Q: Assalam alaikum wrb
Can you please pull the verse about Allah subhanautala s promise of sending force to fight with belivers they can’t see. Does this means angel were promised to be sent to fight with belivers?

A: Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh! 🤲
Yes, this refers to angels. The key phrase is “junūdan lam tarawhā” (forces/soldiers you did not see), which appears in Surah At-Tawbah (9:26) and again in 9:40. Both verses describe Allah sending down tranquility (sakīnah) upon the believers and reinforcing them with unseen forces — understood by virtually all commentators, including Ibn Kathir and Mawdudi, as angels.
A few related passages worth connecting:
∙ Al-Anfal 8:9-12 — Allah’s promise before Badr to reinforce the believers with a thousand angels in succession, and the angels’ role in strengthening hearts.
∙ Aali Imran 3:124-125 — the mention of three thousand, then five thousand angels sent down during Badr/Uhud.
∙ At-Tawbah 9:40 — specifically about the Prophet ﷺ in the cave during the migration, where the “unseen forces” reinforced him, not in a battle context at all.
On your actual question — whether angels were “sent to fight” — there’s a genuine point of discussion among scholars. Some narrations (especially around Badr) suggest angels actively struck blows against the disbelievers. Mawdudi, in his commentary on these passages, leans toward the angels’ primary function being to instill courage, certainty, and tranquility in the believers’ hearts and to strike fear into the enemy, rather than physical combat being their main role — though he doesn’t entirely rule out a more direct participation at Badr given the hadith evidence. Ibn Kathir tends to affirm the more literal reading that angels did fight alongside the Muslims at Badr specifically.
So the honest scholarly position is: angels were definitely sent down as unseen reinforcement in multiple instances, but whether their role was purely psychological/spiritual or also physically combative is something the classical commentators don’t fully agree on — likely because the Qur’an itself emphasizes the sakīnah (tranquility) and reinforcement aspect over describing literal swordplay.
Would you like me to pull together the relevant Tafheem ul-Quran commentary on these specific verses for your translation notes?

Q: What is the stand of rationalist scholars on this issue about literal vs metaphorical?

A:

Rationalist scholars (Ghamidi, Wahiduddin Khan, and in a different vein, Sayyid Ahmad Khan before them) generally push toward the metaphorical/non-literal end on this question, though with real variation in how far they take it.
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi treats the angel reinforcement at Badr primarily as Qur’anic language for divine providence and psychological reinforcement — the sakīnah (tranquility) is the substantive thing actually happening to the believers’ hearts, and the “unseen forces” language is the Qur’an’s way of expressing that Allah’s help came through means outside ordinary human calculation. He’s generally uncomfortable with hadith reports that describe angels delivering physical blows, viewing them as not rising to the level of certainty needed to override the Qur’an’s own framing, which he reads as emphasizing courage and steadiness rather than literal combat.
Wahiduddin Khan takes a similar line, and goes further in his broader hermeneutic: he tends to read miraculous-sounding interventions throughout the Qur’an as Allah working through real but naturalistic causes — numerical disadvantage being offset by morale, strategy, and unseen psychological factors — rather than as Allah suspending the ordinary order of cause and effect. So for him too, “forces you did not see” leans toward the spiritual-psychological register.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, further back and more radically rationalist, is the one who pushed hardest toward full metaphor — he was generally inclined to read “angels” in martial contexts as a figure of speech for unseen help/circumstances rather than as literal created beings intervening, though this is one of the positions that got him heavily criticized even by later rationalists like Ghamidi who don’t go that far.
This puts them in real tension with:
∙ Ibn Kathir and the classical/traditional position, who affirm the hadith reports of angels physically striking at Badr (e.g., the famous report of a Sahabi seeing marks on a slain enemy that no human blade could have made) as established and authoritative, not requiring reinterpretation.
∙ Mawdudi, who sits somewhere in between — he doesn’t deny the possibility of literal angelic combat and treats the hadith with respect, but his own emphasis in Tafheem leans descriptively toward the sakīnah/morale function as the Qur’an’s primary point, without explicitly rejecting the literal reports the way Ghamidi does.
The methodological fault line underneath this, if it’s useful for your footnotes: it’s really a dispute about how much authority isolated hadith reports carry when they add specificity beyond what the Qur’an itself states, not a dispute about whether angels exist or whether Allah intervened at Badr. Both sides affirm the intervention; they disagree on whether the mechanism described in some hadith reports is binding doctrine or a possibly non-literal/symbolic elaboration.
Want me to draft this as a short comparative section for your Tafheem footnotes, with the relevant primary citations?

