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See note [234] on the identical phrase in 2:245 . In the present instance the meaning is apparently wider, applying to all that man may do selflessly. for the sake of God alone.
i.e., Paradise.
Cf. ii. 245, n. 276.
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See note [25] on the expression ashab al-yamin ("those on the right hand") in 74:39 . In many instances, the metaphor of "the right hand" or "right side" is used in the Qur'an to denote "righteousness" and, therefore, "blessedness", symbolized in the present context by the "light spreading rapidly" before and on the right side of the believers as a result of their "cognition of God, and their high morality, and their freedom from ignorance and blameworthy traits" (Razi).
In the Darkness of the Day of Judgment there will be a Light to guide the righteous to their Destination. This will be the Light of their Faith and their Good Works. Perhaps the Light of the Right Hand mentioned here is the Light of their Good Works: for the Blessed will receive their Record in their right hand (lxix. 19-24).
The highest Achievement, the highest felicity, the attainment of Salvation, the fulfilment of all desires. See n. 4733 to xliv. 57.
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Meant here are, apparently, not only outright "hypocrites" (in the connotation given to this term in Western languages), but also people who, being shaky in their beliefs and uncertain in their moral convictions, are inclined to deceive themselves (see note [7] on 29:11 ).
I.e., "you should have sought light while you lived on earth".
The stress on there being a gate in the wall separating true believers and hypocrites (or the weak of faith) points to the possibility of the latters' redemption: cf. the famous hadith quoted in note [10] on 40:12 . Mujahid (as quoted by Tabari) identifies the "wall" spoken of here with the "barrier" (hijab) mentioned in 7:46 .
This wall is said to be the barrier of Al-A’râf (or the heights) between Paradise and Hell. See 7:46-49.
Watchful preparation in Life, and the light of Faith, which reflects the divine Light, are matters of personal Life, and cannot be borrowed from another. So, in Christ's parable of the Ten Virgins (Matt. xv. 1-13), when the foolish ones had let their lamps go out for want of oil, they asked to borrow oil from the wise ones, but the wise ones answered and said, "Not so;...but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves".
The wall will divide the Good from the Evil. But the Gateway in it will show that communication will not be cut off. Evil must realise that Good-ie., Mercy and Felicity-had been within its reach, and that the Wrath which envelops it is due to its own rejection of Mercy.
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Sc., "by the prospect of worldly gains" or "by fear for your personal safety" - both of which characterize the half-hearted as well as the hypocrites.
Thus Ibn Zayd (quoted by Tabari), explaining the verb tarabbastum.
I.e., "until your death".
See note [30] on the last sentence of 31:33 .
Satan.
The evil will now claim some right of kinship or association or proximity with the good in earthly fife; but in fact they had been arrogant and had selfishly despised them before. The reply will be: (1) you yourselves chose temptation and evil; (2) when you had power in your earthly life, you hoped for ruin to the good, and perhaps plotted for it; (3) you were warned by prophets of Allah, but you doubted Allah's very existence and certainly His Mercy and Justice, and the Hereafter; (4) you followed your own lusts and neglected Reason and Truth; (5) you were given plenty of rope, but you followed your mad career, until Judgment came upon you, and now it is too late for repentance.
The Arch-Deceiver (Satan) deceived you in respect of Allah in many ways: for example, he made you oblivious of Allah's Mercy and loving-kindness; he made you reject His Grace; he made you think that Allah's Justice may not overtake you; etc.
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I.e., belated repentance.
Lit., "your friend" (mawlakum) - i.e., "the only thing by which you may hope to be purified and redeemed": cf. the saying of the Prophet mentioned in note [10] on 40:12 , see also note [15] above.
In personal responsibility there is no room for vicarious ransom or for ransom by payments of gold or silver or by sacrifice of possessions. Nor can the crime be expiated for after Judgment. 'You' and 'those who rejected Allah' are two ways of looking at the same persons. 'You are rejected because you rejected Allah.'
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I.e., "Should not the remembrance of God and His revelation make them humble rather than proud?" This is an emphatic warning against all smugness, self-righteousness and false pride at having "attained to faith" - a failing which only too often attains to such as consider themselves "pious".
This is apparently an allusion to the spiritually arrogant among the Jews, who regard themselves as "God's chosen people" and, therefore, as predestined for His acceptance.
I.e., so that now they act contrary to the ethical precepts of their religion: implying that the purpose of all true faith is to make man humble and God-conscious rather than self-satisfied, and that a loss of that spiritual humility invariably results in moral degeneration.
Humility and the remembrance of Allah and His Message are never more necessary than in the hour of victory and prosperity.
