Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 38 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:38

أَيَطْمَعُ كُلُّ ٱمْرِئٍ مِّنْهُمْ أَن يُدْخَلَ جَنَّةَ نَعِيمٍ

“Does every person among them aspire to enter a garden of pleasure?”

Saheeh International

Essence

Each of the mockers quietly leans toward paradise, hoping for a reward his own actual life has given him no real reason to expect.

A reflection

Leaning toward a downpour after a few drops

The word used for this hope, yaṭmaʿu, is rooted in a specific, almost physical picture: the first few drops of rain fall, barely enough to darken the ground, and already a person leans forward expecting the full downpour behind them. The lexicons preserve the sense precisely: hope that runs ahead of its evidence, leaning toward an outcome the present moment has not actually supplied.

That picture fits the mocking crowd described in the ayat just before this one with uncomfortable precision. Having spent their time crowding toward the Prophet in scorn, scattered into small hostile circles, each one nonetheless privately expects, on nothing more than a few drops of unearned confidence, to be welcomed into the very garden the believers were promised two ayat earlier. There is no downpour behind their drops: no prayer kept, no due paid, no trust honoured, nothing in the list that actually earned the believers their place. Only the lean itself, hope reaching far ahead of anything that could support it.

This is a particular kind of self-deception worth naming on its own terms. It is not disbelief in the reward; the mockers clearly want it enough to expect it. It is disbelief in the connection between effort and reward, assuming the downpour will arrive regardless of whether anything was ever actually sown to deserve it.

A farmer who plants nothing and still watches the horizon for rain clouds is not being hopeful in any useful sense. He has simply mistaken the posture of expectation for the substance that expectation is supposed to be built on. The mockers' lean toward paradise is this same mistake, carried into the one area of life where the mismatch between posture and substance matters more than anywhere else.

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.