Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 17 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:17

تَدْعُوا۟ مَنْ أَدْبَرَ وَتَوَلَّىٰ

“It invites he who turned his back [on truth] and went away [from obedience]”

Saheeh International

Essence

It calls out, by name if need be, to exactly the one who once turned his back and simply walked away.

A reflection

A fire given something to say

Commentators record several ways of reading this calling, and the boldest among them takes it almost literally: Allah gives actual speech to the Fire itself, the way He later gives speech to skin and hands as witnesses, so that it calls out plainly, come here, disbeliever, come here, hypocrite, before gathering those it has called the way a bird snatches up scattered grain. Other readings treat the calling as a vivid figure of speech, the guardians of the Fire doing the calling, or simply the inevitability of arrival described as though summoned.

Whichever reading is taken, the image is doing something unsettling and deliberate: it gives this punishment a kind of agency, a voice, rather than leaving it as a passive location a person simply ends up in by accident of circumstance. A flood or a collapsing building does not call anyone by name; it simply happens to whoever is present. This scene insists on something more pointed than that, a summons specifically addressed, rather than a disaster indifferently encountered.

That distinction matters for how the whole scene should land. A disaster met by chance can feel like misfortune. A summons addressed specifically to the one who turned away reads as something closer to a conversation finally continuing, between a call that was made once in this life and ignored, and a call now made again that cannot be.

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