Q: In chapter alkahaf , it’s is mentioned SHAITAN and its progeny .. can you please pull that verse?

A:

The verse you’re referring to is Surah Al-Kahf, 18:50.
It comes right after the command for the angels to prostrate to Adam — Allah mentions that Iblis refused, was of the jinn, and disobeyed his Lord’s command. Then Allah asks the believers a rhetorical question: will they take Iblis and his offspring/progeny (dhurriyyatahu) as protectors/allies instead of Him, when they are an enemy to mankind — calling it a terrible exchange.
The key phrase about progeny is “a-fatattakhidhūnahu wa dhurriyyatahu awliyā’a min dūnī” — “Will you then take him and his progeny as allies instead of Me?”
A point worth noting for your footnotes: this is one of the relatively few verses that explicitly mentions Iblis having dhurriyyah (offspring/progeny), which scholars connect to the broader Qur’anic and hadith material about Shaytan having a lineage or “children” in some sense (also touched on in discussions around Surah An-Nisa 4:38 and various hadith about Shaytan’s offspring residing in marketplaces, etc.). Mawdudi and Ibn Kathir both treat “progeny” here as referring to Shaytan’s followers/offspring among the jinn who carry forward his mission of misleading humanity — not necessarily implying literal biological reproduction in a human sense, though the term dhurriyyah is the same word used for human descendants elsewhere in the Qur’an.
Would you like me to pull the Tafheem commentary on this specific verse for your translation work?

Q:

This verse indicates the progeny is there forever like human beings, it’s not a one time act.
Quranic verses are supposed to be read, understood and practiced till end of the times.
The rationalist approach about beings not seen appears to be for that period , not generations to come. This creates problems in understanding, comprehension about role of unseen, both angels and shayateen. How can we convince ourselves and discuss with rationalist?

A:

