Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 24 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:24

فَقَالَ إِنْ هَـٰذَآ إِلَّا سِحْرٌ يُؤْثَرُ

“And said, "This is not but magic imitated [from others].”

Saheeh International

Essence

This, he finally said aloud, is nothing but magic, copied from somewhere else, careful never to say whose.

A reflection

The toy that changes colour depending which way you pull it

The lexicons describe this root as turning a thing from its true reality into something else, and they preserve a vivid, almost playful illustration of the idea: a children's toy that showed one colour when pulled from one side and a different colour when pulled from the other, the same object made to display whatever face the puller chose to draw out of it. Sihr, at its core, is exactly this: making a thing appear as something it is not, bending perceived reality away from what is actually there.

There is a sharp irony in this man reaching for precisely this word to describe what he had already, in his own earlier words, called something with a sweetness and weight he could not place in any familiar category. The label he finally chose was itself an act of the very thing it named: taking something and making it appear, to an audience watching him pull the strings, as something other than what he had privately already recognised it to be. He did not merely mislabel the Quran. He performed, in the act of labelling it, the exact operation the label itself describes.

This is worth sitting with as more than wordplay. A charge of sihr accuses the thing charged of changing appearance to deceive. The charge itself, in this instance, was the deception, changing the appearance of a truth he had already seen clearly into something his audience would find easier to dismiss.

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.