Surah Al-Muddaththir English Translation & Brief Tafsir

¹O Prophet Muhammad, you who have withdrawn into seclusion, hidden yourself from society, and wrapped yourself in the cloak of solitude! O Muslim, you who feel the message of the Quran in your heart but hold back from conveying it! The time for withdrawing into your shell and living a quiet life is over. Stop hiding now! Make known to people the truths I have sent you, and bring into the open the message you have been conveying in secret.

²So free yourself from every worry. Set out with resolve and determination to carry the messages of the revelation sent down to you to hearts in need. Prepare yourself for this great task, and from now on go among the people to inform and warn them! Starting with those closest to you, invite people to Islam. Explain to them that the belief of shirk is wrong, and that there is no power other than Allah to whom servitude is due! With the Quran, warn humanity, which is floundering in the darkness of denial and ignorance, against the dangers awaiting it at the end of the road. Perhaps they will reflect and take heed.

³Do not be afraid; Allah is with you. So, with your heart as well as your words and actions, proclaim the greatness of your Lord alone, and glorify Allah’s majesty and announce it to the whole universe! Speak of your Lord’s greatness, of the blessings He has bestowed, and of the perfect working of the magnificent order He has established in the universe.

⁴And while carrying out this duty of conveying the message, purify your inner self. Begin conveying the message and warning with yourself first; always keep your surroundings and your outward appearance clean. Just as you keep your material clothing clean, keep clean also your spiritual clothing, which symbolizes your personality and character. Let your clothing be clean and in harmony with the loftiness of your call. Purify your body, your desires, and your cravings of filth; do not become tainted with shirk and denial. If you do not listen to your Lord and act according to Our laws, you cannot cleanse yourself. Know that everything your Lord has described as evil and has forbidden is filth.

⁵Keep away from the deeds that will put you in difficulty on the Day of Reckoning and from all the sins that will bring punishment. Distance yourself from every kind of shirk and filth, including thoughts and actions the Quran does not approve. Do not let shirk and disbelief confuse your mind and pollute your feelings and thoughts. Go out among people with a virtuous and morally excellent character.

⁶Do not put anyone under obligation in order to get back more than you gave. Whatever good you do for people, do not consider it too much and throw it in their faces. Nor ever turn the services you render in the name of Islam into a means of gain. Do good solely to earn Allah’s good pleasure, expecting nothing in return. Even if you have done great good deeds and services, never think yourself great and give in to pride. Also, do not forget that you invite people, on Allah’s behalf, to live by the order of life that is the purpose of their creation.

⁷O My Messenger! When you set out to proclaim the values you believe in, those who are disturbed by this will set out too. They will place very great obstacles in your way to turn you away from this work. Be patient, for the sake of earning your Lord’s good pleasure, with the persecution you will suffer while carrying out your duty of conveying the message, and stand firm against the hardships you will meet. Your Lord does not expect of you anything beyond your strength. Do not let the hardships you face while doing your duty grow large in your eyes so that you lose heart.

⁸O Prophet! Make known this truth: when the time We have set comes, the horn called the Trumpet (Sur), which announces the resurrection, will be blown, and people will be raised to life to answer for what they did. On that day everyone will be called to account for whom he followed and by what standard he lived his worldly life.

⁹That day on which the Trumpet will be blown is a very hard day for those who deny tawhid and call the Prophet a liar.

¹⁰As for the disbelievers, who cover up and deny the truths that come from Allah and turn away from the call, that day will be anything but easy for them. When the disbelievers see their records of deeds, they will understand the gravity of their situation, and on that day they will have to pay a very heavy price, for what they denied has come to pass. This is a warning to those who do not believe in the Hereafter.

¹¹O Muslim! In every age and in every society, you too will be confronted by wrongdoers who deny Allah’s verses and, relying on their wealth and power, wage war against Islam. Leave it to Me to settle accounts with this transgressing man, whom I created alone when he possessed nothing, and who, though I later gave him wealth and children, grew insolent through his riches! I equipped him with so many blessings, giving him wealth, property, and children, so that he would follow the order of life to which I invited him. I Myself will deal with that brazen, transgressing disbeliever who, though he knows the truth very well, rebels against My verses because of his arrogance and selfishness!

