Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 15 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:15

ثُمَّ يَطْمَعُ أَنْ أَزِيدَ

“Then he desires that I should add more.”

Saheeh International

Essence

After everything already given, the one thing he still wanted was simply more of it.

A reflection

A few drops, and already the flood is wanted

The lexicons picture this root through weather. The Arabs called the first sparse drops of rain tatmi', because that small, almost accidental scattering is precisely what makes a person long for the actual downpour still to come. A few drops do not satisfy thirst for rain; they create it, sharpening an appetite that would have stayed dormant if nothing had fallen at all. Tamaʿ names exactly that mechanism: a small taste manufacturing a large craving, rather than a large craving simply existing on its own and happening to be fed.

Applied to this man, the image lands with uncomfortable precision. He has already received what the previous three ayat described as wealth without a stated edge, sons kept constantly present, an entire life smoothed in advance. By any reasonable measure, he has already had more than a few sparse drops; he has had something close to the full weather system most people never see in a lifetime. And still, this ayah says, he wants more, with the same hungry logic as someone who has felt only the first scattered drops and now cannot stop thinking about the storm.

This is the root's real insight, sharper than a simple accusation of greed would be on its own. Greed of this kind is not primarily a response to scarcity. It is manufactured by abundance itself, each new gift quietly priming the appetite for the next one rather than settling it, which is exactly the mechanism this ayah catches him in the act of displaying.

There is a reason the Arabs reached for weather rather than, say, hunger to picture this. Hunger has a natural ceiling; a full stomach stops wanting food, at least for a while. Rain has no such built-in stop. More rain simply makes the ground more ready for even more, which is precisely the open-ended, self-feeding quality this word is reaching for, and precisely the quality this man's wanting turns out to display once it is held up against the image.

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.