The Quran

101

Preface

يا أَيُّهَا الَّذينَ آمَنوا لا تَسأَلوا عَن أَشياءَ إِن تُبدَ لَكُم تَسُؤكُم وَإِن تَسأَلوا عَنها حينَ يُنَزَّلُ القُرآنُ تُبدَ لَكُم عَفَا اللَّهُ عَنها ۗ وَاللَّهُ غَفورٌ حَليمٌ

Yusuf Ali

O ye who believe! Ask not questions about things which, if made plain to you,¹ may cause you trouble. But if ye ask about things when the Qur-ān is being revealed, they will be made plain to you, God will forgive those: for God is Oft-forgiving, Most Forbearing.

Many secrets are wisely hidden from us. If the future were known to us, we need not necessarily be happy. In many cases we should be miserable. If the inner meaning of some of the things we see before our eyes were disclosed to us, it might cause a lot of mischief. God’s Message, insofar as it is necessary for shaping our conduct, is plain and open to us. But there are many things too deep for us to understand, either individually or collectively. It would be foolish to pry into them, as some people tried to do in the time of the Prophet. Where a matter is mentioned in the Qur-ān, we can reverently ask for its meaning. That is not forbidden. But we should never pass the bounds of (1) our own capacity to understand, (2) the time and occasion when we ask questions, and (3) the part of the Universal Plan which it is God’s purpose to reveal to us.