¹²So that he would follow the order of life to which I invited him, I bestowed on him boundless property and wealth and gave him many means and riches. But he was ungrateful for what I gave him; he grew insolent, transgressed, and denied.

¹³I also gave him strong and powerful children, each holding an important position and always before his eyes.

¹⁴And I gave him, in abundance, everything a person could wish to have. I generously spread before him far more power and ability than was given to others, and countless blessings and opportunities.

¹⁵But he is never satisfied. Persisting in disbelief, it never even crosses his mind to thank Me. On the contrary, he wants Me to give him more, and he keeps on making insatiable demands. The ungrateful man was never satisfied! He asked and asked. As if he would never die, he wants still more with great greed.

¹⁶No! Such a person is not worthy of My mercy; he will not get what he wants. From now on I will not increase his wealth and children, and I will give him no more opportunity. For that disbeliever stubbornly calls Our verses lies and denies them, and he transgresses more and more. Because they deny the truths We sent, I will punish such people with a most terrible punishment.

¹⁷So I, for My part, will take back all the blessings I gave him. I will drive him in Hell up an exceedingly steep, hard slope full of punishment. I will strike him with unbearable pains and intolerable punishments. I will burden him with hardships he cannot escape. He will not be able to bear the hardships I lay on him, and they will be a steep slope for him.

¹⁸For when Our verses were conveyed to him, that disbeliever calculated in fine detail how he would reject them. He thought long about how he would call the Quran a lie, and insolently made a plan.

¹⁹Then, in his mind full of shirk and disbelief, he made an assessment of his own. May he perish! How carefully he weighed and measured as he made his plan!

²⁰He also judged the truths We made known by his own wretched reasoning, and in his ignorance he belittled Our truths. Even though Allah’s ruling was brought to his mind, how did this ungrateful man, may he perish, make such a plan contrary to Islam and to humanity?

²¹Then he considered the consequences his plan would bring about. To find new grounds, he looked down with arrogance at the Prophet, who was calling him to the truth and to good.

²²Then, uneasy and anxious, he knitted his brows, grimaced, and scowled.

²³Then, too proud to come to faith, he brazenly turned his back on Our verses. He refused to follow the Prophet and turned away, and, shunning a religion that would make him equal with other people before Allah, he put on airs of greatness.

²⁴After all this weighing and measuring, he made light of the Prophet’s call, saying, “This Quran is at most magical words, a piece of sorcery learned by being handed down from past generations.”

²⁵Saying, “This is fabricated; it is nothing but the magical words of a human being,” he shunned faith. By this behavior he deprived himself of divine mercy and became deserving of the punishment of Hell.

²⁶O My Messenger! Leave him; let him talk freely among his supporters. And I, for My part, in return for what he did, will drag him and cast him into Saqar, that is, into Hell, which he deserves.

²⁷Do you know what Saqar, which is called Hell, is? Who but Allah could make known to you the terror of Hell?

²⁸That scorching fire neither leaves the one cast into it to die nor lets him live. These people cannot even begin to think about or imagine the intensity of the fire of Hell. Hell makes the disbelievers and the wrongdoers writhe in unceasing torment; it leaves nothing of those We cast into it and never ceases burning and scorching. It leaves neither flesh nor bone on the body. Nor does it ever cease restoring a person to his former state to torment him again.

²⁹That Hell has a raging thirst for the denying, ungrateful human being. It is such a fire that it ceaselessly burns the skins and scorches them pitch black. It makes him pay the price for his ingratitude and rebellion toward Allah while he was in the world, and inflicts an endless punishment.

³⁰Over this Hell there are exactly nineteen strong and merciless angels serving as its wardens. These are the guardians of Hell. If you ask, “Why guardians, and why nineteen?”:

