Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 37 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:37

عَنِ ٱلْيَمِينِ وَعَنِ ٱلشِّمَالِ عِزِينَ

“[To sit] on [your] right and [your] left in separate groups?[1756]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The mocking crowd arranges itself in little scattered cliques, left and right, unable even in their shared hostility to stand together as genuinely one.

A reflection

Clumps, not a crowd

The word used here pictures something specific: not a single mass of people but a scatter of little cliques, each one clinging to its own small circle rather than joining with the others into anything larger. The lexicons describe it as groups splintered left and right, huddled apart rather than standing shoulder to shoulder.

This detail does real work inside the scene the ayah is painting. A unified opposition, even a hostile one, would at least have the dignity of genuine solidarity, people standing together because they share a real conviction. What this word pictures instead is something smaller and pettier: clusters trading remarks among themselves, each clique absorbed in its own circle rather than in any shared, coherent stand. The crowd that gathered to mock the Prophet was not even unified in its mockery.

This matters because it reveals something about the nature of the opposition itself. A conviction strong enough to unite people tends to produce something closer to a single formation. A posture built only on mutual contempt and borrowed scorn, with no real shared position underneath it, tends to splinter into exactly this kind of scattered clustering, groups of a few people muttering to each other rather than one body standing for anything at all.

There is something almost deflating about this detail for anyone tempted to read the crowd's hostility as a serious, organised threat. A genuinely organised opposition, marching together with one voice, would at least have earned a kind of grudging respect for its cohesion. What this word pictures instead is closer to several separate huddles that happened to converge on the same target, each one too absorbed in its own small circle to ever actually become the single formidable front its noise might have suggested from a distance.

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.