'Abasa · Makki · ayah 10 of 42

'Abasa 80:10

فَأَنتَ عَنْهُ تَلَهَّىٰ

“From him you are distracted.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Distraction is not forgetting; it is holding someone in your hand while your eyes are elsewhere, and even a good cause can do it.

A reflection

Even a good cause can be a distraction

The word lahw has a narrow first image for many Muslims today. It suggests entertainment: music, games, idle fun, the things that pious people are wary of. So 'you were distracted' might sound as if the Prophet ﷺ had been caught doing something frivolous.

Look at what was actually distracting him. He was calling the most powerful men of Makkah to Allah. It was the central task of his mission. Yet the Quran uses the word of distraction for it.

That is because the root is defined not by what occupies you, but by what it pulls you away from. The lexicons put it plainly: lahw is whatever busies you so that you leave what matters. A book on synonyms adds a telling contrast. Play can train you, as a game of skill does. Lahw is named for what it makes you let go.

So the truer picture is uncomfortable. A distraction can be a noble thing. It becomes lahw the moment it takes the place of something that should have come first. Trade is not blamed in the Quran. But the men it praises are those 'whom neither trade nor sale distracts from the remembrance of Allah' (24:37).

Picture a woman who coordinates the hospital-visiting rota for her mosque. She keeps a spreadsheet of forty patients and twenty volunteers, and her phone never stops. It is beautiful work. One evening she learns that the widower in the flat next door has been ill for a fortnight. No one has knocked on his door. She has walked past it twice a day, on her way to organise visits for strangers.

Nothing she was doing was wrong. It simply stood in the place of the thing right beside her.

This is the most humbling lesson of this ayah. Our worst distractions are not always our guilty pleasures. Sometimes they are our proudest projects. The committee, the campaign, the online debate about the faith. Any of them can become the thing we are busy with while the one who came to us waits.

The question is never only 'is this good?' It is 'what is this pulling me away from?'

The full entry has 4 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.