Al-Balad opens the way a courtroom opens, with one word raised like a hand to stop you: no. Then Allah swears by the most sacred city on earth, the city the Prophet ﷺ was standing inside while the people who shared his streets were already planning to spill his blood there. From that oath the surah pulls a hard truth out into the open: you were not made for ease. You were made for struggle, and the only question is which struggle you choose.
From a tranquil soul to a sacred city
Sheikh Abu Bakr begins, as he does across this juz, by tracing the seam between this surah and the one before it. Al-Fajr had closed on the most beautiful invitation in the Qur'an: the tranquil soul called home, "return to your Lord," well pleased and pleasing. So where does Al-Balad open? On the most tranquil place that returning ever leads to, the city of Makkah, where the House of Allah is built. When you finally reach it, the Sheikh says, the feeling is not the ordinary excitement of a holiday or a wedding. It is a calm that overtakes the whole body, a peace you have never tasted anywhere else.
He keeps drawing the threads together. Al-Fajr spoke of the soul returning to its Lord, and Makkah is where, every single year, the pilgrim physically acts out that return, answering Allah's call, wearing what looks like the shroud he will one day be raised in. Al-Fajr promised a soul that is well pleased, and one of the deepest joys a believer knows is to finally lay eyes on that House. So the surah that begins on the city is really finishing a sentence the last surah started: this is where the journey home is headed.
No. I swear by this city.
لَا أُقْسِمُ بِهَٰذَا الْبَلَدِ
“I swear by this city [i.e., Makkah] -”
Al-Balad 90:1 Read 90:1 with tafsir
The first word is *la*, no, and the Sheikh will not let you skip past it. Allah never opens an oath in the Qur'an with a bare "I swear"; there is always something before it. Here that something is a flat refusal, and he gives you the way to hear it: it is the same "no" you use when someone tells you a lie and you cut in, "no, no, no, I swear he was at the masjid." The denial silences a falsehood first, then the oath lands the truth. Allah is shutting down the wrong assumptions the deniers were carrying out of the surah before, then swearing to set the record straight.
And notice the word *this*. In Arabic, the Sheikh points out, you say "this" for what is near and dear, and "that" for what you push away. When Allah destroyed the rebellious nations He said "those" cities, holding them at arm's length. Here He says *this* city, drawing Makkah in close, because it is beloved to Him. He also notes a precision worth pausing on: an earlier surah called Makkah the "safe" city, but here the word safe is dropped, because the theme of Al-Balad is a conflict erupting in Makkah between the Prophet ﷺ and his people, and there is no peace in the middle of a war. Every word, he reminds you, sits exactly where it belongs.
And you are free of restriction in it
وَأَنتَ حِلٌّ بِهَٰذَا الْبَلَدِ
“And you, [O Muhammad], are free of restriction in this city -”
Al-Balad 90:2 Read 90:2 with tafsir
This single word *hill* opens like a hand, and the Sheikh turns it over to show several faces, each true. The first is the bitter one: it tells the Prophet ﷺ that the Quraysh are about to treat his blood as *hill*, permitted, in the very city they hold sacred. These were people who would not so much as hunt an animal inside Makkah; they would walk twenty kilometres out into the desert heat rather than break its sanctity. Yet when it came to the best of creation, they were ready to tear up their own most sacred law to be rid of him. The Sheikh lingers here, because this is the pattern of every age: the forces of denial pride themselves on their principles and their codes, right up until Islam becomes a real challenge, and then they break their own rules to crush it. Pharaoh broke his law to hunt Musa. A tribe that never attacked its own attacked the one man in it who carried the truth. Allah is preparing the believer's heart in advance: when you carry this message, expect the rules to bend against you.
But the word carries mercy too. A second reading, the Sheikh explains, is a permission given to no one before or after: at the Conquest of Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ would be allowed, for a single hour of a single day, to shed blood inside the sacred city and execute a handful of war criminals. He notes how stunning this is, because Al-Balad is a Makkan surah, revealed years before that conquest ever happened. The word was a guarantee of a victory not yet won. A third reading, *hill* as resident, says: you are settled in this city, and even when they expel you, you will return to it. So inside one word sit a warning, a promise of conquest, and a promise of homecoming, all of it pointing forward to a triumph Allah had already sealed.
By the parent and the child, and a life of hardship
وَوَالِدٍ وَمَا وَلَدَ
“And [by] the father and that which was born [of him],”
Al-Balad 90:3 Read 90:3 with tafsir
لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ فِي كَبَدٍ
“We have certainly created man into hardship.”
