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qālū ṭāʾirukum maʿakum ʾa-ʾin dhukkirtum bal ʾantum qawmun musrifūna
They said, ‘Your bad omens attend you. What! If you are admonished.... Indeed, you are an unrestrained lot.’
— Ali Quli Qarai
36Yā-SīnيسVerse 19 of 83
Ya-Sin36. Yā-Sīnيس
Yā Sīn
Ya Sin
MeccanVerse 19 of 83
Surah Ya-Sin - Verses 18-19
18. “(The pagans told the prophets:) ‘For us, we augur an evil omen from you, if you do not desist, we will certainly stone you, and there shall certainly afflict you a painful chastisement from us’.”
19. “They said: ‘your evil omens are with yourselves, (should you augur a bad omen) if you are admonished? But you are a prodigal people’.”
This verse indicates that not only those blind-hearted people did not submit before that clear logic and those miracles, but also they increased their hardship and went beyond the stage of rejection and reached the stage of threat and vehemence of action, as the Qur’an says:
Perhaps, simultaneous to the time of the advent of these Divine prophets, some difficulties appeared in the life of the people of that area as the result of their sins or as a Divine warning, as some commentators have also cited that the rain ceased to fall for a length of time1, but not only they did not take a lesson from it, but also they related that event to the invitation of the prophets. They did not even suffice it, but by the manifest threat they showed their evil and ugly intentions, and said:
Yes, when the adherents of wrong and the supporters of injustice and corruption have not any acceptable logic, they always rely on some threat, pressure, and hardship. They are neglectful of the fact that those who pave the path of Allah will never submit because of these threats, but their perseverance will be increased. On the day when they entered this field, they put their souls ahead and became ready for donation. The second verse indicates that it was here that the Divine messengers, by their expressive and clear logic, answered their meaningless words, as follows:
If misery, misfortune, and evil events have encompassed the environment of your society and the Divine blessings have gone out from amongst you, you must seek its cause inside yourselves and in your wrong thoughts, and in your ugly and evil deeds, not in our invitation. It is you who have made the atmosphere of your lives dark in relation to idolatry, sensuality, tyranny, and voluptuousness, and thus you have ceased the bounties of Allah from you.
A group of commentators have considered the Qur’anic sentence: /’a ’in ŏukkirtum/ as a hinder to an independent matter and said that its concept is this that if the Divine prophets come and admonish you and warn you its recompense is that you threaten them to punishment and think of their existence as omen. They have brought light, guidance, goodness and blessing for you. Is the response of such a service those threats and ugly words? At last, the last word of these messengers of Allah to them was this that they said:
That is, the main problem of yours is your prodigality and oppression. If you have denied Monotheism and referred to polytheism, its reason is prodigality and violating the Truth; and if your society has been afflicted an evil fate, its cause is also immoderation in sins and polluting to lusts. And, finally, if you threaten the benevolent to death for their benevolence, this is also because of your oppression. Next to the commentary of the rest verses of this story, we will explain about the historical event of these messengers and the place where these events happened.
Footnotes