Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 21 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:21

وَإِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلْخَيْرُ مَنُوعًا

“And when good touches him, withholding [of it],”

Saheeh International

Essence

The lightest touch of good fortune is often enough to make a person close their hand completely, exactly when opening it would cost so little.

A reflection

A matching shape for a matching pair

This word is built on the exact same intensive pattern as the restlessness named two verses earlier and the panic named in the verse just before it, three words sharing one grammatical shape, as though the Quran wanted the three to be heard, and felt, as a single matched set rather than three separate observations. One root disposition, halūʿan, breaks into two matching expressions, jazūʿan and manūʿan, each built the same way, each describing the same underlying unsteadiness meeting a different kind of weather.

The root itself pictures blocking, preventing, standing in the way of something that would otherwise flow through. Applied to good fortune, it describes a hand that closes reflexively the moment it holds something worth keeping, not through calculated unkindness but through something closer to a startled, automatic flinch, the same unsteadiness that produced panic at harm now producing a closed fist at ease.

That shared shape across all three words is worth noticing on its own linguistic terms. The Quran is not describing two unrelated character flaws that happen to coexist in the same person. It is describing one underlying disposition, surfacing identically in opposite weather, proof that the real problem was never the hardship or the ease themselves, but the lack of anything steady sitting underneath either one.

The full entry has 7 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.