as those before you competed over it, and it will destroy you just as it destroyed them. By Allah, whenever the worldly life is opened up on one side, its clarity turns murky on another—or on several others. As a pre-Islamic poet said:

A day is against us and a day is for us;
A day we are sorrowed and a day we rejoice.

In short, this sūrah seeks refuge from whisperings (waswas). Such whisperings sometimes assail a person at the very roots of faith: about the reality of the Lord, about the Quran, about the Messenger ﷺ—until one is plagued by thoughts he would rather be reduced to charcoal than voice aloud. There is also whispering about purification: some people—may Allah protect us—are afflicted with it. A man enters the bathroom to make wuḍūʾ, an act that should take five minutes, yet he stays there five hours. In the prayer you find him repeating the opening takbīr, lingering on the initial “k” of “Allāhu akbar” twenty times, until he becomes unable to pray at all, and the whispering leads him to abandon the prayer.

The same happens in family matters. A man imagines his relatives have cast a spell into his food and drink, so he eats only in restaurants. He addresses his wife, saying, “O mother of so-and-so,” and Satan whispers, “You have divorced her,” plunging him into distress. Some, when they open the muṣḥaf to read, imagine—with every page they turn—that they have pronounced their wife divorced, and so they give up reading the Quran. These whisperings are truly grave, but