Al-Qiyamah · Makki · ayah 31 of 40

Al-Qiyamah 75:31

فَلَا صَدَّقَ وَلَا صَلَّىٰ

“And he [i.e., the disbeliever] had not believed, nor had he prayed.”

Saheeh International

Essence

At the soul's leaving, a whole life is summed up in two missing acts: he never affirmed the truth, and never once prayed.

A reflection

Not a portrait of someone else

After a talk at the mosque on stinginess, a man walks home with his brother. 'I hope Uncle Tariq was listening,' he says. He means it kindly. He has not thought of himself once.

Most of us read this ayah the same way. The commentaries report that it came down about Abu Jahl, the fiercest enemy of the early Muslims in Makkah. So we file it under villains. He neither believed nor prayed; we do both, more or less. The ayah slides past.

But look at who the sentence is about. It has no name in it. The verbs simply say 'he'. Several careful readers traced that 'he' back to the start of the surah. There, 'the human being' (al-insān) thinks his bones will never be gathered (75:3). He wants to keep sinning ahead of himself (75:5). He asks, with a shrug, when this Day of Resurrection will be (75:6). On this reading, the man who neither affirmed nor prayed is that same human being, at the end of the same life.

One commentator held both views together. Judging a whole kind of person, he said, does not stop one particular man being the first to fit it. Abu Jahl may be the occasion. The description is a type, and the type is open.

That changes how the ayah should be held. It is not a wanted poster. It is closer to a mirror at the end of a corridor, which shows whoever walks towards it. The man in the ayah did not wake up one day as a villain. He postponed. He said 'later' to the truth and 'later' to prayer, and later arrived at the collarbones (75:26).

None of this is meant to make the reader fear that they are Abu Jahl. It is meant to stop the ayah being wasted on him. It does not really ask who he was. It asks where in me those same two gaps are. Is there a truth I already know and have not let bear any weight? Is there a prayer I keep for when life is calmer?

The brother walking home did not need the talk for Uncle Tariq. Nor do we need this ayah for Abu Jahl. He has already met what it describes.

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.