Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 6 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:6

إِنَّهُمْ يَرَوْنَهُۥ بَعِيدًا

“Indeed, they see it [as] distant,”

Saheeh International

Essence

They judge it impossibly distant, which was always an opinion about themselves, never a fact about the Day.

A reflection

A verb for judging, not just for looking

The verb used here does not simply mean to see with the eyes. In Arabic it carries a second, well-established sense: to hold an opinion, to judge something to be the case, the same root used when someone says "I see it this way" to mean "this is my considered view," not a report of what their eyes happened to land on. So this ayah is not describing disbelievers squinting at the horizon and genuinely failing to spot the Day coming. It is describing a conclusion they have already reached, a verdict rendered long before any evidence was weighed.

That distinction matters enormously for how the doubt gets answered. A sincere failure of perception deserves patience and better evidence. A verdict reached in advance, and then defended as though it were a simple observation, deserves something closer to honesty about what is actually happening: the distance was decided first, for reasons that had nothing to do with looking carefully, and the looking was arranged afterwards to support it.

This is a familiar move in any era, not only in the one this ayah first addressed. A person decides, for reasons that are really about comfort rather than evidence, that a habit will not actually catch up with their health, that a dishonest shortcut at work will not actually be discovered, that a slowly neglected marriage will not actually end in the way neglected marriages generally do. The judgment of "distant" very often arrives first, dressed up afterwards as a measured assessment of the facts.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.