Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 23 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:23

ثُمَّ أَدْبَرَ وَٱسْتَكْبَرَ

“Then he turned back and was arrogant”

Saheeh International

Essence

He turned his back on it, the same way a man turns his back and runs, and called that greatness.

A reflection

The posture of a man fleeing

This root means the back of a thing, its hindmost part, the opposite of its front. The Arabs built a whole idiom around the contrast: a person who could not tell qabil from dabir, front from back, was hopelessly confused about everything. In battle, showing one's dubur, one's back, was the plain physical description of fleeing, turning away from the fight rather than standing to face it.

That specific, physical association, the back shown in flight, is exactly what this verb carries into this scene. Adbara is not a neutral description of simply walking away or losing interest. It is the posture of retreat, the same gesture a man makes when he turns from an opponent he cannot or will not face. Applied here, to a man confronting a truth rather than an armed enemy, the verb quietly names what is actually happening beneath the surface: not calm disagreement, not measured dismissal, but something closer to flight, dressed up afterward as a considered decision.

This is a sharper judgement than a simple he disagreed would carry, and it is worth letting the sharpness register. A person can walk away from an argument they have genuinely considered and rejected on its merits. This verb describes something else: the back shown to a truth that could not actually be defeated in the open, only evaded by turning from it entirely.

There is a second meaning worth noting as well. The same root describes a thing's end, its last part, the way a matter is settled once it has run its full course. Read with this second sense in view, the verb carries a quiet double weight: he not only turned his back physically, he also brought the matter to its final, settled end, closing off whatever remained open in his own mind before the posture of flight had even finished its turn.

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.