Al-Infitar · Makki · ayah 5 of 19

Al-Infitar 82:5

عَلِمَتْ نَفْسٌ مَّا قَدَّمَتْ وَأَخَّرَتْ

“A soul will [then] know what it has put forth and kept back.”

Saheeh International

Essence

When everything else is undone, each soul will know both columns of its account: what it sent ahead, and what it held back.

A reflection

Both columns of the account

A woman is booked in for a major operation. For a fortnight before, she cooks. Twenty meals go into the freezer, each lid labelled in her own handwriting. She comes home from hospital weak and unable to stand at the stove. She opens the freezer, and there is exactly what she prepared. Nothing more. Nothing she only meant to make.

Qaddamat is that preparation. The root means going first, ahead of others. The foot, qadam, is the tool of stepping forward. The front of an army is its muqaddima. Form II, qaddama, is to send something ahead of yourself, the way a traveller sends provisions to the stage he will reach. What you sent is waiting when you arrive.

Akhkharat is its partner. The root means coming after: the back of a camel saddle, the one born at the tail of the herd. The same root gives al-ākhira, the abode that comes after this one. So the ayah names two columns: what a soul put forward, and what it held back.

The classical readings of the second column are worth sitting with. Some say it is the good the soul left undone. Others say it is the practices it set going, which others kept doing after it. Others read the wealth it gave in its life, and the wealth it left to its heirs. Another view reads its first deeds and its last.

One early commentator argued for the second reading with a sharp point. Whatever good you neglected is not really 'held back', he said. Neglecting a duty is itself a wrong, and so it too has been sent ahead. What truly comes after you is what keeps going when you are gone.

That is uncomfortable, because it means nothing is neutral. The prayer delayed, the call never made, the debt left unpaid: these are not blank spaces in the record. They are entries.

And the soul does not need to be told. ʿAlimat: it knows. The freezer is opened, and there is no arguing with the labels.

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.