وَكَذَّبُوا۟ وَٱتَّبَعُوٓا۟ أَهْوَآءَهُمْ ۚ وَكُلُّ أَمْرٍ مُّسْتَقِرٌّ
Wa kadhdhabū wa'ttabaʿū ahwāʾahum; wa kullu amrin mustaqirr "They denied and followed their own cravings. And every matter comes to rest."
Kadhdhabū — they denied. Root: ك-ذ-ب, and the verb is on the pattern تَفْعِيل (tafʿīl, Form II). Here that pattern conveys ascription: to call someone a liar, to count a word a lie. Kadhaba is to lie; kadhdhaba is to count someone else a liar. Two distinct acts.
This verb is one of the backbone verbs of the sūra; all four of the accounts open with it (9, 18, 23, 33) and the fifth continues with it (42).
Ittabaʿū ahwāʾahum — they followed their cravings. The root of هَوَىٰ / هَوَاء: ه-و-ي. This root was treated in al-Qāriʿa and al-Nāziʿāt: hawā is to fall from a height downward. Hāwiya — that which falls, or the deep abyss into which one falls.
And هَوًى (hawā) — a person's inclination, his craving — is from the same root. The explanation the lexicographers transmit: craving is what drags a person downward; the self falls towards it. I transmit this explanation; I do not offer it as a settled etymology.
The plural form of the word (ahwāʾ) is worth dwelling on. Guidance in the Qurʾān is singular (ṣirāṭ, sabīl, hudā), while craving is here plural. The same distribution appears elsewhere in the Qurʾān: "This is My straight path, so follow it; and do not follow the other ways, for they will divide you from His way" (al-Anʿām 6/153) — one path, many ways.
The order of the two verbs is worth recording. First the denying, then the following of craving. That is, the verse arranges craving not as the cause of denying but as its consequence. The order could have been built the other way; it was not.
I record this as my own reading: after a thing has been rejected no emptiness remains; something takes the place of what was rejected. The verse says what fills that place.
مُسْتَقِرّ — Root: ق-ر-ر. This root was treated in al-Qiyāma, al-Insān and al-Mursalāt. Its concrete sense: to settle in a place, to become fixed, to stand there.
- قَرَار — a place of standing, a fixed place, a base. "He made the earth a place of rest (qarār)" (al-Naml 27/61).
- مُسْتَقَرّ (with fatḥa, a noun of place) — the place where something comes to rest.
- مُسْتَقِرّ (with kasra, the active participle) — that which comes to rest, which settles into place.
- قُرَّة — coolness of the eye. The lexicographers' explanation: the state in which the eye, having found what it sought, becomes still. Qurrat ʿayn.
What the sentence says is this: every matter arrives somewhere, stops there and stays there. There is no matter left hanging; what has been postponed is not without an outcome.
And the load carried by Form X (istifʿāl) here is worth recording. This form generally conveys seeking (istaghfara — he sought forgiveness), but it also has the sense of "to come into that state" (istaḥjara — it turned to stone; istaghnā — he became rich). Istaqarra is of the second kind: to come into a state of rest, to settle.
Its counterpart within the sūra. The word occurs once more, in verse thirty-eight: ʿadhābun mustaqirr — "a settled punishment" that came upon the people of Lot in the morning. That is, a word set down in the third verse as a rule comes back in the thirty-eighth as an event.
| Verse | Expression | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | wa kullu amrin mustaqirr | The rule: every matter comes to rest |
| 38 | ʿadhābun mustaqirr | The instance: a punishment that has come to rest |
This is a small but clear example of how the sūra works: it states the rule at the beginning and gives the instance afterwards. I record it as my own reading.
Most of human life is lived without the outcome being seen. A word is spoken and its effect emerges years later; a deed is done and one passes on without seeing its return. This does not mean that there is no outcome; it means that it has not yet come to rest.
The verse separates these two: an outcome unseen and an outcome absent are not the same thing. And it says this not as a sentence of threat but as a description of how things work — the sentence is nominal, it addresses no one, it issues no ruling; it describes an order.