An-Naba · Makki · ayah 1 of 40

An-Naba 78:1

عَمَّ يَتَسَآءَلُونَ

“About what are they asking one another?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The surah opens with a question Allah already knows the answer to, asked to lift our eyes from the rumour to the news itself.

A reflection

Asking sideways

The evening train has stood outside a station for fifty minutes. In the carriage, the theories multiply. Signal failure. A strike. Someone on the line. A man three seats down is certain it is the overhead cables, because it was last time. Everyone asks everyone. Beside the door, a small button marked 'Talk to the driver' sits untouched.

Yatasāʾalūn has that shape. It is the verb of mutual asking: they ask one another. One early report describes the people of Makkah sitting together once the Quran had begun to come down, talking it round the circle. One believed it, another called it a lie. A classical grammarian noted that the verb can even mean simply talking a matter over, with no real question in it at all.

The lexicons draw a line through this root that sharpens the picture. Asking to know is answered by the tongue. Asking to be given is answered by the hand. And a true request, a masʾala, carries humility: it rises from the lower to the higher. This is established usage, not a later reading. So the needy person at the door is simply 'the asker', al-sāʾil.

Put the two together and you see what is missing in Makkah. The question never rises. It stays at eye level, passed from one guesser to the next, and nobody knocks at the door of the One who knows.

We do the same with the largest questions a person can carry. What happens when I die? Is anything waiting? These become dinner-table topics, comment threads, late-night conversations that end exactly where they began. Everyone asks everyone. Very few take the question upward, into prayer and into His words, where it could actually be answered.

The ayah does not scold the question. The rest of the surah answers it at length. What it exposes is the direction. A question about the unseen, asked only sideways, goes round the carriage for ever. Asked upwards, it reaches the one place it can land.

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.