The Spider (Al-‘Ankabut)
Verses 16-18 GROUP_1026 29.16-18
16
وَإِبْرَاهِيمَ إِذْ قَالَ لِقَوْمِهِ اعْبُدُوا اللَّهَ وَاتَّقُوهُ ذَلِكُمْ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ إِن كُنتُمْ تَعْلَمُونَ
Tell of Abraham. He said to his people, ‘Worship God and fear Him, that would be best for you, if only you knew.
17
إِنَّمَا تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ أَوْثَانًا وَتَخْلُقُونَ إِفْكًا إِنَّ الَّذِينَ تَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ لَا يَمْلِكُونَ لَكُمْ رِزْقًا فَابْتَغُوا عِندَ اللَّهِ الرِّزْقَ وَاعْبُدُوهُ وَاشْكُرُوا لَهُ إِلَيْهِ تُرْجَعُونَ
You worship idols besides God and fabricate falsehoods. Those whom you worship besides God have no power to provide sustenance for you. So seek your sustenance from God and worship Him and be grateful to Him, for to Him you shall return.
18
وَإِن تُكَذِّبُوا فَقَدْ كَذَّبَ أُمَمٌ مِّن قَبْلِكُمْ وَمَا عَلَى الرَّسُولِ إِلَّا الْبَلَاغُ الْمُبِينُ
If you reject the truth,other communities before you also rejected the truth. The messenger’s responsibility is only to convey the message clearly.’
No class discussions published for this verse group yet.
Commentary
(a) Making anybody other than the One God the centre of one’s noble feelings is a sin, because it amounts to presuming that divine attributes inhere in beings other than God. It is this attribution of the lofty qualities unique to God to some thing other than God, that makes it possible for a man to become the worshipper of some entity other than Him. In the earlier days of polytheism, man used to presume that idols possessed such qualities. Today man is behaving no differently. It is just that the names of the idols of the present day vary from those of yore. The sole difference between ancient and modern times is that ancient man used to attribute the lucrative produce of his field to the kindness of some imaginary god, while the man of today says, ‘Our green revolution is a miracle of our agricultural science’.