Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 41 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:41

عَنِ ٱلْمُجْرِمِينَ

“About the criminals,”

Saheeh International

Essence

Al-mujrimīn: not simply wrongdoers, but harvesters, the word itself picturing a crop cut and gathered home by the one who planted it.

A reflection

Gathering in what you grew

The root behind mujrim is agricultural at its base: jirām was the date harvest, the moment clusters were cut down from the palm and carried home. The same root gave the ordinary word for earning, jarm, as though gathering any income at all were a kind of harvest, cutting off a share and bringing it in. A mujrim, a criminal, is simply someone doing the worst version of that same ordinary act: harvesting something, deliberately, and bringing it home to themselves.

This reframes the word away from an external label stamped onto a person by someone else's judgement, and towards something closer to a receipt for their own labour. Nobody else planted what the mujrimīn in this surah are shown accounting for. They tended it themselves, across years of small choices, and are now, in the scene this ayah sets up, simply being asked what exactly they harvested and brought home.

A man who spent fifteen years quietly cutting corners at work, skimming small amounts nobody seemed to notice, is not unlucky when the fraud finally surfaces. He is bringing in a harvest he planted and tended for fifteen years, row by row, one skimmed amount at a time. The word mujrim captures exactly that: not a sudden, external misfortune, but a crop, finally gathered in.

The companions of the right are about to ask these harvesters, plainly, what exactly they planted. The question in the very next ayah is not rhetorical. It is a genuine accounting, crop by crop, of a harvest built entirely by the hands now being asked about it.

There is a quiet justice in naming it this way rather than as misfortune. A harvest cannot reasonably be blamed on the weather alone when the seed, the soil and the years of tending were all chosen, freely, by the one now standing in the field holding the crop.

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.