One of the habits I have developed while reading the Qur’an is to return not to every verse, but to the ones that first interrupted me. During my initial reading, I listened to the Qur’an rather than reading it on the page, and whenever a verse lingered in my mind, I wrote it down without trying to explain why. Those notes became the beginning of a journal. Years later, I have returned to those same passages with a different purpose: to read them slowly through several English translations, comparing the differences in wording, following the nuances they reveal, and allowing the tensions between them to become part of the commentary rather than obstacles to it. This approach is less an attempt to determine a single definitive translation than to recover something of the semantic richness of the Arabic. Each translator resolves ambiguities in a slightly different way, and those decisions often illuminate possibilities that would remain hidden if only one version were consulted. My aim is therefore archival before it is interpretive. I collect the renderings, note where they converge and where they diverge, and only afterward begin asking why a particular phrase stood out in the first place. In doing so, the commentary becomes not merely an explanation of the text but a record of an encounter with it, revisited over time until the differences between translations no longer obscure the verse but instead disclose its depth.
This is a transcript of a voice memo: It seems like one of those days. So, uh, my brother was like, Oh, yeah, you know? commentary on the Koran. I’m, uh, this is my second time. I read the Quran, and now I’m going over the parts that I found interesting. And the way I’ve been doing that is I have four different translations of the Koran. And you just, you pick up on nuances uh, by different variations. And so what I do is I have a very sort of just archival approach to everything. And, um, Yeah, I’m gonna go through, like, say, one verse that I, that stood out to me. And then I just go through the translations and I, I follow up that verse, uh, with, uh, the any kind of variations that I found interesting. Um, There is one text that I am reading from that is like the main text. And I, I, this is, well, it’s the, it’s from the one that I had. I had I had went through the 1st time and it’s, uh… Translated by Malana, where he didn’t call. And Professor Farida, Khanham. That’s the main one. And I’m also, so the other ones that I have are translation by Admad Ali. The other one is MAS, Abdul Halim, to Oxford World Classic edition. And, uh, I have this one. Uh, which is, uh, He International. Um… It’s published by Al Montada, Al Islami Trust. This one was very, very interesting. All of them are packed with… with notes. So anyway, so, um, this latest one is from chapter 13, verse 14. So I was reading it, and… Well, the 1st time I had gone through the Koran, I was listening to it. And, um, stuff would stick out to me. And I would just make a note of it. So I started a journal where I just started to go through all the parts that stuck out to me, and I just thought that would be, like, a good way of doing a few different things. One, um… rereading it too. Uh, deciphering it in 3 uh, Trying to find some sort of exegesis, uh, that isn’t uh, held back by translation, because I know it’s, it even says in the Koran, it’s like, you know, we have made this in Arabic for you. You know what I mean? It’s very specifically Arabic. Um, But yet, the content of it is the main part, which is also in the Koran, that, you know what I mean? You’re not supposed to have any, uh, associates with God, whether that’s a text or a stone or whatnot. So, chapter 13 is, al Rad, or, uh, Rad, Shrins Thunder. And this verse 14. So what I do is I write down the verse, I thought, was interesting, and then I read the translations and I write it down. Uh, the variations of the translation that I thought were important. And then you have just, like, in the journal, like, a good chunk. And it’s just you’re going over the text over and over again until those discrepancies no longer obstruct you from getting like an overall idea of what’s going on. And then what’s more is that, like, why did I find this interesting? So I’ll go over it over and over again and uh, Yeah. So anyways, without further ado, This is chapter 13, verse 14, It goes, the only true appeal is to God alone. Those they appeal to instead of who? All right, and I have to stop right there because, um, so there is, there is no, um, in certain languages you have masculine and feminine, um, situations. And it’s very explicit that alone in the Quran is not, uh, a masculine or feminine pronoun. And uh, as to its position in the language, it’s very clear that Allah, So the way it plays out is instead of saying his will, It’s whose will, and who is essentially this very interesting fact about Islam that is very much tied to the language of what was revealed. And so even the name Allah is supposedly like the name of, Of God, but also your breathing. So, like, or like they even say like your heartbeat is saying, oh, law, you know what I mean? And, um, And that’s like the whole idea around it. And so who is supposed to be part of this breath? And so, like, like when Sufus meditate, they say, Allahu, Allahu, Allahu. And it’s just like for them it just like, you