³¹We have assigned only the angels called the guardians of Hell to oversee the affairs of Hell. We made the number of those angels on duty a means of testing, so that the character of those who persist in denial and cover up the truths that come from Allah, and of the disbelievers, would come to light. We confused the minds of the deniers, so that the Christians and Jews, who say, “We too were given a scripture before,” being familiar with the language of revelation, would wholeheartedly believe, when they heard these verses, that this Book comes from Allah. And so that those who believe would strengthen their faith even more, saying, “Our Lord does nothing without wisdom.” Thus both those who were given the scripture and those who believe, understanding the inner meaning of the matter, would not fall into the slightest doubt about the number of these angels. For the disbelievers belittled the nineteen angels and thought they could destroy them. But let those in whose hearts there is the disease of doubt and hypocrisy, and the disbelievers who cover up the truths that come from Allah, being unable to grasp the wisdom in these magnificent verses, busy themselves with the nineteen angels at the gate and say, “What did Allah mean by this example?” Let us see what they will say about the number nineteen. Will they call it a lie? Or will they make a religion out of nineteen? We explain Our verses so that those who were given the scripture may grasp that the Book is the truth, and so that the faith of the believers may increase. They will mock you, saying, “If there are only nineteen keepers in Hell, we can all band together and overpower them.” Or they will try to lead people astray by loading the number nineteen with meanings it does not have. Thus, just as Allah gives the hypocrites and the polytheists the freedom to fall into a bad state, He also gives rational and responsible beings the freedom to stray from the right path and choose misguidance. At times He also tests people to show who will react in what way. He deems astray the one who wants to go off the path and who, knowingly choosing evil, wants to remain in error, and He lets him stray. But the one who sincerely strives for good and wants to reach what is right, He brings to the right path. In the end, people think and weigh things up, and choose to believe or not to believe. The examples given in the verses separate those who truly believe from those who do not. The examples given increase the denial of some and the faith of others. Allah will not bring those who deny to the truth by force. He leaves them as they are in their denial. But to those who draw near to Allah and ask for help, He shows the right path. Let them not imagine that your Lord’s armies are limited to nineteen angels. No one but Him can know the number and strength of your Lord’s armies, that is, of the angels, the winds, and natural disasters. They only voice conjecture and guesses they make up in their own heads. So listen, O people! What We have told here is a counsel and a warning for people, to be reflected on and containing much wisdom. So take heed! With this truth plain to see, how can you defy My commands? The truths your Lord has made known are counsels He has sent so that people may take a lesson.

³²No! The disbelievers’ claim is in vain, and they never take heed. By the moon, which recalls the rising of the light of prophethood and is one of the verses of the book of the universe: Allah has sent revelation like the moon that shows the way in pitch darkness. The moon, like a light that is born, grows, and in the end fades away like a human being, reminds a person of his own lifespan. The first crescent represents childhood, the full moon maturity, and the last crescent old age.

³³By the night, too, which tells that the light of faith and the Quran will take the place of the darkness of disbelief, shirk, and rebellion, which constantly brings the good news of the sunrise and the coming of day, and which passes away.

³⁴And by the morning, too, which announces that the night is over and brightens with the good news of a bright future: in the near future, the sun and daylight of the messengership will take the place of this darkness of jahiliyyah (ignorance).

³⁵That Hell, as real as all these things, is the greatest of the calamities awaiting the wrongdoers who seek to obstruct the rising of the sun of the messengership. Allah, who created that magnificent moon that shines before your eyes at night and who makes night and day follow one another, is warning you about Hell. This Hell is the greatest danger, one you must never put out of your minds.

³⁶This punishment is a certain warning for the people who take other gods besides Allah. All the truths your Lord has made known are also important reminders that warn people.

³⁷This Quran is a warning for people who choose either to go forward on the paths of good by worship and good deeds, or to stay behind because of shirk and denial and choose Hell. Whoever wishes believes in Allah wholeheartedly and does deeds for his own good. And whoever wishes turns away from faith and obedience and does deeds to his own harm.

³⁸For on the Day of Reckoning, every person’s fate depends on what he himself has earned. Every person will receive in full the recompense for the way of life he chose. Every sinner will be held as a pledge for all the evil deeds he committed.

³⁹Only those who believe in Allah’s Book and are given their records of deeds from the right, because they carried righteous deeds from this world to the Hereafter, are freed from this pledge. Unlike the ignorant polytheists, they did not seek some other authority to save them, or an intercessor to grant them privileges in the Hereafter. Nor did they rely on their wealth, their children, and the partisans who supported them.

⁴⁰Those who believe and fulfill their responsibilities, on the other hand, will be in the gardens of Paradise, in peace and safety.

