Al-Jinn · Makki · ayah 9 of 28

Al-Jinn 72:9

وَأَنَّا كُنَّا نَقْعُدُ مِنْهَا مَقَـٰعِدَ لِلسَّمْعِ ۖ فَمَن يَسْتَمِعِ ٱلْـَٔانَ يَجِدْ لَهُۥ شِهَابًا رَّصَدًا

“And we used to sit therein in positions for hearing,[1767] but whoever listens now will find a burning flame lying in wait for him.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The jinn's old listening seats near heaven are gone; whoever tries to overhear now meets a flame lying in wait for him.

A reflection

"But she was right about me"

At a summer fair, a palm reader told a seventeen-year-old she would marry young and live by the sea. Eight years later she has done both. Now she sends her younger sister to the same booth every summer. 'She's not always right,' she says. 'But she was right about me.'

That is the most persuasive argument fortune-tellers have, and most people have heard it. They are sometimes right. Surely there is something in it? At worst, it is harmless fun.

The Companions asked the Prophet ﷺ almost exactly that question. Sahih al-Bukhari records it from ʿĀʾisha. People asked him about soothsayers, and he said: they are nothing. But sometimes, they said, they tell us something that turns out true. He answered that the word is from the truth. A jinni snatches it and clucks it into his ally's ear, the way a hen clucks. Then they mix more than a hundred lies with it.

This ayah is the jinn's own side of that story. We used to sit in seats near the sky to listen, they say. That was the supply line: a fragment overheard, passed down, dressed up by a soothsayer. And then: whoever listens now finds a flame lying in wait for him. One concise commentary draws the plain conclusion. These two ayat overturn the claims of those who pretend to know the unseen and deceive the credulous with their lies.

So the worn-smooth argument fails twice. The occasional hit was never the soothsayer's gift. It was stolen, and mixed with a hundred lies. And since the Prophet's ﷺ mission, even the stealing has met a guarded sky.

What remains is a booth, a confident voice, and a client who remembers the one prediction that came true. The palm reader was right about the sea. She was also wrong about a hundred things nobody wrote down.

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.