Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 42 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:42

فَذَرْهُمْ يَخُوضُوا۟ وَيَلْعَبُوا۟ حَتَّىٰ يُلَـٰقُوا۟ يَوْمَهُمُ ٱلَّذِى يُوعَدُونَ

“So leave them to converse vainly and amuse themselves until they meet their Day which they are promised -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The Prophet ﷺ is told to leave the mockers entirely to their churning, aimless talk until they finally meet the one Day that was never actually forgotten.

A reflection

Wading through water that goes nowhere

One of these two verbs pictures horses driven into a river at a ford, wading through the middle while the current churns around their legs, a great deal of visible motion and effort that carries nobody anywhere in particular. The other pictures something closer to a child's spittle running loose, motion with no destination, activity for its own sake rather than for any purpose it is heading toward.

Paired together, the two verbs describe a very specific kind of busyness: constant, visible, even exhausting, and entirely without direction. The mocking crowd's endless debating, their scattered mockery, their confident scheming against the Prophet, all of it looked, from the outside, like serious activity. This ayah names it for what it actually was, churning water stirred up without ever crossing to the other side, motion mistaken for progress.

This is a recognisable shape well beyond this one ancient crowd. A great deal of modern noise, arguing online, performing outrage, staying endlessly busy with activity that produces nothing lasting, fits this same description: energetic, visible, and going nowhere at all. The ayah's quiet judgement on the mockers' flurry of activity is worth sitting with before assuming one's own constant motion is necessarily carrying anyone anywhere either.

The test worth applying honestly to one's own busyness is simple: would a week, a month, or a year of this particular activity leave anything standing afterward, or would it simply leave the same churned water, stirred up again the next time, having crossed nothing in between. Most genuinely purposeful effort can answer that question plainly. Activity that only ever produces more of itself, argument that only ever produces the next argument, tends to be the wading this ayah is naming, however busy and however justified it feels from inside it.

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.