Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 25 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:25

لِّلسَّآئِلِ وَٱلْمَحْرُومِ

“For the petitioner and the deprived -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The known due names two people: the one who asks, easy to notice, and the deprived one who never does, easy to miss entirely.

A reflection

Mistaken for fine, and missed

A man loses most of his income within a year, through nothing he did wrong, and tells almost no one. He still shows up dressed as he always has, still says he is managing when asked. Neighbours who would have handed money to someone begging on a corner never once think of him.

One reading, recorded by several early commentators, fixes exactly this figure as al-maḥrūm: not the one who asks and is refused, but the one who abstains from asking at all, and is therefore assumed to be comfortable, and so receives nothing. The sources are blunt about the mechanism: he is taken for wealthy, fa-yuḥram, and so is deprived. His own silence is the very thing that seals his deprivation.

Meanwhile the person who does ask, al-sāʾil, is at least visible. A hand held out gets noticed, even if it is sometimes refused. The quietly deprived person gets neither the refusal nor the gift, because he never enters the frame at all. Pairing the two in one ayah is itself an instruction: a believer's attentiveness cannot stop at whoever happens to ask. The harder, and more consequential, work is noticing the person who has trained himself never to.

The man managing on far less than anyone guesses is not an edge case this ayah forgot to mention. He is, on one strong reading, exactly who it was naming first.

Pride plays its part here too, and it is worth naming honestly. Many people in his position would rather go without than let their situation be known, since asking feels like an admission that something has gone wrong with a life they used to be able to manage alone. That instinct is understandable and even, in small doses, admirable. But it is precisely what this ayah is quietly working against: a system of care that depended only on visible asking would end up rewarding whoever has the least shame about asking, and punishing whoever has the most.

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.