This is a genuinely sharp objection, and I think it’s worth sitting with rather than rushing past — you’ve identified a real asymmetry in how the rationalist approach handles different categories of “unseen” in the same surah, even the same broader Qur’anic discourse.
Laying out the tension clearly first:
In 18:50, the existence and ongoing activity of Iblis and his dhurriyyah is treated by virtually everyone — rationalist and traditionalist alike — as a permanent, transgenerational reality. Nobody reads “his progeny” as “Shaytan’s followers at Badr” and stops there. The verse address is li-l-nās (to mankind) across time, and the rationalists themselves affirm an ongoing, real, unseen adversarial force operating against every generation of believers.
But then the same scholars, when they get to 9:26/9:40/8:9-12, treat “junūd lam tarawhā” (forces you did not see) as basically exhausted by its historical moment — psychological reinforcement for that specific battle, that specific group of companions. The unseen threat (Shaytan and his progeny) is permanent and ongoing; the unseen help (angels) is one-time and circumstantial.
Why this is a real inconsistency, not just a difference of taste:
If the rationalist principle is “non-literal/figurative language for forces whose mechanism isn’t fully specified,” that principle should cut the same way for both categories. You can’t use “this is just expressing something psychological/moral, specific to that moment” for the angels at Badr, while simultaneously affirming “this is a literal, permanent, ongoing unseen entity with descendants” for Iblis — using the same hermeneutical toolkit. Either unseen-language tracks something ontologically real and ongoing, or it’s contextual and exhausted by its moment. Picking one reading for the comforting/empowering verses and the other for the adversarial ones looks less like consistent methodology and more like the conclusion driving the method.
How to press this in actual discussion with a rationalist:
1. Ask them directly: do you affirm Iblis and his progeny as a real, ongoing, literal unseen reality operating today? If yes — and Ghamidi and Wahiduddin Khan both clearly do — then ask why the parallel category (angelic reinforcement) doesn’t get the same ontological respect.
2. Point to the grammar. Dhurriyyatahu uses the same possessive-progeny construction used elsewhere for literal human lineage (e.g., dhurriyyat Ibrahim). If they insist this is literal continuity for Shaytan, the burden shifts to them to justify why an equally direct statement about junūd (forces/armies) sent down by Allah collapses into pure metaphor by default rather than literal continuity also being on the table.
3. Push on the implication for du’a and belief itself. Muslims are commanded across all generations to seek refuge from Shaytan (A’udhu billahi min ash-shaytanir-rajim) as if the threat is fully live and ongoing — not as a historical artifact of 7th century Arabia. If that protection-seeking is meaningful and not merely metaphorical, the corresponding promise of Allah’s reinforcement and unseen support for believers facing oppression should carry the same ongoing force, by the same logic that makes du’a meaningful generation after generation.
4. Note that Mawdudi himself, sitting in the middle, generally affirms an ongoing cosmic struggle framework — angels and shaytan are both active, continuous categories of unseen agency, even while he’s cautious about over-literalizing the mechanics of any single historical battle account. That middle position might actually be more internally consistent than the harder rationalist line, because it treats the unseen realm symmetrically rather than asymmetrically.
The honest caveat, so I’m not overstating the case for you: a rationalist could respond that the existence of Iblis/jinn and the existence of angels are both affirmed as permanent ontological categories (this isn’t really in dispute for Ghamidi or Wahiduddin Khan — they’re not denying angels or jinn exist), and their actual claim is narrower: that the specific historical promise of physical/military reinforcement at Badr was tied to that battle’s circumstances, the way a specific prophetic promise to a specific community doesn’t necessarily generalize as a blanket guarantee of military aid forever. They’d likely argue 18:50 is making an ontological claim (Shaytan and his offspring exist and oppose mankind generationally) while 9:26 is making a circumstantial claim (in this particular crisis, Allah reinforced believers in this particular way) — and that distinguishing “permanent nature of a being” from “one specific historical instance of divine aid” isn’t actually inconsistent.
So the strongest form of your objection isn’t “rationalists are inconsistent about the unseen as a category” (they’d have a response to that), but rather: if Shaytan’s opposition to believers is explicitly perpetual and transgenerational in the text, on what principled basis is Allah’s corresponding aid to believers read as historically bounded rather than equally perpetual? That’s the sharper version, and I don’t think it has an easy answer from the rationalist side — it would require them to show the text itself signals temporal limitation for the aid-verses in a way it doesn’t for the threat-verses, rather than just asserting it.
Would you like me to draft this as a structured comparative piece — maybe titled something like “The Asymmetry of the Unseen: A Question for Rationalist Exegesis” — for ForOneCreator, with full verse citations and a fair presentation of both sides for the final section?

Q: Creation of Adam and creation of jinn.. same term used for both creations though from different materials. Humans have progeny very obviously as they are seen and jinn existence is given meaning by rationalist including Scholar Mohammed Asad , who significant time spent time in learning Arabic . It’s strange to believe in one creations and having difficulty in swallowing the existence of other beings. Is my observation wrong and how this can be included in the above discussion?

