Tafheem-ul-Quran - Abul Ala Maududi

Ayah by Ayah

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Tafheem-ul-Quran - Abul Ala Maududi translation for Surah Ghafir — Ayah 60

40:60
وَقَالَ رَبُّكُمُ ٱدۡعُونِيٓ أَسۡتَجِبۡ لَكُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ يَسۡتَكۡبِرُونَ عَنۡ عِبَادَتِي سَيَدۡخُلُونَ جَهَنَّمَ دَاخِرِينَ ٦٠
Your1 Lord said: “Pray to Me, and I will accept your prayers.2 Surely those who wax too proud to worship Me shall enter Hell, utterly abased.”3
Footnotes
  • [1] After the Hereafter, the discourse now turns to Tauhid which was the second point of dispute between the Prophet (peace be upon him) and the disbelievers.
  • [2] That is, all the powers to answer our prayers rest in Me only; so you should not pray to others but pray to Me. To understand the spirit of this verse well, three points should be comprehended properly:
  • [3] Qira’at: Yaʻqub read it as: “. . . then to Him you pl return .”
  • [4] Frequently the Qur’an addresses the events of the Hereafter in pasttense; this grammatical shift should be pondered upon by the reader.
  • [5] Qira’at: Rouh read it as: “And Allah saves those . . .”
  • [6] First, man prays only to that being whom he regards as All- Hearing and All-Seeing and Possessor of supernatural powers. And the real motive of prayer for man is the internal feeling that the natural means and resources of the material world are not enough to remove any of his troubles and to fulfill any of his needs, or are not proving to be enough. Therefore, it is inevitable that he should turn to a being who is possessor of supernatural powers and authority. Man invokes that Being even without having seen Him; he invokes Him at all times, at all places, and under all circumstances; he invokes Him in solitude, aloud as well as in a low voice, and even in the depths of his heart. He does so inevitably on the basis of the belief that that Being is watching him everywhere, is also hearing whatever he has in his heart, and possesses such absolute powers that, it can come to the help of the supplicant wherever he is, and can help him out of every trouble and difficulty. After having known this truth about the prayer, it remains no longer difficult for man to understand that the one who invokes another than Allah for help, commits shirk absolutely and purely and clearly, for he believes those attributes to be belonging to the other being, which only belong to Allah. Had he not believed the other being to be an associate of Allah in the divine attributes, he would never have even thought of invoking it for help.