فَلا صَدَّقَ وَلا صَلّىٰ
وَلٰكِن كَذَّبَ وَتَوَلّىٰ
He neither confirmed [the truth], nor prayed,
but denied [it] and turned away.
EXPOSITION
Here the surah shifts to its final rhyme scheme. The change in rhyme scheme marks the shift in attention, moving away from the scene of death and resurrection to describing the nature of the person who ends up miserable in the hereafter, exploring and explaining the reasons for why his death and hereafter were so despondent.
Two main reasons are mentioned here for a person’s miserable state after death: not believing in God and His message, and not praying. Denial of God and His messages is of course the root cause of perdition. This attitude then manifests itself in all his actions. For the faithful, the main manifestation of his inner orientation is the act of worship. For the faithless, it is the refusal to do so. This was emphasised in the previous surah as well as being the outstanding quality of those who have doomed themselves to damnation. When the people of paradise ask the inmates of hell ‘What drew you into hell?’ They will answer: ‘We were not among those who prayed. Nor did we feed the poor. We used to gossip along with the gossipers, and we used to deny the Day of Retribution, until death came to us’ (74:42-47). This is because worship, or the refusal to do so, are the most palpable and distinct manifestations of a person’s inner orientation. The love for God will invariably reveal itself as the desire to worship Him, and conversely the love of the self will reveal itself as hubris and a refusal to submit to Him. This all ties into the surah’s main theme of the convergence of outer (ẓāhir) and inner (bāṭin).
But denied [it] and turned away may seem like simply a restatement of the previous verse, but it serves an important purpose. It highlights the fact that kufr is not simply a passive state of inaction, but active denial. The kāfir wilfully and knowingly turns away from God. He is not simply the victim of circumstance, someone who was born into the wrong family or culture or time. This is an important fact that is often overlooked. For more, see for example the discussion on 98:1.
INSIGHTS FROM OTHER TRADITIONS
- ‘In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.’
[1] James 2:17.