Nuh · Makki · ayah 23 of 28

Nuh 71:23

وَقَالُوا۟ لَا تَذَرُنَّ ءَالِهَتَكُمْ وَلَا تَذَرُنَّ وَدًّا وَلَا سُوَاعًا وَلَا يَغُوثَ وَيَعُوقَ وَنَسْرًا

“And said, 'Never leave your gods and never leave Wadd or Suwāʿ or Yaghūth and Yaʿūq and Nasr.'[1764]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The idols being clung to were, only a generation back, just portraits of good men — proof that worship of the wrong thing rarely begins as worship at all.

A reflection

An idol literally named Love

The first name on the list, Wadd, is not an obscure syllable; it is the ordinary Arabic word for love, affection, deep fondness. These were not frightening, invented god-names designed to sound powerful. They were the names of men people had genuinely loved, carried forward, unchanged, onto the statues made to remember them.

That detail sharpens the whole tragedy of this verse. Allah's own name al-Wadūd, the Most Loving (11:90, 85:14), shares this exact root. The love that rightly belongs to the source of all love — the One who loves His creation and is loved in turn without needing anything back — had, by the time this verse is spoken, been quietly rehoused in a carved figure that could not love anyone back at all. The word did not change. Only what it was pointed at did.

This is, in miniature, the whole danger the surah is naming: not that people set out one day to abandon real love for a lifeless substitute, but that something genuinely good — love for a righteous man worth loving — was allowed to drift, slowly and without anyone noticing the exact moment, onto an object that could only ever hold the name, never the thing the name was supposed to mean.

Ask which 'Wadd' in your own life — which love, however genuine at its root — may have quietly attached itself to something that can only hold the name of what you are actually looking for.

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.