The men immediately referred to are the contemporary Jews and Christians. To each of these Ummats was given Allah's Revelation, but as time passed, they corrupted it, became arrogant and hard-hearted, and subverted justice, truth, and the purity of Life. But the general lesson is far wider. No one is favoured of Allah except on the score of righteousness. Except on that score, there is no chosen individual or race. There is no blind good fortune or ill fortune. All happens according to the just laws and will of Allah. But at no time is humility or righteousness more necessary than in the hour of victory or triumph.
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According to most of the commentators - and, particularly, Zamakhshari, Razi and Ibn Kathir - this is a parabolic allusion to the effect of a re-awakening of God-consciousness in hearts that had become deadened by self-satisfaction and false pride.
So it is easy for Him to soften your hearts as well.
As the dead earth is revived after the refreshing showers of rain, so is it with the spirit of man, whether as an individual or a race or Ummat. There is no cause for despair. Allah's Truth will revive the spiritual faculties if it is accepted with humility and zeal.
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Or: "who give in charity" - depending on the vocalization of the consonants sad and dal. In view of the sequence, the sense given in my rendering seems preferable (and is, indeed, stressed by Zamakhshari), although in the reading of Hafs ibn Sulayman al-Asadi, on which this translation is based, the relevant nouns appear in the spelling mussaddiqin and mussaddiqat, "men and women who give in charity".
See verse {11} above.
i.e., Paradise.
Cf. lvii. 11; also see ii. 245, n. 276.
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I.e., by their readiness for any sacrifice.
Cf. iv. 69, and n. 586. The four categories there mentioned as constituting the beautiful Company of Faith are: the Prophets who teach, the Sincere Lovers of Truth, the Martyrs, and the Righteous who do good. Of these, the prophets or messengers have already been mentioned in this verse. The Righteous who do good are mentioned as the men and women given over to deeds of charity in verse 18.
The Martyrs (witnesses) are all those who carry the Banner of Truth against all odds and in all positions of danger, whether by pen or speech, or deed or counsel.
Note that these two are specially high degrees in the Hereafter, just short of Prophethood. For they have not only their reward in the Hereafter, like those who practise charity (verse 18 above), but they themselves become sources of light and leading.
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Commenting at length on this passage, Razi makes it clear that life as such is not to be despised, inasmuch as it has been created by God: cf. 38:27 - "We have not created heaven and earth and all that is between them without meaning and purpose"; and 23:115 - "Did you think that We have created you in mere idle play?" But whereas life in itself is a positive gift of God and - as Razi points out - the potential source of all blessings, it loses this positive quality if it is indulged in recklessly, blindly and with disregard of spiritual values and considerations: in brief, if it is indulged in without any thought of the hereafter.
Lit., "[It is] like the parable of...", etc.
This is the sole instance in the Qur'an where the participial noun kafir (in its plural form kuffar) has its original meaning of "tiller of the soil". For the etymology of this meaning, see note [4] on 74:10 , where the term kafir (in the sense of "denier of the truth") appears for the first time in the sequence of Qur'anic revelation.
According to Tabari, the conjunction wa has here the meaning of aw ("or").
Cf. vi. 32, and n. 855. In the present passage the idea is further amplified. In this life people not only play and amuse themselves and each other, but they show off, and boast, and pile up riches and man-power and influence, in rivalry with each other.
Cf. xxxix. 21, and n. 4273. Here the Parable is meant to teach a slightly different lesson. Allah's mercies are free and open to all, like His rain. But how do men make use of them? The good men take the real spiritual harvest and store the Spiritual grain. The men who are in love with the ephemeral are delighted with the green of the tares and the grass; but such things give no real nourishment; they soon wither, become dry, and crumble to pieces, like the worldly pleasures and pomps, boasting and tumults, possessions and friends.
Kuffar is here used in the unusual sense of 'tillers or husbandmen', because they sow the seed and cover it up with soil. But the ordinary meaning, 'Rejecters of Truth', is not absent. The allegory refers to such men.
Cf. iii. 185, and n. 492. Many of the attractive vanities of this world are but nets set by Satan to deceive man. The only thing real and lasting is the Good Life lived in the Light of Allah.
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Sc., "rather than in striving for glory and worldly possessions": implying elliptically that no man is free from faults and transgressions, and hence everyone is in need of God's forgiveness. (Cf. note [41] on 24:31 .)
For a further qualification of the humility which characterizes true believers, see {3:133-135}.
Cf. iii. 133, and n. 452.
"Bestows on whom He pleases." That is, such grace and favour is beyond any one's own merits. It is bestowed by Allah according to His holy Will and Plan, which is just, merciful, and righteous.
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I.e., "the earth or mankind as a whole, or any of you individually": an allusion to natural as well as man-made catastrophes, and to individual suffering through illness, moral or material deprivation, etc.
I.e., God's decreeing an event and bringing it into being.
