Two Kinds of People

Now to the chief themes of Sūrat Hūd, its more particular messages. The first is a distinction between two kinds of people. The one are those whose whole focus in life — their whole focus, their effort, everything they live for, and may Allah not make us of them, for a great many are so even while professing belief — is simply to obtain the dunyā and to acquire more of it. If it is this house, then tomorrow it must be a larger one. Their every moment is spent in thinking of this, in speaking of it, in pursuing it, in earning for it. All they trouble themselves about is the comfort of this world, and they are forgetting the Hereafter. Some have forgotten the Hereafter altogether, in the sense of never having considered it at all, which means they are disbelievers. And there are others who have indeed considered it — they believe they are going there, they have the ticket for it — but they are not troubled about it yet.

The other group, plainly, are those whom Allah (swt) has divinely guided, who use the world and take their part in it, but whose whole focus — or whose focus, in varying degrees — in using the world, in living in it, in eating and the rest, is in truth the ākhirah. We need only increase that: that more of our world should be for our ākhirah. It generally comes about through good intention, even in eating, even in sleeping. So their whole focus is the Hereafter. And that is to be found in the verses up to about 15 or 16.

And then, at verse 24, Allah (swt) draws a comparison between them. Having set out the two, Allah (swt) says, in verse 24:

Mathalu al-farīqayni ka-l-aʿmā wa-l-aṣammi wa-l-baṣīri wa-l-samīʿ, hal yastawiyāni mathalan, afalā tadhakkarūn. The likeness of these two groups just spoken of: the one are aʿmā and aṣamm — dumb and blind. They do not speak the truth. They are not dumb and blind in the sense of people with a disability of that kind; these are people with a spiritual disability. And a khānqāh, one might say, is a home in which the spiritually disabled are made more spiritually able. So these people are aʿmā and aṣamm. Can they be as the one who sees and hears the truth, the ḥaqq? Can the likeness be equal? Will you not reflect? Such is the substance of all the evidence given up to that point.