ﲈ ﲉ ﲊ ﲋ ﲌ ﲍ ﲎ ﲏ ﲐ ﲑ ﲒ ﲓ ﲔ ﲕ ﲖ ﲗ ﲘ ﲙ ﲚ ﲛ ﲜ ﲝ ﲞ ﲟ ﲠ ﲡ ﲢ ﲣ ﲤ ﲥ
But if they turn away - then We have not sent you, [O Muhammad], over them as a guardian; upon you is only [the duty of] notification. And indeed, when We let man taste mercy from us, he rejoices in it; but if evil afflicts him for what his hands have put forth, then indeed, man is ungrateful.
Tafsir
Verse range: 42:47-48
That is, neither will Allah Himself avert it, nor has anyone else the power to avert it.
This sentence has several other meanings also: (1) "You will not be able to deny any of your misdeeds"; (2) "you will not be able to hide yourself even in disguise ; " (3) "you will not be able to protest or show any displeasure against any treatment that is meted out to you; " (4) "it will not be in your power to change the condition in which you are placed. "
That is, "You have not been made responsible that you must bring them to the right path anyhow, nor will you be held accountable as to why these people did not come to the right path."
"Man" here implies the mean and shallow people who are the subject of the discourse here, who have got a measure of the worldly provisions and are exulting in this, and who do not pay any attention when they are admonished to come to the right path. But when they are visited by a disaster in consequence of their own misdeeds, they start cursing their fate, and forget all those blessings which Allah has blessed them with, and do not try to understand how far they themselves are to be blamed for the condition in which they are placed. Thus, neither does prosperity become conducive to their reformation nor can adversity teach them a lesson and bring them to the right path. A study of the context shows that this is, in fact, a satire on the attitude of the people who were the addressees of the above discourse, but they have not been addressed to tell them of their weakness directly, but the weakness of man has been mentioned in a general way and pointed out that what is the real cause of his sad plight. This gives an important point of the wisdom of preaching: the weaknesses of the addressee should not be made the target directly, but they should be mentioned in a general way so that he is not provoked, and if his conscience has still some life in it, he may try to understand his shortcoming with a cool mind.
