Al-Infitar · Makki · ayah 17 of 19

Al-Infitar 82:17

وَمَآ أَدْرَىٰكَ مَا يَوْمُ ٱلدِّينِ

“And what can make you know what is the Day of Recompense?”

Saheeh International

Essence

Some knowledge cannot be hunted down by cleverness; the Day of Recompense is too vast to work out, so it has to be told.

A reflection

Knowledge you cannot hunt down

A chess grandmaster can see twenty moves ahead. He can read an opponent's plan from the way a single pawn is placed. Ask him what his own last day will look like, and he smiles and says he has no idea. The board he masters has sixty-four squares. Life does not.

The verb in this ayah, adrāka, comes from a root with a hunting picture behind it. A desert hunter would creep forward hidden behind a camel, using it as a screen until the game was in range. That camel was the dariyya. Tadarraytu al-ṣayd meant: I worked out where the game was before I could see it. So dirāya is knowledge reached by skill and slow approach. The same root gives mudārāt: finding the careful way round a difficult person.

Now hear the question. Wa-mā adrāka: and what will make you know? No stalking reaches this. One classical commentator says the Day of Recompense is such that no knower can grasp its reality. However you picture it, he says, it is beyond that, many times over. Another says the question magnifies the Day that the deniers called a lie.

This is not an insult to reason. The surah has just used reason: a generous and wise Creator would not leave every wrong unanswered (82:6–9). You can work out that there must be a reckoning. But what that Day actually is, its scale, its texture, its terror and its joy, cannot be hunted down. It has to be told.

We live in an age that trusts what it can measure. The ayah marks the edge of that trust. There are things we know only because we are told them by someone who has seen. Another ayah puts it plainly: no soul knows what it will earn tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land it will die (31:34).

The grandmaster's skill is real. So is the hunter's. The ayah simply points to the one kind of knowledge where skill runs out, and asks you to listen instead of guess.

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.