finally uncovered

Kāfir, disbeliever, grows from a root meaning to cover, pictured first in a farmer pressing soil over seed. The truth, on this image, was never actually absent from the disbeliever's life. It was present the whole time and deliberately pressed down, covered rather than missing.

Ḥasra, regret, grows from a different root entirely, one meaning to uncover: a sleeve drawn back from the arm, a helmet lifted off, what was hidden now lying bare for everyone, including its owner, to see plainly. One classical distinction describes it precisely as grief renewed over a good that has slipped away, not ordinary sadness but a specific, sharper ache at something once held and then lost.

Place the two roots side by side and this ayah's claim becomes exact rather than merely severe: the one who spent a lifetime covering is met, in the end, by total uncovering. Nothing new is shown to him that was not already there. The cover he built himself, over evidence he had access to the whole time, is simply removed, and what had been pressed down and denied becomes impossible to deny any further.

That is a sharper fate than ordinary disappointment. It is the exact undoing of the one project a disbeliever spent a lifetime maintaining: not being shown something new, but having the thing he worked hardest at, the covering itself, finally and permanently fail.

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.