Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 31 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:31

فَمَنِ ٱبْتَغَىٰ وَرَآءَ ذَٰلِكَ فَأُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْعَادُونَ

“But whoever seeks beyond that, then they are the transgressors -”

Saheeh International

Essence

Whoever deliberately seeks past the one bounded line just drawn has not found more freedom, but has become one of the transgressors.

A reflection

The horse that does not stop at the marker

A charging horse at full stretch, running flat out, gave the Arabs a word for simply overstepping: carrying on past a post that was meant to be the finish. The same root supplies the word used here for transgressors, and, by a short step further, the word for an enemy, someone whose hostility has run past the line that friendship or peace would have kept.

The image fits the moment precisely. One clear boundary has just been drawn: this, and nothing further. The person named here is not someone who stumbled near that line or mistook where it was. They are someone running at full stretch who simply kept going once they reached it, the way a horse given its head does not slow at a marker unless something actually pulls it up.

This matters because it locates the fault correctly. The line itself was never in doubt; it was stated plainly in the previous ayah. What this word describes is momentum carried past a post that was already visible, not confusion about where the post stood. A horse running past a marker it could see clearly was never lost. It simply did not stop where it should have.

There is a reason the same root supplies both the transgressor and the enemy. Hostility, in this picture, is not a different failing from transgression but the same overstepping redirected outward: the line that should have kept one person's claims from colliding with another's is run straight through, and what results is enmity rather than merely private wrongdoing. The word chosen for crossing the sexual boundary named in the previous ayah is the very same word the language reaches for whenever any two parties' rightful limits collide because one of them refused to stop at the post.

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.