Al-Fajr · Makki · ayah 17 of 30

Al-Fajr 89:17

كَلَّا ۖ بَل لَّا تُكْرِمُونَ ٱلْيَتِيمَ

“No![1919] But you do not honor the orphan”

Saheeh International

Essence

No: he longed to be honoured by his Lord, yet would not honour the orphan, and the same word is turned back on him.

A reflection

Wanting the top table

At a charity gala for an orphans' fund, a senior partner from a law firm is furious. He has been seated at table nine instead of the top table, and he tells the organiser so, twice. Nobody notices that the two teenagers the charity supports have been put at a small table by the kitchen door.

That is the shape of this ayah. The man in the previous verses wanted one thing above all: to be honoured. My Lord has honoured me, he said, or, when things went badly, my Lord has humiliated me. Honour was his whole scoreboard.

Then comes kallā: no, not at all. It rejects both claims at once. One early explanation gives the sense as if from Allah Himself. I did not test him with wealth because he is honoured by Me, nor with poverty because he is lowly before Me.

And then bal: rather. The ayah does not stop at correcting his words. It moves, as one commentary puts it, from the ugly thing he said to the uglier thing he did. You do not honour the orphan. It even switches to address him directly, 'you', which the commentators read as sharpening the rebuke. The man who craved ikrām is exposed by the same word. He would not give ikrām to the child with no one to demand it.

One early report names a real case. An orphan boy grew up in the house of one of Makkah's powerful men, it says, and was pushed away from what was rightfully his.

The principle reaches every age. The quickest way to measure how someone understands honour is to watch how they treat a person who cannot return it. The lawyer at table nine cared about his seat. The orphans by the kitchen door were the people the whole evening was for.

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.