A:

Your observation is well-founded, and it sharpens the piece considerably. Let me check what Muhammad Asad actually says before folding this in, since precision matters here — his position is often summarized in ways that flatten it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Good — this confirms something that makes your point even sharper than I first stated it. Let me lay it out properly.
What Asad actually does with jinn (confirmed from his own appendix): Asad’s interpretive move in Appendix III is to treat jinn as a flexible term that, depending on context, can mean: (1) elemental forces of nature, including human nature, concealed from our senses, manifesting only through their effects rather than their intrinsic reality; or (2) a symbolic personification of man’s relationship with satanic forces. And — this is the detail that matters most for your argument — in his footnote on 18:50 specifically, Asad reads “jinn” as denoting the angels, treating Iblis as having originally been of angelic nature rather than a separate created species in the folkloric sense.
So Asad doesn’t just symbolize the unseen-help verses (9:26, 8:9-12) while leaving Iblis/jinn untouched. He runs the same de-literalizing move across the jinn category too — at exactly the verse (18:50) that mentions Iblis’s progeny. That’s not an inconsistency in Asad the way it is in Ghamidi/Wahiduddin Khan, who (as far as the more commonly available material shows) tend to leave jinn ontology more intact while softening only the angel-combat verses. Asad is actually the more consistent rationalist here — he applies symbolic/allegorical reading pressure evenly across both categories of the unseen, angels and jinn alike, rather than picking and choosing which “unseen” gets literalized.
This sharpens — and partially redirects — your objection:
Your instinct (“it’s strange to accept one unseen creation and struggle with another”) is correct as a charge against inconsistency, but the more precise target isn’t “rationalists in general” — it’s that different rationalists are inconsistent in different directions, and almost nobody applies a single coherent rule across the whole class of unseen beings. Specifically:
1. Asad symbolizes broadly — angels, jinn, and Shaytan’s progeny can all become metaphor/personification depending on context. He’s internally consistent in method (de-literalize where the term’s referent is ambiguous) but this leads him somewhere most traditional and even most other rationalist scholars won’t follow him — effectively dissolving jinn as a distinct created species in many contexts, which Ibn Kathir, Mawdudi, and Ghamidi would all object to.
2. Ghamidi/Wahiduddin Khan symbolize narrowly — they keep jinn and Shaytan as real, literal, ongoing creatures (consistent with 18:50 read straightforwardly) but de-literalize only the combat mechanics of angelic intervention at Badr. Their inconsistency is the one we identified last time: permanent literal threat, contextual/metaphorical aid.
3. Ibn Kathir/Mawdudi (closer to your own instinct) hold both categories — angels and jinn/Shaytan — as equally real, literal, ongoing, and active across all generations. This is the position that treats “Adam” and “Iblis” as created from different materials (clay vs. fire — Al-Hijr 15:26-27, Al-A’raf 7:12) but as equally real, ongoing creations with continuing progeny, exactly paralleling your own framing.
Your material point about creation-material and progeny stands on its own, independent of any of these three positions. The Qur’an uses khalaqa for both Adam’s creation and the jinn’s creation (e.g., Ar-Rahman 55:14-15 — man from clay/sounding clay, jinn from a smokeless flame/fire), the same verb, just different raw material specified. If material difference doesn’t disqualify humans from having a real, continuing line of dhurriyyah, there’s no textual reason it should disqualify jinn from the same — the disanalogy some rationalists lean on (humans are “seen,” jinn are “unseen,” therefore the unseen one is more available for reinterpretation) isn’t actually a textual argument, it’s an empirical/epistemological preference smuggled in as if it were exegesis.
How this folds into the piece:
This gives you a stronger three-way structure rather than a simple “rationalist vs. traditionalist” binary:
∙ Section 1: The asymmetry on angels (permanent threat vs. historically-bounded aid) — Ghamidi/Wahiduddin Khan’s specific inconsistency.
∙ Section 2: Asad’s broader and more consistent — but more radical — solution: symbolize jinn and angels alike, which solves the asymmetry but at the cost of dissolving categories most Muslims, rationalist or not, are unwilling to give up.
∙ Section 3: Your core point — same creative verb, different material, both with attested dhurriyyah — as the textual anchor for why partial symbolization (literalizing jinn but not angels, or vice versa) is the weakest of all the available positions, less defensible than either Asad’s full symbolism or Ibn Kathir/Mawdudi’s full literalism.
Want me to draft this as the structured comparative piece for ForOneCreator, with this expanded three-way framing and full verse citations (15:26-27, 55:14-15, 18:50, 9:26, 8:9-12)?