Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 5 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:5

وَٱلرُّجْزَ فَٱهْجُرْ

“And uncleanliness[1789] avoid”

Saheeh International

Essence

Before he can call anyone else away from idols, he is told to leave every last trace of them himself.

A reflection

The same shudder, three times over

This root begins, in the lexicons, with something almost comically physical: a disease in a she-camel's hindquarters that makes her thighs tremble and shake whenever she tries to rise. From that one unsteady shudder, the whole word family grows. The same letters, carried into a different vowel pattern, name a punishment sent down on a defiant people, a calamity that shakes an entire community the way the sickness shakes the camel's legs. Carried into this ayah's own, heavier pattern, the word is read by the commentators as the filth of idols themselves, and whatever leads toward them.

It is worth noticing that none of this is a metaphor invented for the occasion. The physical trembling of a sick animal, the trembling of a punished nation, and the believer's instruction to keep clear of idols are genuinely one root wearing three different masks. Idolatry, on this picture, is not simply an intellectual error about which being deserves worship. It is pictured as something unsteady and sick at its core, the kind of instability that eventually brings a person, or a whole people, down the same way a diseased leg eventually fails to carry its own weight.

The command, then, is not a dry prohibition handed down from nowhere. It is built from an image the first hearers already knew from their own herds: something visibly wrong, visibly unsteady, and worth staying well clear of before it buckles under you.

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.