After the city, Allah swears by a parent and what they bore. The Sheikh notes the scholars differ on who is meant, with the relationship of father to child standing in for it, a bond soaked in compassion and care, which will matter when the surah arrives at mercy. Then comes the subject of all this swearing, the truth the oaths were building toward: *We have certainly created man into kabad*, into toil, struggle, hardship that does not let up.
This is the answer to a question the believer carries quietly, the Sheikh says: Allah created Adam in Paradise and could have kept us all there, so why place us in a life of struggle? Because the tranquil soul of the surah before is not handed out for free. He ties it directly back to Al-Fajr: that surah praised the soul at peace, and this surah tells you the only road to that peace runs through hardship endured for Allah's sake. The Prophet ﷺ himself said no one was ever harmed for Allah's sake the way he was harmed. The struggle is not a glitch in the design. It is the design, and it is the price of the home you are returning to.
Does he think no one is watching?
أَيَحْسَبُ أَن لَّن يَقْدِرَ عَلَيْهِ أَحَدٌ
“Does he think that never will anyone overcome him?”
Al-Balad 90:5 Read 90:5 with tafsir
يَقُولُ أَهْلَكْتُ مَالًا لُّبَدًا
“He says, "I have spent wealth in abundance."”
أَيَحْسَبُ أَن لَّمْ يَرَهُ أَحَدٌ
“Does he think that no one has seen him?”
Now Allah turns to the man who took all that strength and struggle and aimed it at the wrong thing. Does he really imagine, the verse asks, that no one has power over him, that he answers to nobody? He struts about boasting, "I have destroyed piles of wealth." The Sheikh draws out the small ugliness underneath the boast: a man inflating how much he has burned through, often as a shield against being asked to give, so that when the needy approach for charity he has his excuse ready, I have nothing left, do not come to me.
Then the verse closes the trap: does he think no one saw him? He answered to no one in his own mind, spent as he pleased, refused as he pleased, and forgot the One whose eyes never left him. The boast was loud precisely because he assumed the room was empty. It never was.
Two eyes, a tongue, two lips, and two roads
أَلَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُ عَيْنَيْنِ
“Have We not made for him two eyes?”
Al-Balad 90:8 Read 90:8 with tafsir
وَلِسَانًا وَشَفَتَيْنِ
“And a tongue and two lips?”
وَهَدَيْنَاهُ النَّجْدَيْنِ
“And have shown him the two ways?”
90:10 Read 90:10 with tafsir
Against that forgetfulness Allah lays out the gifts the man never counted. Did We not give him two eyes? Look up and down at this gift, the Sheikh says, and ask who could possibly have made it. A tongue, so he could speak, and two lips. He draws out a striking point on the lips: Allah gave them so you could close them, so you could govern the tongue behind them. So when that tongue says something it should never have said, do not blame the gift, blame yourself, because the lips that could have stopped it were yours to shut. You were made responsible.
And then the two roads: We showed him the two ways, *an-najdayn*, the high road of good and the low road of evil, both made plain. The eyes to see, the tongue and lips to speak and restrain, the two paths marked out, every tool he needed was placed in his hands. The man who boasted that no one had power over him was, the whole time, walking on a road Allah laid, looking through eyes Allah opened. The equipment was never the problem. The choice of road is.
The steep pass: what is al-aqaba?
فَلَا اقْتَحَمَ الْعَقَبَةَ
“But he has not broken through the difficult pass.”
Al-Balad 90:11 Read 90:11 with tafsir
وَمَا أَدْرَاكَ مَا الْعَقَبَةُ
“And what can make you know what is [breaking through] the difficult pass?”
90:12 Read 90:12 with tafsir
فَكُّ رَقَبَةٍ
“It is the freeing of a slave”
90:13 Read 90:13 with tafsir
أَوْ إِطْعَامٌ فِي يَوْمٍ ذِي مَسْغَبَةٍ
“Or feeding on a day of severe hunger”
90:14 Read 90:14 with tafsir
يَتِيمًا ذَا مَقْرَبَةٍ
“An orphan of near relationship”
90:15 Read 90:15 with tafsir
أَوْ مِسْكِينًا ذَا مَتْرَبَةٍ
“Or a needy person in misery”
90:16 Read 90:16 with tafsir
Given two roads, the man took the easy one downhill, and Allah voices the reproach: he did not storm the steep pass. Stay with the picture the Sheikh has been building, he says: a person stands at the foot of a bare, rocky hill, and two clean paths climb away from him, one to good and one to evil, both steep, both hard, because anything uphill costs. The difference is where the hardship sits. The good road is brutal at the start and easy at the end, opening onto the Garden. The evil road is easy at the start and ends where the real difficulty begins, in the Fire. And the human being, the Sheikh observes, loves ease at the beginning. He grabs whatever is quick and immediate and shoves every difficulty to later, later, later, until it grows. So Allah's verb here is sharp. The word *iqtahama* is to plunge into something headlong, throwing yourself into hard labor without weighing it first, and once you are in you cannot climb back out. It is the feeling, he says, of buying a flat-packed cupboard, spreading the screws and glue and panels across the floor, and halfway through realizing what you have gotten yourself into with no way back. That is the energy Allah wants aimed at the high road, and the man would not spend it.
