اَلَمْ Do not تَرَ you see اَنَّ that الْفُلْكَ the ships تَجْرِیْ sail فِی through الْبَحْرِ the sea بِنِعْمَتِ by (the) Grace اللّٰهِ (of) Allah لِیُرِیَكُمْ that He may show you مِّنْ of اٰیٰتِهٖ ؕ His Signs اِنَّ Indeed فِیْ in ذٰلِكَ that لَاٰیٰتٍ surely (are) Signs لِّكُلِّ for everyone صَبَّارٍ (who is) patient شَكُوْرٍ grateful وَ اِذَا And when غَشِیَهُمْ covers them مَّوْجٌ a wave كَالظُّلَلِ like canopies دَعَوُا they call اللّٰهَ Allah مُخْلِصِیْنَ (being) sincere لَهُ to Him الدِّیْنَ ۚ۬ (in) religion فَلَمَّا But when نَجّٰىهُمْ He delivers them اِلَی to الْبَرِّ the land فَمِنْهُمْ then among them مُّقْتَصِدٌ ؕ (some are) moderate وَ مَا And not یَجْحَدُ deny بِاٰیٰتِنَاۤ Our Signs اِلَّا except كُلُّ every خَتَّارٍ traitor كَفُوْرٍ ungrateful یٰۤاَیُّهَا O النَّاسُ mankind اتَّقُوْا Fear رَبَّكُمْ your Lord وَ اخْشَوْا and fear یَوْمًا a Day لَّا not یَجْزِیْ can avail وَالِدٌ a father عَنْ [for] وَّلَدِهٖ ؗ his son وَ لَا and not مَوْلُوْدٌ a son هُوَ he جَازٍ (can) avail عَنْ [for] وَّالِدِهٖ his father شَیْـًٔا ؕ anything اِنَّ Indeed وَعْدَ (the) Promise اللّٰهِ (of) Allah حَقٌّ (is) True فَلَا so let not deceive you تَغُرَّنَّكُمُ so let not deceive you الْحَیٰوةُ the life الدُّنْیَا ۥ (of) the world وَ لَا and let not deceive you یَغُرَّنَّكُمْ and let not deceive you بِاللّٰهِ about Allah الْغَرُوْرُ the deceiver اِنَّ Indeed اللّٰهَ Allah عِنْدَهٗ with Him عِلْمُ (is the) knowledge السَّاعَةِ ۚ (of) the Hour وَ یُنَزِّلُ and He sends down الْغَیْثَ ۚ the rain وَ یَعْلَمُ and knows مَا what فِی (is) in الْاَرْحَامِ ؕ the wombs وَ مَا And not تَدْرِیْ knows نَفْسٌ any soul مَّا ذَا what تَكْسِبُ it will earn غَدًا ؕ tomorrow وَ مَا and not تَدْرِیْ knows نَفْسٌۢ any soul بِاَیِّ in what اَرْضٍ land تَمُوْتُ ؕ it will die اِنَّ Indeed اللّٰهَ Allah عَلِیْمٌ (is) All-Knower خَبِیْرٌ۠ All-Aware
(31:31) Do you not see that ships sail in the sea by Allah's Grace that He may show you some of His Signs?55 Surely there are Signs in this for everyone who is steadfast, thankful.56
(31:32) When waves engulf them (in the sea) like canopies, they call upon Allah, consecrating their faith solely to Him. But when He delivers them safely to the land, some of them become lukewarm.57 None denies Our Signs except the perfidious, the ungrateful.58
(31:33) O people, fear (the wrath) of your Lord, and dread the Day when no father will stand for his child, nor any child stand for his father.59 Surely Allah's promise is true.60 So let the life of this world not beguile you,61 nor let the Deluder delude you about Allah.62
(31:34) Surely Allah alone has the knowledge of the Hour. It is He Who sends down the rain and knows what is in the wombs, although no person knows what he will earn tomorrow, nor does he know in which land he will die. Indeed, Allah is All-Knowing, All-Aware.63
55. There are distinct Signs which affirm that all power and authority belong wholly to God. The ships that man builds might be very solid and the extent of his navigational experience might also be immense. Yet, at sea, ships are exposed to such horrendous forces of nature that man’s skill and experience alone cannot enable a voyage to be accomplished safely.
It is only by dint of God’s grace and mercy that man is able to reach the shores of safety. As soon as someone is denied God’s gracious protection, he comes to recognize the inadequacy and inefficiency of his own tools ‘and skills. One might be a staunch atheist or a diehard polytheist, but no sooner does one encounter a truly tempestuous storm while at sea than one comes to know that God indeed exists and that He is the only God.
