The Quran

131

فَإِذا جاءَتهُمُ الحَسَنَةُ قالوا لَنا هٰذِهِ ۖ وَإِن تُصِبهُم سَيِّئَةٌ يَطَّيَّروا بِموسىٰ وَمَن مَعَهُ ۗ أَلا إِنَّما طائِرُهُم عِندَ اللَّهِ وَلٰكِنَّ أَكثَرَهُم لا يَعلَمونَ

Muhammad Asad

But whenever good fortune alighted upon them, they would say, "This is [but] our due"; and whenever affliction befell them, they would blame their evil fortune on Moses and those who followed him.¹ Oh, verily, their [evil] fortune had been decreed by God -but most of them knew it not.

The phrase tatayyara bihi signifies "he attributed an evil omen to him" or "he augured evil, from him". It is based on the pre-Islamic Arab custom of divining the future or establishing an omen from the flight of birds. Thus, the noun ta'ir (lit., "a flying creature" or "a bird") is often used in classical Arabic to denote "destiny" or "fortune", both good and evil, as in the next sentence of the above verse ("their [evil] fortune had been decreed by [lit., "was with"] God"). Instances of this tropical employment of the expressions ta'ir and tayr and their verbal derivations are also found in 3:49, 5:110, 17:13, 27:47, 36:18-19.