Then the Sheikh slows down on a piece of grammar that changes everything. Allah says *fa la iqtahama*, using *la*, the particle of negation that normally lives with the present tense, and pairs it with a past-tense verb where you would expect *ma*. That mismatch is deliberate and does two things. First, *la* opens the negation onto many things rather than one, so He is already signaling that the steep pass is not a single deed but several, which is exactly the list about to arrive. Second, the construction carries the weight of a question, a *why*: why did he not break through the pass? Did We not give him two eyes, a tongue, two lips, and guide him to the two roads? So with all of that in his hands, why would he not throw himself up the climb? It is a complaint and a summons at once. Allah is not merely reporting that the man failed, He is calling every one of us to plunge into the pass ourselves.
And what is the pass? Watch the verb in the next ayah, the Sheikh says. Allah asks, *and what can make you know what the steep pass is*, using *adraka*, the past tense. He explains a pattern that runs through the Qur'an: when Allah asks "what can make you know" in the past tense, *adraka*, He is about to tell you the answer, but when He uses the present, *yudrika*, He withholds it, as He does with the timing of the Hour. So the very choice of *adraka* here is a mercy. Allah has just commanded us to storm this pass; had He left us with *yudrika*, we would be ordered up a road we could never even identify, and that would be a terrible bind. Instead He leans in to spell it out, deed by deed.
The first is *fakku raqaba*, freeing a slave. The Sheikh notes that Arabic has several words for rescue, and they are not interchangeable: you use one word for pulling someone from a fire or from drowning, but *fakk* is reserved for releasing a captive or a slave. And the word for the slave, *raqaba*, is the *back* of the neck, not the front, and that is not random. He pictures the chain: linked at the front, a pull drags the slave forward, but the image of the back of the neck conveys the choke and the helplessness of bondage, a person with no choice but to move as he is pulled. So the very word grieves over slavery before it commands the freeing. He points out that *fakku raqaba* comes as a noun, not a verb, and nouns in Arabic carry permanence, so this is not a single act of manumission but a standing commitment to keep freeing slaves. And this, he stresses, was revealed in the early Makkan years, which is the answer to anyone who claims Islam endorses slavery: from the very beginning Allah was urging people to set slaves free. Islam did not abolish every form outright, he explains, but it abolished the unjust forms, the man enslaved for a debt or a kidnapping or his poverty, and kept only the just, and even then it commanded that a slave be treated like family, never overburdened, called a brother under your hand. He also passes on Ikrimah's lone and striking reading, that *fakku raqaba* can mean freeing your *own* neck from the slavery of sin by turning back to Allah in repentance, which is itself the first and steepest step of the climb.
The second deed is *it'amun fi yawmin dhi masghaba*, feeding on a day of severe hunger, and again the Sheikh shows it as a noun, a settled habit of feeding rather than a one-off. But the precision is in *masghaba*. Allah does not just say feed the poor on any ordinary day. *Masghaba* is hunger, and the Arabic idiom describes a whole people gripped by famine, widespread hunger when an entire nation is starving. So the command, he says, is to feed especially on the day the hunger is everywhere, to run toward the famine-struck land and pour yourself into relieving it. He reads it as the cure for the disease named in the surah before, where the proud devoured wealth greedily and kept it for themselves; here the medicine is to open your hand exactly when the need is greatest.
Then Allah names who to feed first: *yatiman dha maqraba*, an orphan of near relationship. *Maqraba* is closeness, the Sheikh explains, and it points in two directions. The orphan who is your own relative comes first, and the orphan who lives close to you, in your own neighborhood, comes with him. He notes the sting in it: the Quraysh would not so much as care for their own orphaned kin, and an earlier surah had already exposed them for not honoring the orphan at all. So Allah is telling us to know the orphans in our own community, and he turns it into a question that lands hard: do you know even one orphan who lives near you? It is painful, he says, if the honest answer is no. And he widens the word, as he did before, to include the convert whose family abandons him the moment he enters Islam and who has nowhere to turn. That person is an orphan of a kind, owed the same honor, the same care, the same following-up to make sure he is alright.
