The Quran

Preface

وَلا تَقعُدوا بِكُلِّ صِراطٍ توعِدونَ وَتَصُدّونَ عَن سَبيلِ اللَّهِ مَن آمَنَ بِهِ وَتَبغونَها عِوَجًا ۚ وَاذكُروا إِذ كُنتُم قَليلًا فَكَثَّرَكُم ۖ وَانظُروا كَيفَ كانَ عاقِبَةُ المُفسِدينَ

Yusuf Ali

“And squat not on every road, breathing threats, hindering from the path of God those who believe in Him, and seeking in it something crooked; But remember how ye were little, and He gave you increase. And hold in your mind?s eye what was the end of those who did mischief.¹

The Midianites were in the path of a commercial highway of Asia, viz., that between two such opulent and highly organised nations as Egypt and the Mesopotamian group comprising Assyria and Babylonia. Their besetting sins are thus characterised here: (1) giving short measure or weight, whereas the strictest commercial probity is necessary for success, (2) a more general form of such fraud, depriving people of rightful dues, (3) producing mischief and disorder, whereas peace and order had been established (again in a literal as well as a metaphorical sense); (4) not content with upsetting settled life, taking to highway robbery, literally as well as (5) metaphorically, in two ways, viz., cutting off people from access to the worship of God, and abusing religion and piety for crooked purposes, i.e., exploiting religion itself for their crooked ends, as when a man builds houses of prayer out of unlawful gains or ostentatiously gives charity out of money which he has obtained by force or fraud, etc. After setting out this catalogue of besetting sin Shu'ayb makes two appeals to the past: (1) You began as an insignificant tribe, and by God’s favour you increased and multiplied in numbers and resources; do you not then owe a duty to God to fulfill His Law? (2) What was the result in the case of those who fell into sin? Will you not take warning by their example? So Shu'ayb began his argument with faith in God as the source of all virtue, and ended it with destruction as the result of all sin. In the next verse he pleads with them to end their controversies and come to God.