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Sura 16
Aya 98
98
فَإِذا قَرَأتَ القُرآنَ فَاستَعِذ بِاللَّهِ مِنَ الشَّيطانِ الرَّجيمِ

Muhammad Asad

NOW whenever thou happen to read this Qur'an, seek refuge with God from Satan, the accursed.1
  • The present passage (verses 98-105) evidently connects with the broad ethical exhortation given in verse 90 above and, thus, with the statement (in verse 89) that the Qur'an is meant "to make everything clear and to provide guidance and grace and a glad tiding unto all who have surrendered themselves to God" - which, in its turn, implies that the Qur'an is the ultimate source of all God-willed ethical and moral values, and thus an unchanging criterion of good and evil. But since man is always, by virtue of his nature, prone to question the very validity of the moral standards established through revelation, the believer is now called upon to seek, whenever he reads or meditates on this divine writ, God's spiritual aid against the whisperings of what the Qur'an describes as "Satan, the accursed" - that is, all the evil forces, both within man's own soul and within his social environment, which tend to undermine his moral convictions and to lead him away from God.