know, there, there, it allows them to breathe as well. And so there’s like this, there’s like these levels where, um, you’re associating your ability to breathe, your ability to live, your ability to speak. With the name of God. And so, um, When you’re reading the Quran, it’s never his or her or him or anything like that. It’s always who. He’s referred. God is referred to as who? Um, so, um, When it’s easier when I’m writing it down, you see a capital H and a U. Uh, when I’m, when you’re just hearing it, especially with uh, sentences that actually have the word who, as, as in like designating somebody, um, it can follow the word can follow. So I’d say like, to who, who is, right? Uh, it’s easier to see when you’re looking at it, but when you’re just listening to it, it may trip you up. But just letting you guys know. Who is like, uh, the proper pronoun for God? And the logic of that is that it has to do with the voice. With, um, And with that whole sort of eschatology. So anyway, so from beginning, the only true appeal is to God alone. I, When I 1st began this journal, I translated all hymns to whose and to all gods to Allah. Because I just wanted to get as clear as possible. These days, I just let God in because I think, um, it’s a bit more approachable that way. Uh, especially for this line, but um, An earlier entries, I would put a law. Um, But just keep that in mind that. When I say God, it says Allah in the Koral. The only true appeal is to God alone. Those they appeal to instead of who, will never respond to them in any way. They are like a man who stretches forth his hands towards the water, so that it may reach his mouth, but it never does. The call of those who deny the truth are all in vain. That’s the quote. So, I was listening to it, that stood out to me, so I made a note of it. And now in my way, going over it years, almost later, a few years. Um, filtering it through all of these translations and seeing, um, and going over it at the same time and seeing any discrepancies that are left behind as a result of just reading one translation. Here’s another translation. So I wrote the chapter, verse, and I’m just following it with, If I need to write the whole ch- verse again, I’ll do that. If it’s just a line, I’ll do that. So these are all the things in my journal that are following this entry of the verse. The only true prayer is to who? Those they pray to besides who, give them no answer any more than water reaches the mouth, of someone who simply stretches out his hands for it. It cannot do so. The prayers of the disbelievers are all in vain. This is from another. And I just wrote one line which really just stood out to me. It… It was a difference, but it made all the difference, and I wrote it, it said, to call on who is truth. And then here’s another translation. To call on who is true, for those they invoke other than who, do not answer them at all. Except like a man who stretches his hands towards the water, that it reach his mouth, but it will never reach it. Not more than error are the prayers of the infidels. And this is the, the final. Translation. To who is the supplication of truth? And those they call upon, besides who, do not respond to them with a thing, except as one who stretches his hands toward water, to reach his mouth, but it will not reach it. And the supplication of the disbelievers is not but an error. Futility.
This is a thoughtful way of reading the Qur’an. Comparing multiple translations is one of the best ways to see where translators are making interpretive decisions rather than simply substituting one English word for another. The verse you’ve chosen, Qur’an 13:14, is especially rich because several of its key Arabic words carry more than one possible shade of meaning. One point I’d gently clarify concerns the pronoun. In Arabic, Allah is grammatically referred to with the third-person masculine singular pronoun (huwa “he,” hu “him”). This is a feature of Arabic grammar rather than a statement about biological sex or gender. Islamic theology is equally clear that God is not male or female: “There is nothing like unto Him” (42:11). English translators therefore almost always write “He” because that is the closest grammatical equivalent, while emphasizing that the pronoun does not imply maleness. Your instinct that God transcends gender is very much in line with classical Islamic theology, but the specific claim that the Qur’an refers to God as “Who” rather than “He” isn’t how the Arabic text itself works. Rather, Arabic frequently identifies God with relative clauses—“the One who…” (alladhī)—which can make the text feel less like a personal name and more like an inexhaustible source of action and relation. The opening phrase, لَهُ دَعْوَةُ الْحَقِّ (lahu daʿwatu l-ḥaqq), is where your translations begin to diverge. Daʿwah can mean a call, invocation, prayer, appeal, or supplication. Al-ḥaqq means truth, but it also carries the sense of reality, what is genuine, what is right, and even one of the divine names, “The Truth” or “The Real.” That is why you encountered renderings like “the only true appeal,” “the only true prayer,” “to call on God is truth,” and “to Him belongs the supplication of truth.” None of these is simply wrong; each chooses one aspect of the Arabic. What struck me most in your notes was the line, “to call on God is truth.” That translation