Al Masad ( The Plaited Rope) or Al Lahab ( The Flame)

Al Masad ( The Plaited Rope) or Al Lahab ( The Flame)
[Glorious Quran, Surah 111:1-5]

This Surah, it referred in the first instance to a particular incident in a cruel and relentless persecution, carries the general lesson that cruelty ultimately ruins itself. The man who rages against holy things is burnt up in his own rage. His hands, which are the instruments of his action, perish and he perishes himself. No boasted wealth or position will save him. The women, who are made for nobler emotions, may, if they go wrong, feed unholy rage with fiercer fuel-to their own loss. For they may twist the torturing rope round their own neck. It is a common experience that people perish by the very means by which they seek to destroy others.

The Chosen One of ALLAH (Subhana Wa Ta'la), in his earnest desire to proclaim the Message, gathered his keen together to hear and judge with open minds between error and truth. Behold, the fiery " Father of Flame" blazed up with foul abuse and curses, and said to the holy one: " Perish thou! " with his hands he took stones and cast them at the holy one's head. Purse-proud he headed relentless persecution. His wife laid snares, tied thorns with twisted ropes of prickly palm-leaf fibre, and strewed them in the holy one's path on darkest nights, for cruel sport! But lo! the curses, insults, spite, harmed not the Innocent, but hit the wrongdoers themselves and branded them with eternal infamy!

Bismillah Ar Rahmaan Ar Raheem

"Perish the hands of the Father of Flame! Perish he! No profit to him from all his wealth, and all his gains! Burnt soon will he be in a Fire of blazing Flame! His wife shall carry the (crackling)wood-as fuel! A twisted rope of palm leaf fibre round her (own)neck! "
[Surah 111:1-5]

Abu Lahab: "Father of Flame", was the nickname of an uncle of the Holy Prophet, from his fiery hot temper and his ruddy complexion. He was one of the most inveterate enemies of early Islam. When the Holy Prophet called together the Quraysh and his own kith and kin to come and listen to his preaching and his warning against the sins of his people, the"Father of Flame" flared up and cursed the Holy Prophet, saying "Perdition to thee! " According to the English saying, "the causeless curse will not come". His words were futile, but his power and strength were equally futile. The star of Islam rose higher and higher everyday, and its precautions dwindled in strength and power.

Many of the leaders of precautions perished at Badr, and Abu Lahab himself perished a week after Badr, consumed with grief and his own fiery passions. Verse 3 was prophetic of his end in this very life, though it also refers to the Hereafter. " Burnt soon will he be in a Fire of blazing Flame! " Surah 111:3

Abu Lahab's wife was a woman of equally passionate spite and cruelty against the sacred person of the Holy Prophet. She used to tie bundles of thorns with ropes of twisted palm leaf fibre and carry them and strew them about on dark nights in the paths which the Prophet was expected to take, in order to cause him bodily injury. "To carry firewood" may also be symbolical for carrying tales between people to embroil them. This was also one of her vices. But she was laying up for herself another kind of Fire and another kind of Rope, the Fire of Punishment, and the Rope of Slavery to Evil. Thus, does Evil prepare its own fate. This is the general lesson of sustained craft and cruel wrongdoing recoiling on the wrongdoer's head.