⁴¹Then Allah will show the believers the state of those suffering punishment in Hell. The believers, for their part, will want to learn the condition of the guilty and, out of curiosity, will ask them:

⁴²“What has driven you into Saqar, this burning, scorching fire that you once mocked?”

⁴³They will answer: “We would not follow Allah’s call, and we were not among those who performed the prayer. We were not among those who take refuge in Allah and worship Him, or who follow the Prophet. Nor did we keep the promises we made to our Lord in Surah al-Fatihah, which we used to recite.”

⁴⁴“We were wholly sunk in a life of luxury and show. We would not clothe and feed the poor, nor concern ourselves with their needs. Nor would we make any effort for a just and noble order in the land that would secure this.”

⁴⁵“Along with those who mocked Allah’s verses and plunged into falsehood, sin, and the belief of shirk, we too would plunge into the deceptive pleasures of the world. We used to believe that we would not be called to account, and that everything would end when life in this world ended.”

⁴⁶“Because we did not follow Allah’s call to tawhid, our way of life changed our beliefs as well. And so, although we said with our tongues that we believed in the Day of Reckoning, we did not live as we believed. Instead, we chose to believe as we lived. By not preparing for that day through the way we lived, we disregarded the Hereafter. We thought that what we did would go unpunished. Even if we did not deny that Day of Reckoning in words, we had denied it in deed.”

⁴⁷“And so we went on living as if we would never die. In the end, this state of ours continued until the reality called death, which we thought would never come, came to us. Our appointed hour caught us unawares and confronted us at a moment we never expected.”

⁴⁸From now on, the false intercession of the clerics who support false systems and oppressive centers of power cannot save them, and such intercession will be of no use at all. Let them not say, “We will find an intermediary and get our affair settled.” No one can save them from Saqar’s grip. No one can mediate in Allah’s sight for the salvation of those wrongdoers, and the disbelievers will never be granted intercession.

⁴⁹Then what are these people relying on after so many warnings? The truth being so, they do not listen to Our counsel; they turn away and flee from the warnings of the Quran and from Allah’s call.

⁵⁰Why, like terrified wild donkeys, do they flee from these counsels and from your call, and hurry away without listening to you at all?

⁵¹Moreover, like wild donkeys that take fright and flee from a lion that wants to hunt them, they turn away from Allah’s call. The donkey does what being a donkey requires. But what about human beings? How can their fleeing from a prophet who brings them benefit be explained?

⁵²Yes, those deniers flee from this revelation because their pride will not let them obey the Prophet. Moreover, as if the Quran conveyed to them were not enough, they want special revelations and scriptures sent down to them. That is, they claim that only revelations confirming the system inherited from their forefathers should be sent. They are as stubborn as mules. For they have no thought of believing. Well, if these demands were met, would they believe?

⁵³No! Even if special revelations came to them, they would not believe. These demands of theirs are nothing but excuses. In fact, the real reason for their denial is this: they do not fear the fire of Hell of which they have been warned, nor do they have any concern for the Hereafter and the reckoning. The truth is that they are people who do not accept resurrection after death, giving account, punishment, and reward, and who therefore turn away from the Quran.

⁵⁴Come to your senses! Whatever they say, on the Day of Reckoning everyone will receive in full the recompense they deserve! The truth is that, whatever those who deny may think and whatever they may believe, the Quran is by no means, as they claim, the magical word of a human being. Truly, what is being made known to you by Allah to turn you away from shirk is a powerful counsel that brings good news and warns.

⁵⁵Now, whoever wishes, using his own will and choice, heeds these warnings, does what is good for himself, reflects, and takes a lesson from the Quran. So let whoever wishes to attain salvation and well-being in this world and the Hereafter take counsel from it and keep away from evil.

⁵⁶But unless those who deny seek guidance, your Lord does not bring them to guidance, and they cannot take counsel or learn a lesson from the Quran. If people are able to make choices using their free will, this is thanks to your Lord’s grace and generosity. So turn to Him, in order to be freed from every kind of evil and sin and to become truly honest and virtuous. Allah is the only being whose punishment is to be feared and guarded against, and by whose Book the way is to be found. The one and only authority with the power to forgive those who wish to guard themselves is Allah alone. And it is Allah alone whose counsel is to be heeded, whose call is to be followed, and toward whom responsibility is to be felt.