shifts the emphasis. Instead of saying that only true prayers belong to God, it suggests that the very act of directing one’s invocation toward God is itself participation in truth. Philosophically, that’s a profound move. Truth ceases to be merely correspondence between statements and facts; it becomes a rightly ordered relation between the worshipper and reality. Then there is the image of water. The Arabic compares idolaters to someone who stretches out his hands toward water, hoping it will reach his mouth by itself. It is a deliberately impossible picture. The metaphor isn’t just that idols fail; it’s that the worshipper has mistaken the structure of reality. Water cannot leap into one’s mouth through wishful thinking, and neither can powerless objects answer prayer. The image captures futility not through argument but through embodied experience. You can almost see the thirsty person extending empty hands, waiting for something that will never happen. Your archival method is also worth commenting on. You’re not trying to force the translations into agreement. You’re letting the differences remain visible until they cease to obstruct and instead begin to reveal the semantic field around the Arabic. That’s remarkably similar to the way classical tafsīr often works. Medieval commentators would collect different readings, grammatical possibilities, and lexical nuances before arriving at an interpretation. You’re doing something analogous through English translations. I also noticed something about your own process. You’re asking not only, “What does this verse mean?” but also, “Why did this verse stop me when I first heard it?” That second question treats the experience of reading as part of the commentary. It recognizes that exegesis is not only about the text but also about the event of encountering the text. That’s a productive discipline, because it preserves the original force that made the verse memorable before later analysis risks domesticating it. As a journal entry, this verse seems to orbit a single idea from several angles: truth is not merely something one possesses intellectually; it is revealed in where one’s appeal is directed. Every translation you collected circles that point with slightly different language, and together they illuminate more than any one translation could by itself.
What is that—directed appeal?
Also the water. There are certain renderings that make it so that it seems as if the its saying that the man is stretching out for something he already has
“Directed appeal” is my way of describing what the Arabic word duʿāʾ (or here, the related daʿwah) is doing. In English, “prayer” often suggests a religious ritual, but the Arabic is broader. It can mean calling upon, invoking, asking for help, crying out, appealing to, or seeking. It’s the movement of dependence. Whenever a person reaches beyond themselves—whether in desperation, hope, gratitude, or trust—that is an act of directed appeal. The verse asks: Where is that appeal ultimately directed? The Qur’an’s answer is that only God is capable of answering it in the fullest sense. Your observation about the water image gets to one of the major translation differences. The Arabic reads: “…except like one who stretches out his two hands toward the water so that it may reach his mouth, but it will not reach it.” The ambiguity lies in what exactly the man is doing. There are at least two natural readings. The first is the more common interpretation in classical tafsīr: the water is present, but the man simply stretches his hands toward it without actually taking it and drinking. He waits for the water to come to him. The absurdity is one of passivity. He desires water but refuses the action required to obtain it. The second reading—which I think you’re picking up on from some translations—is subtler. The water is already within his reach. It is not absent. His relationship to it is distorted. Instead of drinking it, he merely gestures toward it, hoping that the gesture itself will satisfy his thirst. The problem isn’t the lack of water but the mistaken mode of relating to it. That second reading becomes philosophically interesting. It suggests that the tragedy is not always seeking what is unavailable. Sometimes it is having reality before you while engaging it in the wrong way. The image reminds me of your earlier comments about diagnosis versus lived experience. A list isn’t false, but if one treats the list as though it were the experience itself, one can end up “stretching one’s hands toward the water” without drinking. The object is there, but one’s mode of engagement prevents the fulfillment one seeks. There is another layer. Water in the Qur’an is often a symbol of life itself. The image may therefore be saying that life cannot be received through illusion or misdirected dependence. One cannot substitute symbols, idols, or powerless intermediaries for the source of life any more than one can quench thirst by holding one’s hands over water and waiting. So I think your note is well taken: some translations make the emphasis fall on distance (“the water is out of reach”), while others make it fall on misrelation (“the water is there, but he is relating to it in a futile way”). The Arabic is compact enough that both nuances can be felt, and that’s one of the reasons comparing translations is so valuable.
