102
Muhammad Asad
AT-TAKATHUR (GREED FOR MORE AND MORE)
THE HUNDRED-SECOND SURAH
Total Verses: 8
Introduction
THIS early Meccan surah is one of the most powerful, prophetic
passages of the Qur'an, illuminating man's unbounded
greed in general, and, more particularly, the
tendencies which have come to dominate all human societies in our technological
age.
IN THE NAME OF
GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE:
(1) YOU ARE OBSESSED by greed for more and more
(2) until you go down to your
graves. 1
(3) Nay, in time you will come to understand!
(4) And once again: 2 Nay, in time you will come to
understand!
(5) Nay, if you could but understand [it] with an
understanding [born] of certainty,
(6) you would indeed, most surely,
behold the blazing fire [of hell]! 3
(7) In the end you will indeed, most surely, behold it with
the eye of certainty: 4
(8) and on that Day you will most
surely be called to account for [what you did with] the boon of life!
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1 The term takathur
bears the connotation of "greedily striving for an increase", i.e.,
in benefits, be they tangible or intangible, real or illusory. In the above
context it denotes man's obsessive striving for more and more comforts, more
material goods, greater power over his fellow-men or
over nature, and unceasing technological progress. A passionate pursuit of such
endeavours, to the exclusion of everything else, bars
man from all spiritual insight and, hence, from the acceptance of any
restrictions and inhibitions based on purely moral values - with the result
that not only individuals but whole societies gradually lose all inner
stability and, thus, all chance of happiness.
2 See surah 6,
note 31.
3 Sc., "in which you find
yourselves now" - i.e., the "hell on earth" brought about by a
fundamentally wrong mode of life: an allusion to the gradual destruction of
man's natural environment, as well as to the frustration, unhappiness and
confusion which an overriding, unrestrained pursuit of "economic
growth" is bound to bring - and has, indeed, brought in our time - upon a
mankind that is about to lose the remnants of all spiritual religious
orientation.
4 I.e., in the hereafter, through
a direct, unequivocal insight into the real nature of one's past doings, and
into the inescapability of the suffering which man brings upon himself by a wrong, wasteful use of the boon of life (an-naim).