Nuh · Makki · ayah 24 of 28

Nuh 71:24

وَقَدْ أَضَلُّوا۟ كَثِيرًا ۖ وَلَا تَزِدِ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ إِلَّا ضَلَـٰلًا

“And already they have misled many. And, [my Lord], do not increase the wrongdoers except in error."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Nuh states a plain fact — these idols have misled many — and then, for the first time, asks Allah to simply let the wrongdoers keep the direction they themselves chose.

A reflection

Misleading others is never a private act

Nuh does not say the idols confused a handful of weak-minded people; he says plainly that they have led many astray, kathīran, a great number. The scale is stated as established fact, not exaggeration for effect, and the sources read this as describing the idols' continuing damage across the generations between this verse and Nuh's own flood — a drift that, as the earlier verse has shown, started small and kept gathering more people into it the longer it was left unexamined (71:23).

This names something worth sitting with for anyone who carries any influence at all, however modest: a teacher, a parent, a public voice, a trusted friend giving advice. Wrongdoing contained entirely within one person's own life is a serious matter between that person and Allah alone. Wrongdoing that becomes a pattern other people then copy, trust and pass on to people who never met the one who started it, carries a second weight entirely — not instead of the first, but added onto it.

A manager who quietly cuts corners on safety just once, and gets away with it unnoticed, has sinned once, seriously, and that is between her and Allah alone. A manager whose shortcuts instead become 'how we've always done it' long after she has left the company entirely, inherited by staff who never once knew her name or met her, has set something in motion whose full and final account she will never personally live to witness closing. The five idols named a verse earlier were, by this point in their history, doing exactly that kind of multiplying harm — no longer one bad choice, but a structure other people's choices now depended on.

Wherever your own example currently shapes someone else's habits, ask honestly, and in some detail, how far down that particular chain your influence actually reaches by now, and whether what is travelling down it genuinely deserves to keep going unexamined.

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.