The last named is *miskinan dha matraba*, a needy person in misery. A *miskin*, the Sheikh says, is someone left with barely the essentials to survive, the person you look at and wonder how he is even still going. And *matraba* is the possessor of dust, a word built for intensity, someone overwhelmed and coated in it. He unpacks what that single image tells you: the man is homeless, because anyone with a home would not be that dusty; he is wandering in search of food, because the more you walk the more the dust clings; he is destitute, bankrupt, sleeping in the dirt. So Allah is not pointing at the merely poor but at the most desperate case of all, and again it answers the previous surah, whose people would not even *encourage* feeding the needy, holding back so no one would think them stingy, guarding their reputation while a hungry man went unfed. The whole list, the Sheikh sums up, is teaching us one thing: to become truly humanitarian. That is what the steep pass is, mercy spent on the freed, the famine-struck, the orphan, and the one lying in the dust, the very people the boaster of the verses before had brushed straight past.
And then, a believer who calls others to patience and mercy
ثُمَّ كَانَ مِنَ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالصَّبْرِ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالْمَرْحَمَةِ
“And then being among those who believed and advised one another to patience and advised one another to compassion.”
Al-Balad 90:17 Read 90:17 with tafsir
After all that humanitarian effort, Allah names the condition that makes it count, and the Sheikh draws out why He saves it for last. He did not begin the steep pass with "first, be a believer." He began with the freeing and the feeding, then placed faith at the end, exactly the way you raise the bar by stating the condition last: "cut the grass, wash the car, and do it all without anyone's help, and I will reward you." The clause that lands at the end is where the weight falls. So it is here. None of the good deeds carry you up the pass without *iman* underneath them. He even reads hope into the past-tense verb: a disbeliever who did good, freed slaves, kept family ties, then entered Islam, keeps the reward of all of it, as the Prophet ﷺ told one man, you accepted Islam with all the good you already did.
And notice, the Sheikh says, that Allah says "among those who believed," in the plural. You are not meant to climb alone. Once the faith settles in your heart, look around for the others already doing this work and join them. Then comes the instruction twice over: they *advised one another to patience* and *advised one another to mercy*. Patience, because the climb is hard and people abandon good projects the moment it gets heavy, so you need someone beside you saying keep going, stay firm. And mercy, *marhamah*, the widest, most universal compassion, which the Sheikh says is the surah's deepest fruit. He gives it a piercing edge: real mercy is not only feeding a man today and tomorrow, it is caring about where he ends up forever, feeding his body and also calling his heart, so you are not merciful to him for a few years and indifferent to him for eternity. He recalls Umar ibn Abdul Aziz, who once distributed the charity until even the poor were full, and then told his men to scatter grain on the mountains so that no bird in his city would die hungry. That, he says, is what mercy looks like once iman truly lives inside a person.
The right hand, the left hand, and a sealed fire
أُولَٰئِكَ أَصْحَابُ الْمَيْمَنَةِ
“Those are the companions of the right.”
Al-Balad 90:18 Read 90:18 with tafsir
وَالَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا بِآيَاتِنَا هُمْ أَصْحَابُ الْمَشْأَمَةِ
“But they who disbelieved in Our signs - those are the companions of the left.”
90:19 Read 90:19 with tafsir
عَلَيْهِمْ نَارٌ مُّؤْصَدَةٌ
“Over them will be fire closed in.”
90:20 Read 90:20 with tafsir
These climbers of the steep pass, Allah says, are the companions of the right, *al-maymanah*, a word the Sheikh notes is richer than a plain "right side": it carries blessedness and brightness, the people who take their record in their right hand and walk to the Garden, the happy ones. Set against them are those who disbelieved in Allah's signs, the companions of the left. He explains the signs are of two kinds: the recited verses and the Prophet's miracles, and the signs woven into creation itself, the sky, the seed pushing up out of the earth, the baby brought living from the womb, each one designed to lead a watching heart to the conclusion *there is no god but Allah*. To reject all of that is the mark of the left hand.
Then the surah seals shut. Over them is a fire *mu'sadah*, closed in upon them. The Sheikh distinguishes the word from an ordinary "closed": this is shut with no possible escape, the lid pressed down on the pot so nothing gets out and the heat only builds inside, the punishment intensifying with no door. And he notices the balance: when Allah spoke of the people of the right He did not even describe the Garden here, yet for the people of the left He details the Fire, because the whole climate of this surah is hardship and toughness, from the "no" of its opening, to the *kabad* of a struggling life, to the steep pass, so it closes on the harshest image of all. The surah that told you life is a climb ends by showing you exactly what waits at the bottom of the easy road down.