56. People who are steadfast and thankful to God are more likely to perceive the truth of monotheism. Once this truth dawns upon them, they hold fast to it. Steadfastness is their first and foremost trait. They stand out for being constant rather than for having a wavering and vacillating disposition. They adhere to their faith through thick and thin. They are not capricious so that they forget God when they enjoy prosperity and turn to Him in utter humility only when a calamity befalls them. Nor are they such who revile God when they are struck with affliction. Their second significant attribute is that they are ever thankful to God. They value the bounties He has granted them and they are consistent in expressing gratitude to their Benefactor.
57. The word used here is muqtasid which is open to more than one meaning. Were we to take iqtisad to mean rectitude and uprightness, the phrase would mean that even after the crisis is over and the person facing it lands on the shores of safety, he still adheres to tawhid, something to which he committed himself during his state of crisis. Experiencing such a crisis gave these righteous people constancies in adhering to tawhid.
Alternatively, if the word is taken to signify a medial, moderate attitude, the verse would mean that the crisis they experienced had a moderating effect on some ardent devotees of atheism and polytheism. It may also mean that once the worst is over, people lose a part of their fervor and enthusiasm for God, which had been aroused as a result of the threatening circumstances that had come to surround them.
It is likely that the present verse embraces all these shades of meaning.
The point stressed is that people perceive the truth when they are exposed to a severe storm during a sea voyage. In that hour of crisis, they abjure both polytheism and atheism and invoke the One True God to help them out of the crisis. However, once God delivers them safely to land, only a few appear to have learnt any lasting lesson from the experience. Even those few can be divided into the following categories: (i) some truly mend their ways; (ii) the disbelief of some becomes somewhat diluted, and (iii) some retain a part of the sincerity engendered by the crisis.
58. These two attributes are sharply opposed to the two attributes mentioned in the verse just above (i.e. verse 31). A perfidious person is one who is prone to treachery and disposed to break his word. As for an ungrateful person, he is one who never acknowledges the favors done him by his Benefactor, how so numerous they might be. Worse still, he even has the temerity to be rebellious towards his Benefactor. Those tainted with such traits brazenly revert to atheism or polytheism after they have been rescued from the crisis. In this changed state, they deny the Signs of God which they had observed in their own selves and around them at the time they were caught in the storm. They allow. themselves to forget that when they had prayed in distress to the One True God, it was because of an intuition deeply ingrained in their very own nature.
Atheists might try to explain away their instinctive response to such crises by saying that they were momentarily overcome with weakness. For in their view, it was not God Who rescued them; rather, they were saved because of the different means and devices to which they had resorted.
As for polytheists, they attribute their return to safety to the blessings they owe to holy personages whom they revere or to gods and goddesses to whom they are devoted. Accordingly, on reaching the shore they soon take to thanking their false gods by making offerings at their altars. They are totally unable to recall that in their hour of utter despair when they had no one else to turn to, they had called upon The One True God with utmost sincerity and devotion.
59. One’s relations with one’s friends, leaders, spiritual guides and other such people are not always very close. The closest mutual relation in the world is that found between parents and their offspring. But so horrendous will the Day of Reckoning be that no father will step forward and offer to redeem his son. Nor will any son come to his father’s rescue and suffer chastisement on his father’s behalf. In such a situation, how can it even be conceived that anyone will volunteer to ruin the everlasting life of the Hereafter for someone else’s sake? It would be utterly silly for anyone to destroy his prospects in the Everlasting Life so as to provide worldly benefit to others. It would also be stupid if anyone were to follow the course of sin and error under the illusion that someone else will come to his aid in the Next Life.
At this point one should take into consideration the content of verse 15 above wherein children have been told that while they ought to serve their parents as far as worldly matters are concerned, they should not obey them if they direct them to error in matters pertaining to faith and religion.
60. “Allah’s promise” here signifies the promise that resurrection will necessarily occur, that the Day of Resurrection is bound to come, that someday God’s Court of Justice will inevitably come to order and everyone will be called to account.
61. The life of this world beguiles the superficially-minded, filling their minds with a variety of misconceptions. Some fall prey to the mistaken notion that everything is confined just to this world, and that there will be no Afterlife. Those who think along these lines believe that there is nothing beyond the grave and, hence, they concentrate on making the most of whatever there is in this world. Intoxicated with wealth, affluence and power, such people completely forget the inevitability of death, victims as they are of the delusion that luxuriant living, power or authority will endure. Consigning spiritual and moral objectives to oblivion, these - people become wholly engrossed in the pursuit of material gain and pleasure, exalting them as ends in themselves. Such people constantly hanker after ever-higher standards of living, relegating everything else to insignificance. They do so disregarding the fact that this wild goose chase for higher standards of living might lead to a lowering in the standard of their humanity. In such an atmosphere, some people even begin to believe that worldly prosperity is the right standard by which to judge what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. Hence they tend to conclude that whatever leads to material prosperity is good and whatever does not lead to it is evil. Some even begin to consider material prosperity an indicator of being blessed with God’s approval.
