Az-Zalzalah · Madani · ayah 3 of 8

Az-Zalzalah 99:3

وَقَالَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ مَا لَهَا

“And man says,[1963] "What is [wrong] with it?" -”

Saheeh International

Essence

When the familiar ground turns strange, the creature named for familiarity and forgetfulness finally asks the question it should have asked long before.

A reflection

"What is wrong with it?"

After every terrible news story, someone posts the same four words: 'What is wrong with the world?' It gathers a thousand agreeing replies. Almost nobody posts the harder question underneath it.

The ayah records a human being at the moment the ground heaves and gives up its dead. He says: mā lahā, 'what is wrong with it?' One commentator notices that he does not speak to the earth. He does not say 'what is wrong with you?' He speaks about it, as if to himself. The commentator suggests he is really rebuking his own soul: O self, what has happened to the earth? You are the cause. Had it not been for your wrongs, it would not have come to this.

The word insān sharpens the moment. By one classical view it comes from uns: warmth, familiarity, being at ease with what is around you. The human is the creature who settles into things, who grows used to whatever is there. By another view, reported from a Companion, it comes from forgetting: the one who was given a covenant and forgot it (20:115).

Both views land here. The creature who grew so comfortable with the ground that he never questioned it now watches it turn strange. The creature who forgot is suddenly made to remember. The same commentator describes the human in this ayah as the one the Quran elsewhere calls ungrateful, anxious and prone to wrong: the one whose habit is heedlessness.

There is a better time to ask mā lahā, and it is now. Not 'what is wrong with the world?' as a way of placing the problem out there, but 'what is wrong with me?' as a way of taking it home. The first question fills comment sections. The second changes a life.

The ayah shows both questions at once: a man staring at the ground, and a voice underneath asking what part he played. It is kinder to ask that question in a quiet moment today than to have it forced from you on that Day.

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.