In the one you quoted, he reaching for the water to touch his lips
His lips he has. He is his lips
The Arabic says, in essence: “…like one who stretches out his hands toward the water that it might reach his mouth, but it will not reach it.” The mouth (or lips) is not what is lacking. The man already possesses his mouth. What is lacking is the connection between the water and the mouth. That creates an odd reversal. Normally, if you’re thirsty, you bring your mouth to the water or the water to your mouth. Here, the man simply extends his hands and waits for the water to accomplish the rest. The verse depicts a breakdown in agency and relation. Your observation also highlights that the object of fulfillment—the mouth—is already part of him. The image isn’t about acquiring a mouth; it’s about satisfying a mouth that already exists. The deficiency is not in the recipient but in the relation between recipient and source. That opens an interesting philosophical reading. The human being already possesses the faculty of desire, prayer, longing, or receptivity. The question is whether those faculties are directed toward something capable of fulfilling them. If they are misdirected, then the existence of desire itself doesn’t produce satisfaction—just as having a mouth doesn’t quench thirst. The Qur’anic image is powerful because it doesn’t describe a man with no water or a man with no mouth. It describes someone whose way of relating to the water is futile. Everything necessary seems to be present except the effective relation between them. That is one reason the metaphor has endured: it is less about physical impossibility than about a mode of engagement that cannot achieve what it seeks.
It’s about reaching out
It’s almost like saying yes this is prayer
But we are not reaching out
There isn’t a lack
The verse certainly speaks about reaching out. The Arabic emphasizes the gesture: the man stretches out his hands (bāsit kafayhi). The gesture itself is real. He is reaching. Your reading suggests that the failure is not the absence of prayer or appeal. The man is already engaged in it. The question is how he is reaching. If we follow that line, the image is no longer about scarcity. It is not, “There is no water.” The water is there. Nor is it, “There is no mouth.” The mouth is there. The scene contains the one who thirsts, the water, and the capacity to drink. What is missing is the relation that actually unites them. That makes the metaphor surprisingly subtle. The outward form of prayer—stretching out one’s hands—can be present while the appeal remains futile because it is directed in a way that cannot accomplish what it seeks. The issue is not the existence of longing but the reality to which longing is addressed. That also resonates with the beginning of the verse: “To Him belongs the true invocation” (or, in another rendering, “The only true appeal is to God”). The contrast is not between appealing and not appealing. It is between an appeal that is grounded in reality and one that is not. So when you say, “There isn’t a lack,” I think you’re identifying something important in the imagery. The metaphor is not primarily organized around deficiency. It is organized around misrelation. The water is not absent. The mouth is not absent. The hands are not absent. Yet the act remains fruitless. In that sense, the verse could be read as saying that idolatry is not first a failure to desire God. It is a failure in the direction or mode of that desire. The gesture exists; what it lacks is the living relation that would allow the water to become drink. He stretches out his hands toward the water that it might…
He does this thinking it will do that. Yes. That is a very natural reading of the construction. The logic is almost: “He stretches out his hands toward the water so that it may reach his mouth.” The irony is that he believes the first action is sufficient to produce the second. He performs one gesture while expecting an outcome that the gesture itself cannot bring about. The image isn’t mocking the desire to drink. It’s exposing a mistaken expectation about causality. He thinks, “If I reach toward the water, the water will come to me.” But it doesn’t. That’s why the comparison works so well for the verse’s larger point. It isn’t saying that the worshipper has no desire, no prayer, or no sincerity. It’s saying that he expects an effect from something incapable of producing it. The phrase “that it might…” is doing a lot of work. It reveals the man’s intention. He stretches out his hands thinking that this will result in the water reaching his mouth. So the parable isn’t just about the physical scene. It’s about a belief: If I do this, that will happen. And the Qur’an’s answer is: No, it won’t. That expectation is the illusion the verse is describing. The futility lies not in the reaching itself but in the assumption that this particular reaching can accomplish what he hopes. Yes. That is a very natural reading of the construction. The logic is almost: “He stretches out his hands toward the water so that it may reach his mouth.” The irony is that he believes the first action is sufficient to produce the second. He performs one gesture while expecting an outcome that the gesture itself cannot bring about. The image isn’t mocking the desire to drink. It’s exposing a mistaken expectation about causality. He thinks, “If I reach toward the water, the water will come to me.” But it doesn’t. That’s why the comparison works so well for the verse’s larger point. It isn’t saying that the worshipper has no desire, no prayer, or no sincerity. It’s saying that he expects an effect from something incapable of producing it. The phrase “that it might…” is doing a lot of work. It reveals the man’s intention. He stretches out his hands thinking that this will result in the water reaching his mouth. So the parable isn’t just about the physical scene. It’s about a belief: If I do this, that will happen. And the Qur’an’s answer is: No, it won’t. That expectation is the illusion the verse is describing. The futility lies not in the reaching itself but in the assumption that this particular reaching can accomplish what he hopes.
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