Al-Jinn · Makki · ayah 11 of 28

Al-Jinn 72:11

وَأَنَّا مِنَّا ٱلصَّـٰلِحُونَ وَمِنَّا دُونَ ذَٰلِكَ ۖ كُنَّا طَرَآئِقَ قِدَدًا

“And among us are the righteous, and among us are [others] not so; we were [of] divided ways.[1768]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Reporting home, the jinn name the sound among them, those short of it, and their factions, and leave each listener to find himself.

A reflection

Not shadows behind the door, but a people like us

A weekend madrasa class of nine-year-olds is asked to draw a jinn. Twenty pictures come back. Horns, red eyes, a shadow behind a bedroom door, a figure rising from a lamp. One girl has drawn something else: a row of figures standing shoulder to shoulder in prayer, one of them faintly see-through. The teacher asks where she got the idea. She points to the surah they have been learning.

Most of us carry the other nineteen pictures. The word jinn arrives already loaded with films, folk tales and a cousin's frightening story. In that picture the jinn are a single dark species. They haunt, possess and deceive, and any good one is an exception.

Here the jinn speak for themselves, and they say something else. 'Among us are the righteous, and among us are those short of that'. They describe their own people the way an honest person might describe a town. Some are sound. Some fall short. And they add that they were 'ways cut apart': factions, schools, different roads.

The commentators took this plainly. The jinn were not all disbelievers, one wrote. They were divided: some disbelievers, some believers who were sound, some believers who were not. Others noted that some jinn already believed in Mūsā before the Quran came. The jinn themselves say they heard 'a Book sent down after Mūsā' (46:30). Early commentators summed it up in a phrase: the jinn are like you.

That changes the frame. The Quran presents the jinn as a second accountable people, addressed and tested as we are. 'I did not create jinn and humankind except to worship Me' (51:56). They choose, and some choose well.

This does not tame the unseen. The Quran warns of devils among the jinn, and of men who sought their protection and only grew more burdened (72:6). But the warning sits inside a larger picture of free creatures, not a horror film.

And the mirror turns back on us. If the jinn are like us, then we are like them. The same words fit any human street, office or mosque. Among us are the sound, and among us are those short of it. The girl's drawing was not naive. It was the more accurate one.

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.