External disasters or misfortunes may strike people's eye or imagination, but there are worse crisis and misfortunes in the spiritual world, which are of equal or greater importance to man's future. All this happens according to the Will and Plan of Allah. Even where we are allowed the exercise of our own wills, the consequences that follow are in accordance with the laws and Plan decreed by Allah beforehand.
For baraa, 'to bring into existence', and other words denoting Allah's creative energy, see n. 120 to ii. 117; n. 916 to vi. 94; and n. 923 to vi. 98.
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Thus, the knowledge that whatever has happened had to happen - and could not have not happened - because, obviously, it had been willed by God in accordance with His unfathomable plan, ought to enable a true believer to react with conscious equanimity to whatever good or ill comes to him.
I.e., attributing their good fortune to their own merit or "luck".
In the external world, what people may consider misfortune or good fortune may both turn out to be illusory,-in Kipling's words, "both imposters just the same". The righteous man does not grumble if some one else has possessions, nor exult if he has them. He does not covet and he does not boast. If he has any advantages, he shares them with other people, as he considers them not due to his own merits, but as gifts of Allah.
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Cf. last sentence of 4:36 and the whole of verse {37}.
I.e., does not want to admit that whatever has happened must have been willed by God.
Neither the Covetous nor the Boasters have any place in the Good Pleasure of Allah. The Covetous are particularly insidious, as their avarice and niggardliness not only keep back the gifts of Allah from men, but their pernicious example dries up the streams of Charity in others.
It is Charity in Allah's Way that is specially in view here. If people are selfish and withhold their hand, they only injure themselves. They do not hurt Allah's Cause, for He is independent of all needs, and He will find other means of assisting His more meagrely-endowed servants; He is worthy of all praise in His care for His creatures.
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Lit., "with them".
Side by side with enabling man to discriminate between right and wrong (which is the innermost purpose of all divine revelation), God has endowed him with the ability to convert to his use the natural resources of his earthly environment. An outstanding symbol of this ability is man's skill, unique among all animated beings, in making tools; and the primary material for all tool-making - and, indeed, for all human technology - is iron: the one metal which is found abundantly on earth, and which can be utilized for beneficial as well as destructive ends. The "awesome power" (ba's shadid) inherent in iron manifests itself not merely in the manufacture of weapons of war but also, more subtly, in man's every-growing tendency to foster the development of an increasingly complicated technology which places the machine in the foreground of all human existence and which, by its inherent - almost irresistible - dynamism, gradually estranges man from all inner connection with nature. This process of growing mechanization, so evident in our modern life, jeopardizes the very structure of human society and, thus, contributes to a gradual dissolution of all moral and spiritual perceptions epitomized in the concept of "divine guidance". It is to warn man of this danger that the Qur'an stresses - symbolically and metonymically - the potential evil (ba's) of "iron" if it is put to wrong use: in other words, the danger of man's allowing his technological ingenuity to run wild and thus to overwhelm his spiritual consciousness and, ultimately, to destroy all possibility of individual and social happiness.
Lit., "those who succour Him and His Apostle", i.e., those who stand up for the cause of God and His Apostle. The meaning is that only they who put God's spiritual and material gifts to right use can be described as "true believers".
See note [3] on 2:3 .
Three things are mentioned as gifts of Allah. In concrete terms they are the Book, the Balance, and Iron, which stand as emblems of three things which hold society together, viz. Revelation, which commands Good and forbids Evil; Justice, which gives to each person his due; and the strong arm of the Law, which maintains sanctions for evil-doers. For Balance, see also xlii. 17, and n. 4550.
"Sent down": anzala: in the sense of revealed to man the use of certain things, created in him the capacity of understanding and using them: cf. xxxix. 6: "sent down for you eight head of cattle in pairs".
Iron: the most useful metal known to man. Out of it is made steel, and from steel and iron are made implements of war, such as swords, spears, guns, etc., as well as instruments of peace, such as ploughshares, bricklayers' trowels, architects' and engineers' instruments, etc. Iron stands as the emblem of Strength, Power, Discipline, Law's sanctions, etc. Iron and steel industries have also been the foundation of the prosperity and power of modern manufacturing nations'.
In xxi. 49, I have translated "in their most secret thoughts" for the more literal "unseen" (bilgaibi). Perhaps the more literal "unseen" may do if understood in the adverbial sense; as explained in xxxv. 18, n. 3902. The sincere man will help the Cause, whether he is seen or brought under notice or not.
To help Allah and His messengers is to help their Cause. It is to give men an opportunity of striving and fighting for His Cause and proving their true mettle, for thus is their spirit tested. As explained in the next line, Allah in Himself is Full of Strength, Exalted in Power, and Able to enforce His Will, and He has no need of others' assistance.
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