They even generalize that he who is successful in this world, regardless of how he has achieved that success, is ipso facto, one loved by God. On the contrary, anyone who is ill-off in the world, even if his lack of success might be due to his veraciousness and his being morally scrupulous, is doomed to failure even in the Next World.
According to this Qur’anic verse, these and all such misconceptions are the guiles of this world.
62. “The Deluder” could be Satan himself, a single person, a group of people, one’s own base self, or any other object that deludes. man.
The reason for using the word “deluder” here in its generality, without specifying any particular person or thing, is that the basic cause of each person’s delusion is different. Every person’s deluder is that which leads him astray, that which causes his life to take a turn in the wrong direction.
The Qur’anic command not to “let the Deluder delude you about Allah” embraces a whole range of deception and befooling. Some are being fooled by a deluder who encourages them to believe that God does not exist. Some are led to believe that after having created the world, God retired into isolation, leaving the world to the tender mercy of His creatures. The deluder of others makes them fancy that some people are so dear to God that anyone who curries favor with them might act similarly and feel assured that God will necessarily forgive him. Others are deluded into believing that since God is Forgiving and Merciful, they can go about sinning to their heart's fill for God will continue to pardon them. The deluder also makes some subscribe to determinism. This makes them convinced that if they commit evil they are helpless for it is God Who makes them do so. Furthermore, if they shun good works, this too is because God does not enable them to do good works.
There are innumerable delusions of this kind to which humans fall prey. Yet the basic cause behind all man’s intellectual waywardness, for all his sins and crimes is that he is a victim of delusion, of one kind or the other. It is only when he falls prey to such delusions that he becomes enmeshed in erroneous beliefs.
63. This verse is, in fact, a response to the question the unbelieving Makkans used to ask the Prophet (peace be on him) about when the Last Day would occur. They raised this question whenever he tried to explain to them the doctrines about the Last Day and the Hereafter. At times the Qur’an responds to this by specifically mentioning the question, while at other times, it responds without mentioning it. The Present verse is of the latter kind.
“Surely Allah alone has the knowledge of the Hour” is the core reply to the question. The statements in this verse that follow provide evidentiary support to this reply. It is clearly stated that man does not even have knowledge of some of the matters that are of the utmost interest to him.
This being so, how can he know for sure when this whole Universe will come to an end? Let us consider some of the obvious limitations of man’s knowledge.
For instance, man’s material prosperity and adversity depend mainly on rainfall, yet rainfall is totally under God’s control. God causes rain to fall as and when and in the quantity that He wills. He stops it, again at His will. Man does not know where and when it will rain and in what quantity. Nor does man know which part of the earth will remain deprived of rainfall; nor yet, for which part of the earth rainfall would be harmful. ' Consider another case: a woman becomes pregnant with her husband’s seed. This is the process that perpetuates man’s progeny. Yet neither the husband nor the wife is aware as regards the fetus being nurtured in the womb and what its shape and its good and bad qualities will be at the time it is born. In fact, man does not even know what his next day will be like. A sudden accident can change the entire course of his life. Yet he cannot anticipate that accident even by just a minute before it occurs. Man does not even know where he will breathe his last. All these crucial bits of knowledge rest only with God, man being denied the least bit of such knowledge. Man would, of course, love to have such knowledge to hand so that he can prepare himself to deal with the resultant situations. Yet he has no other option but to be content with the fact that it is God’s will that prevails in his as in all other cases. In like manner, there is no other course for man but to have faith in God’s Will as the sole determinant of the Last Hour. No precise knowledge of that Hour has been divulged to anyone nor will it be so divulged in the future.
It is pertinent to note that the present verse does not provide an exhaustive list of the matters that belong to the realm of the Unseen, of matters that are known to God alone. This verse mentions only a few examples for illustrative purposes. It states certain matters that are of vital concern to man but about which he is still in the dark. It would be wrong to assume that only these five matters mentioned here are in God's exclusive knowledge. Ghayb (the Unseen) comprises all things that lie beyond the range of man’s knowledge and which are exclusively known to God. The range of ghayb in this sense is vast; it is veritably limitless.
(For further elaboration see Towards Understanding the Qur'an, Vol. IV, Surah al-Nahl 16: n. 83, p. 354.)