Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 19 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:19

فَقُتِلَ كَيْفَ قَدَّرَ

“So may he be destroyed [for] how he deliberated.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Ruin take him, for how truly wretchedly he calculated against the very thing he already knew was true.

A reflection

A curse, not a command

Qutila reads literally as he was killed, but Arabic had long used this exact construction as a fixed expression of condemnation rather than a literal statement of fact, closer in force to ruin take him or damn him than to an actual report of execution. Early commentary names it directly: a curse against him, a formula of strong disapproval rather than a description of an event that had already happened or was being ordered to happen.

This matters for how the tone of the whole line should be heard. It is not a flat, administrative verdict delivered without feeling, the way a sentence might be read out in a court record. It carries the same charge as an exclamation torn out of someone watching a disaster unfold that they can see coming and cannot stop: the sound of outrage meeting folly, not a neutral statement of consequence. The grammar is a curse because the moment calls for one.

What follows the curse matters just as much as the curse itself. Kayfa qaddara, how he calculated, is not asking a real question expecting an answer. It is incredulous, almost despairing at the sheer wretchedness of the scheme just described two ayat earlier: a man with every advantage, who privately recognised the truth, choosing instead to calculate his way carefully into denying it. The line does not merely report that he erred. It registers, in its very grammar, how indefensible the error actually was.

There is a translation challenge worth naming honestly here. Rendering qutila literally, may he be killed, risks sounding like an actual call to violence against him, which misses the idiom entirely and imports a harshness the Arabic construction was never carrying in the first place. Softening it too far in the other direction, into a bland may he be condemned, loses the real heat the exclamation genuinely carries. The honest translation sits somewhere between the two: a curse-word stripped of any literal violence, but not stripped of its force.

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.