Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 27 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:27

وَٱلَّذِينَ هُم مِّنْ عَذَابِ رَبِّهِم مُّشْفِقُونَ

“And those who are fearful of the punishment of their Lord -”

Saheeh International

Essence

Those spared the surah's opening instability carry a tender, watchful fear of their Lord's punishment, closer to a mother's love than to dread.

A reflection

The thin red light after the sun has gone

After sunset, before full dark, a thin red glow sits low on the horizon for a short while. The Arabs called it shafaq: fragile, delicate, already fading even as it is noticed. The same root gives the word used here, mushfiqūn, and the lexicons draw the connection directly: ishfāq is a fear this delicate, this tender, the kind a mother feels for a child she loves rather than the kind a person feels before an enemy.

That distinction changes what this ayah is actually describing. A mother watching her child cross a busy road is not experiencing dread of some hostile force. She is experiencing fear that is inseparable from how much she loves what she might lose. The fear does not compete with the love. It is made of the same material as the love, the way the fading red light is made of the same sun that gave the whole day its warmth.

So the believers named here are not pictured cowering before a menace. They are pictured the way a mother watches a child near a road: alert, careful, unwilling to look away, precisely because what is at stake matters to them this much. The fear described is thin and fragile exactly in the way shafaq is thin and fragile, not a wall of terror but a delicate, sustained attentiveness that only someone who loves what they fear losing could manage to keep up.

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.